Linda Lear

Historian Linda Lear is the author of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (Houghton Mifflin) and Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (2007). She also edited Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (Beacon Press, 1998)

Ms. Lear is the author of numerous academic and popular articles on Carson, as well as the author of introductions to the 40th and 50th anniversary editions of Silent Spring.

Ms. Lear holds a Ph.D. in History from George Washington University. She has served as a Senior Smithsonian Research Associate, a Beinecke Fellow, Research Professor of Environmental History at George Washington University and Senior Research Scholar in History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

She is currently Senior Fellow of the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives at Connecticut College where she is a Trustee Emeritus. Lear also serves on the Board of the Washington Independent Review of Books, an online book reviewing site.

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Linda

Lear

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Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, Winter 2020 | Vol. 64, No. 1

She helped launch the environmental movement and pioneered the idea of the ecology of the human body.

Featured Authors

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Paul Dickson is the author of more than 55 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he has written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying to electronic warfare, he now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball and 20th century history. Bestselling books include: Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, The Hidden Language of Baseball, and The Joy of Keeping Score.

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Thomas Fleming is a longtime contributor to American Heritage and former president of the Society of American Historians.

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James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003) was most famous for his extensive writings on American art history and a four-volume biography of George Washington, for which he won a special Pulitzer citation. Flexner's other historical biographies include the one-volume Washington: The Indispensable Man, The Young Hamilton, Mohawk Baronet (Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet), and The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andre.

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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) was a historian, author, and political adviser who served as Special Assistant to President John Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. Schlesinger won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson. In 1966, Schlesinger won another Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. He was honored with a National Humanities Medal and a Four Freedoms Award before his death in 2007.

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