Terry Golway

Terry Golway is an author and historian whose books include Washington's General: Nathanael Green and the Triumph of the American Revolution, The Irish in America, For the Cause of Liberty, and So That Others Might Live. He frequently writes for American Heritage, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.

Articles by this Author

Firefighters, November/December 2005 | Vol. 56, No. 6

The people who stand ready to trade their lives for ours are part of a tradition that goes back 400 years

Third-party Candidate, October 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 5

There We Go Again, August/September 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 4

In their surprisingly short history, presidential debates have never lived up to our expectations—yet they’ve always proved invaluable

The Fifty Biggest Changes In The Last Fifty Years, February/March 2004 | Vol. 55, No. 1

Politics

Political Reform, October 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 5

Social-protest Movement, September 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 6

The Conventional Wisdom: Why It’s Wrong, July/August 2000 | Vol. 51, No. 4

When the two parties gather to select their candidates, the proceedings will be empty glitz, with none of the import of old-time conventions. Or will they?

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

50/50: The 50 Biggest Changes of The Last 50 Years

With American Heritage approaching its fiftieth birthday in December 2004, we’ve asked five prominent historians and cultural commentators to each pick 10 leading developments in American life in the last half-century. We begin in this issue with Terry Golway—the political columnist for the New…

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

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.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

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.