Alexander Burns

Alexander Burns is a reporter for the New York Times covering politics. Burns was a reporter and editor at Politico before joining the TImes, covering the 2012 Presidential election. He graduated from Harvard College, where he edited the Harvard Crimson.

Articles by this Author

The Dramatic End of the Soviet Union, September/October 2019 | Vol. 64, No. 4

Twenty-two years ago, the Soviet parliament suspended the Communist Party after the failure of a dramatic coup attempt to remove Gorbachev.

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

Our President Violates Tradition by Traveling Abroad

Theodore Roosevelt made the dirt fly in building the Panama Canal. On November 9, 1906, 111 years ago this week, The New York Times ran an article declaring that the President of the United States was about to violate “the traditions of the United States for over a hundred years.” Theodore…

The Death of the Soviet Union

In the last days of August, 15 years ago, the Soviet Union imploded. The crash began with an abortive attempt to remove Mikhail Gorbachev from power, and it ended with a parliamentary decision to suspend the activities of the Soviet Communist Party. This last event was perhaps the most…

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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.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

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.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.