Both Dr. Castel and Dr. Nahm are members of the history department of Western Michigan University at Kalamazoo. This is Dr. Castel’s third appearance in AMERICAN HERITAGE ; a Kansan, he was formerly a Civil War specialist but has recently widened his field of study. Dr. Nahm was born in Pyongyang, Korea (where, incidentally, the General Sherman was destroyed), and has written many articles and monographs on the history of his native country. Major sources for this article include Corea, The Hermit Nation , by William Elliott Griffis (Scribner, 1904); Homer B. Hulbert’s History of Korea, Volume II, revised by Clarence Norwood Weems (Hillary, 1962); and Americans in Eastern Asia , by Tyler Dennett (Barnes & Noble, 1963). Captain Tilton’s letters to his wife are to be found in “Marine Amphibious Landing in Korea, 1871,” a pamphlet compiled by the Marine Corps’s Historical Branch and published in 1966 by the Naval Historical Foundation in Washington.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
