Nathaniel Benchley
Nathaniel Benchley (1915 – 1981), was an American author and longtime summer resident of Nantucket. Benchley wrote many children's/juvenile books and his
1961 novel The Off-Islanders was made into a motion picture titled The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay. He was a close friend of actor Humphrey Bogart and wrote his biography in 1975. Benchley's novel Welcome to Xanadu was made into the 1975 motion picture Sweet Hostage. He was the son of Gertrude Darling and Robert Benchley (1889-1945), the noted American writer and one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table in New York City. His elder son, Peter Benchley (1940-2006), was a writer best known for writing the novel Jaws and the screenplay of the 1975 Steven Spielberg film made from it.
Articles by this Contributor
December 1959
The Indians who sold Manhattan were bilked, all right, but they didn’t mind—the land wasn’t theirs anyway
June 1965
The natives never could live quite happily with “off-island” civilization—but neither could they live without it

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Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.




