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T. H. Watkins

One of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, T. H. Watkins was an editor at American Heritage for six years and a long-time contributor. He also served as Editor of Wilderness magazine for fifteen years, and as Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.

Watkins is perhaps best known for Righteous Pilgrim, a 1990 biography of Harold L. Ickes, the crusading secretary of the interior for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which was a National Book Award finalist.  He also wrote The Hungry Years, The Great Depression: America in the 1930s, and two dozen other books.

Articles by this Author

National Park, May/June 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 3
Wondering which are overrated (none) or underrated (all)
The naturalist ALDO LEOPOLD not only gave the wilderness idea its most persuasive articulation; he offered a way of thinking that turned the entire history of land use on its head
Ninety years ago a highborn zealot named Gifford Pinchot knew more about woodlands than any man in America. What he did about them changed the country we live in and helped define environmentalism.
Fort Adobe
A HERITAGE PRESERVED
Bank Holdup, June/July 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 4
MIAMI DECO
History by a Dam Site
Arkansas saves fragments of the rich but distant past.
SAVING FACE
Listening, April/may 1980 | Vol. 31, No. 3
For The Record, December 1980 | Vol. 32, No. 1
A HERITAGE PRESERVED
Maligned and misunderstood throughout much of their history, the Penitentes of the American Southwest have nevertheless given their people a sense of community and spiritual security. But for how much longer?
The history of carousels goes ’round and ’round…
The hands of Pueblo potter Maria Martinez have reached back across more than seven hundred years of history to create pottery that is now proudly displayed in museums and private collections all over the world.
Henry Morion Stanley, who later found Dr. Livingstone, reports the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, October, 1867
Sticky-fingered specialists have stolen thousands of documents from every size and sort of historical archive.
The Museum of Broadcasting brings back the experience of radio, memories of laughter, drama, fantasy and hope.
Pride lies at the heart of efforts to renovate a historic district in Cincinnati.
Organizers held an old-fashioned cattle drive to commemorate the cowboy's role in winning the West, but, as they say, nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
Thousands of Native American pictographs and petroglyphs are at risk from vandalism amd theft.