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Alvin M. Josephy Jr.

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (1915-2005), a leading historian of the American West, was the Editor of American Heritage Magazine and author of many award-winning books, including The Patriot Chiefs, The Indian Heritage of America, Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, 500 Nations, and A Walk Toward Oregon. He was the founding chairman of the board of trustees of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and president of the Western History Association.

Articles by this Author

Iwo Jima, June/July 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 4
A marine correspondent recalls the deadliest battle of the Pacific war
The Hopi Way, February 1973 | Vol. 24, No. 2
Isolation ends for “the People of Peace”
The shore line of Pyramid Lake, one of the West's great natural wonders, is steadily receding, robbed of the water it needs by a Bureau of Reclamation irrigation project.
Between the ages of fifteen and twenty, young Peter Rindisbacher captured on canvas the lives of Indians and white pioneers on the Manitoba—Minnesota frontier
The new Kinzua Dam floods the Senecas’ ancestral lands—in violation of our oldest Indian treaty. "Lake Perfidy” may even have claimed the bones of their greatest chief
The first men to follow Lewis and Clark across the continent to the Pacific were John Jacob Astor’s fur traders. They discovered the formidable chasm of Idaho’s Snake River—and almost never got out
That was what the white men called it, but the Indians could see how the wind was blowing. Would they abandon the hunting grounds of their forefathers without a fight?
Only Tecumseh came close to uniting the warring tribes, but his British allies and his less visionary people failed him
Few episodes in the long, bloody chronicle of the subjugation of the Indian were more violent than the Pueblo uprising of 1680, the one completely successful revolt against the rule of the white man in American history.
To David Thompson—who died blind, penniless, and bypassed by history—we owe our first knowledge of the American continent’s rugged Northwest
The Nez Percés led the Army a bitter 1,300-mile chase; when they surrendered, one of the last free Indian nations vanished into history.
Never again can there be a hunting party as gay or as risky as the one Sir William Stewart devised in 1843
This nautical chart, lost for five centuries, gives evidence that Portuguese captains had found the New World by 1424