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Edwin S. Grosvenor

Edwin S. Grosvenor is the Editor-in-Chief of American Heritage and Invention & Technology Magazines. He is also the editor of twelve anthologies of essays that appeared in American Heritage including Men of the Revolution, HamiltonLincolnThe Civil War, The Old West  New York, World War I, Roosevelt, Churchill, and The Vietnam War, as well as anthologies from HORIZON Magazine including The Middle Ages and History's Great Confrontations.

Mr. Grosvenor co-authored a biography of his great-grandfather, Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Inventor of the Telephone, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc., and is also the co-author of 299 Things Everyone Should Know About American History.

Previously, Mr. Grosvenor was the President and Editor of Portfolio Magazine, the highest circulation fine arts publication in the U.S. at the time according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, and a nominee for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. 

From 1991 to 1995, Mr. Grosvenor was the publisher of the literary magazine, Current Books, which published such authors as Norman Mailer, Bill Moyers, Garrison Keillor, David McCullough, Anne Tyler, and Vaclav Havel. Current Books was distributed in over 4,000 outlets making it one of the most widely distributed book-related publications in bookstores at the time. He also served as president and editorial director of Hotel Magazine Network, Inc., a publisher of magazines for business travelers with a total circulation of 330,000 copies distributed in the rooms of Marriott and Hyatt hotels.

The Grosvenor family founded the National Geographic Society, where Mr. Grosvenor worked as a photographer with assignments in such countries as Belize, Canada, France, Greece, Iceland, Kenya, Spain, Tonga, Turkey and the U.S.

Mr. Grosvenor also serves as the Historian of the Literary Society of Washington. He obtained his MBA and his MS (Journalism) degrees from Columbia University, and his BA from Yale University.

Twitter: @edwingro

Articles by this Author

The year 1970 was a watershed, so we asked several thoughtful writers to reflect on key events.
The Army has named ten military bases in honor of men who killed 365,000 U.S. soldiers. Should they be renamed? Or left as they are, since the bases are part of a “Great American Heritage," as President Trump says?
Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.
Richard Reeves, Spring 2020 | Vol. 65, No. 2
The prolific author wrote several bestsellers about Presidential power.  
In looking at the restoration of the Front Parlor, we can learn a lot about the Washington family, life in Colonial America, and the art of historic preservation.
To find out what the Founding generation said about "well regulated militias" and the right to bear arms, we researched all the colonial and state constitutions enacted before 1791.
Given the recent tragic shootings, historians should play a role in providing dispassionate facts about the history of gun rights and gun control.
The Supreme Court left the door open for reasonable regulations of guns if Congress has the will to act.
Completed 150 years ago this month, the railroad's construction was one of the great dramas in American history, and led to a notorious scandal.
Authentic brass “crickets” issued to American paratroopers on D-Day are now quite rare. A worldwide search recently “unearthed a lost piece of sound history”
David McCullough’s latest book tells the story of a small group of Revolutionary War veterans and pioneers who set out on an extraordinary 800-mile journey through the wilderness to establish the first settlement in the Ohio Territory. 
A team from American Heritage helped document some of the most important maps of the Revolution — still stored in the medieval English castle where scenes from Harry Potter were later filmed.
We will never learn from the past if we've forgotten it. Now there's been a dramatic decline in the number of college students studying history.
The famous photographs at Harvard, first published in American Heritage in 1977, are at the center of a difficult debate over who owns the images.
For most of the 1800s, whites in blackface performed in widely popular minstrel shows, creating racist stereotypes that endured for more than a century.
America’s first female soldiers were Signal Corps telephone operators making sure critical messages got through, often while threatened by artillery fire.
After World War I, Army Intelligence officers collected statements from German soldiers and citizens.
Enjoy excerpts from seven great books about the Founding Era
In the early 1950s, top secret efforts led to the first submarine trips to the North Pole by USS Nautilus and USS Skate in 1957 – dramatic successes that rivaled the Soviet Union's Sputnik that year – and shifted the balance of strategic power.
A sad footnote to the horrific shootings in Florida is the soiling of the name of the environmental pioneer for whom the Parkland high school was named.
Members of the Maryland Forces guard memories of a dramatic history at Fort Frederick, the best preserved fort from the former English colonies in America. 
A special issue of American Heritage offers excerpts from seven books nominated for the prestigious George Washington Prize.
When the Army arrested a chief of the Ponca Tribe in 1878 for leaving their reservation, he sued the Federal government and won — the first time courts recognized that a Native American had legal rights.
More than 600 donors chipped in to help fund the relaunch of the magazine.
The Trump Administration has proposed massive cuts to history programs whose mission is to teach Americans what made their country great
Editor's Letter, Summer 2012 | Vol. 62, No. 2

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

Sure, parades and picnics can be fun. But the best way to remember sacrifices made for the freedoms we cherish is to read about and remember what those heroes actually accomplished. That's an important part of what American Heritage has done for 70 years: tell those important stories. Here are some…
It's ironic that compromise has become a dirty word for many of the same politicians who profess such reverence for the Constitution and Founding Fathers. We are a nation conceived in compromise, whose very existence was saved at least three times by deals cobbled together by politicians bitterly…