Claire Lui

Claire Lui works as an editorial consultant for both print and online resources, in addition to being a writer. A graduate of Columbia University, where she studied History, Lui has also worked as a food and literary critic, and taught English in China.

Articles by this Author

The Wildwood, New Jersey Resort, April/May 2007 | Vol. 58, No. 2

A New Jersey seaside resort struggles to save the architecture and the memories of the Eisenhower years.

Randyland, April/May 2007 | Vol. 58, No. 2

A hundred boardwalks, gone but not quite dead, await a new dawn

Shoobie Doo Wop, April/May 2007 | Vol. 58, No. 2

Planning a Trip to Wildwood

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

The All-American Girl—and Detective

Eighty-seven years ago, on April 28, 1930, most of the country was mired in unhappiness and worry. The stock market had crashed just six months before, and the Great Depression was only just beginning. But one American entered this uncertain time with unflappable pluck: Nancy Drew. Nancy was not a…

The Wacky World of Weeki Wachee

There’s something all-American about roadside attractions—palaces of corn, Stonehenges built from cars, mountains carved with Presidents’ faces. Americans have a knack for looking at a patch of nature and asking how we can turn it into a tourist destination. My parents, both immigrants, have…

2007-05-31

How Illegal Immigration Was Born

Three Chinese laborers work on a railroad in California around the 1890s (Underwood & Underwood/Corbis) On May 6, 1882, a century and a quarter ago today, President Chester A. Arthur signed a law banning almost all immigration from China to the United States. It affected only a small…

2007-05-07

Over the Falls in a Barrel

A hundred and five years ago today, Annie Taylor became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She was 63 years old, a widow, and a failed dancing school teacher—an unlikely candidate for such an exploit. But she survived, and her name goes down in history as not only the first…

2006-10-24

Inside Andy Warhol

Fame saved Andy Warhol. Lying in Columbus Hospital in New York City after being shot by Valerie Solanas, he was given up for dead, but when Mario Amaya, an art magazine editor, told the doctors that their patient was a famous artist, a specialist was brought in to revive him, giving him 19 more…

2006-09-20

Featured Authors

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.

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.

Catton, Bruce

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.