James Horn

Dr. James Horn is the President of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, affiliated with Preservation Virginia. Previously, he was Vice President of Research and Historical Interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He has also served as Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Editor of Publications at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William and Mary, and taught for twenty years at the University of Brighton, England, before moving to the US.

Dr. Horn is the author of Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake; A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America, and numerous articles on early America. In addition, he has edited three collections of essays and documents, including the Writings of Captain John Smith for the Library of America. His latest book, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, was published in 2010. He is currently working on a study of the great Indian warrior chief, Opechan-canough, who was the principal leader of resistance to English settlement in Virginia during the colony’s first forty years.

Articles by this Author

A Fateful Experiment at Jamestown, Winter 2020 | Vol. 64, No. 1

The first votes of the fledgling Virginia Assembly in 1619 marked the inception of the most important political development in American history — the rise of democracy.

1619: The Year That Shaped America , Winter 2019 | Vol. 64, No. 1

Four hundred years ago this year, two momentous events happened in Britain’s fledgling colony in Virginia: the New World’s first democratic assembly convened, and an English privateer brought kidnapped Africans to sell as slaves. Such were the conflicted origins of modern America.

Roanoke’s Lost Colony Found?, Spring 2010 | Vol. 60, No. 1

New ideas—and archaeological evidence—may provide answers to colonial North America’s longest-running mystery

Jamestown Hangs In The Balance, Winter 2010 | Vol. 59, No. 4

Only by luck and happenstance did Britain’s first permanent settlement in the New World survive

Why Jamestown Matters, Winter 2008 | Vol. 58, No. 1

If the colony had collapsed the English might not have been established as the major colonial power in North America

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.