Ellen Feldman

Ellen Feldman is an author, historian, and 2009 Guggenheim Fellow who has written three books: Scottsboro, The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, and Lucy. Feldman frequently writes for The Huffington Post and American Heritage, and has lectured across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Articles by this Author

FDR and His Women, March 2003, Summer 2025 | Vol. 70, No. 3

A novelist who has just spent several years studying Eleanor Roosevelt, Lucy Rutherfurd, and Missy LeHand tells a moving story of love: public and private, given and withheld.

Anne Frank in America, February/March 2005 | Vol. 56, No. 1

When the single most famous document to come out of the Holocaust was published in America half a century ago, it caused a sensation that made and ruined reputations and ignited furious arguments that resonate today.

A History of Plastic Surgery, February/March 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 1

Cosmetic surgery was born 2500 years ago and came of age in the inferno of the Western Front. The controversy about it is still growing.

FDR and His Women, March 2003, Summer 2025 | Vol. 54, No. 1

A novelist who has just spent several years studying Eleanor Roosevelt, Lucy Rutherfurd, and Missy LeHand tells a moving story of love: public and private, given and withheld.

Roosevelt, October 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 5

The History of Halloween, October 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 7

From its birth in pagan transactions with the dead to the current marketing push to make it a “seasonal experience,” America’s fastest-growing holiday has a history far older (and far stranger) than does Christmas itself.

Ocean Liner, September 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 6

Till Divorce Do Us Part, November 2000 | Vol. 51, No. 7

It has been with us since Plymouth Colony. But that’s not why it’s an American institution.

Splitting Headaches, November 2000 | Vol. 51, No. 7

The ten most-scandalous divorces in American history

The Perils of Immortality , July/August 2000 | Vol. 51, No. 4

For centuries, the Newport rich have been commissioning portraits of themselves, and sometimes getting a surprise when they see the results.

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

Second Terms

I think John Steele Gordon is onto something in his remarks about our genetic need to tell stories. Though second-term blues have been common throughout our history, the reasons for them, as both he and Fredric Schwarz point out, are wildly disparate. A glance at three recent presidents reveals…

A Thought About Dissent

My recent comments about Eleanor Roosevelt and the Bonus March seem to have incited two of my fellow bloggers to entries of their own. They were not in agreement with my views. I will not address the political issues, but I do apologize for my historical mistake. As Frederic Schwarz observed, the…

Lessons From The Bonus March

On September 15, still trying to get it right, President Bush made his fourth visit to the area devastated by Katrina. Each trip has been, it seems to me, more carefully scripted. Gone are the off-the-cuff jokes about youthful hell-raising and the accolades to incompetent officials. The most recent…

A Soldier's Story

A few months ago, on a flight from Atlanta to New York, I found myself in a seat behind a man of about 19 or 20. He was wearing fatigues, the functional, not the fashionable, kind. Even before we took off, I knew something was up. While the rest of us struggled on our own to squeeze oversized bags…

Featured Authors

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.