Richard F. Snow

Richard F. Snow worked 37 years at American Heritage Magazine, serving as Editor-in-Chief for seventeen of them. Born in New York City, he got a summer job as a mail boy at American Heritage during high school, and after studying English and history at Columbia College, returned to work at the magazine full-time. Snow is the author of several books, most recently A Measureless Peril, about the Battle of the Atlantic. Previously, he authored The Iron Road: A Portrait of American Railroading and Coney Island: A Postcard Visit to the City of Fire, as well as two novels, Freelon Starbird and The Burning, and a narrative poem, "The Funny Place." Snow has also consulted for historical motion pictures—among them Glory—and documentaries, including the Burns brothers’ The Civil War and Ken Burns’s World War II documentary. He revisited Coney one more time to work with Ric Burns on the PBS American Experience feature Coney Island, whose screenplay he wrote.

Articles by

Richard

Snow

Articles by this Author

Bert Williams, August/September 1980 | Vol. 31, No. 5

Boston Corbett, June/July 1980 | Vol. 31, No. 4

AMERICAN CHARACTERS

William A. Brady, April/may 1980 | Vol. 31, No. 3

Belle Boyd, February/March 1980 | Vol. 31, No. 2

She was “one of the most active and most reliable of the many secret woman agents of the Confederacy.”

Melvil Dewey, December 1980 | Vol. 32, No. 1

Lorenzo Coffin, October/November 1979 | Vol. 30, No. 6

Richmond Pearson Hobson, August/September 1979 | Vol. 30, No. 5

His reward for heroism was to become “the most kissed man in America”

William Cowper Brann, June/July 1979 | Vol. 30, No. 4

William James Sidis, April/May 1979 | Vol. 30, No. 3

Wade Hampton, February/March 1979 | Vol. 30, No. 2

Charles Chapin, December 1979 | Vol. 31, No. 1

Lincoln Beachey, October/November 1978 | Vol. 29, No. 6

Laura Bridgman, August/September 1978 | Vol. 29, No. 5

Hiram Maxim, June/July 1978 | Vol. 29, No. 4

Charles Goodyear, April/May 1978 | Vol. 29, No. 3

Sockless Jerry Simpson, February/March 1978 | Vol. 29, No. 2

Charles Becker, December 1978 | Vol. 30, No. 1

The Hinckley Fire, August 1977 | Vol. 28, No. 5

Barney Oldfield, February 1977 | Vol. 28, No. 2

A scrappy and reckless farm boy from Ohio became America's most legendary race car driver, and his widely publicized victories in Henry Ford's racing cars helped the aspiring entrepreneur launch Ford Motor Company

Joe Hill, October 1976 | Vol. 27, No. 6

The Battle Of Lake Erie, February 1976 | Vol. 27, No. 2

"With half the western world at stake, See Perry on the middle lake.” —Nineteenth-century ballad

Baltimore, Through A Glass Darkly, April 1973 | Vol. 24, No. 3

Encounter at the Brandywine, February 1973 | Vol. 24, No. 2

“The damn rebels form well”

The Winter Soldiers,, December 1973 | Vol. 25, No. 1

The Debacle at Fort Carillon, June 1972 | Vol. 23, No. 4

It started with jaunty confidence and skirling bagpipes. Five days later it had turned into one of the bloodiest and most futile battles ever fought on American soil.

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

Letter From The Editor: Zeebrugge and A Shau

The port of Bruges lies eight miles inland from the Belgian coast, served by a canal that opens to the sea at Ostend and Zeebrugge. In the bitter spring of 1918 Bruges Harbor teemed with German destroyers and U-boats that regularly came out to continue their years-long effort to starve Britain into…

Letter From The Editor: Underrated

It’s back again, and six years of experience has taught me that it’s going to make some readers angry. Others will tell us it’s their favorite feature. Save for a now-distant cover story about Jane Fonda, nothing we’ve published has elicited such vehement responses as “Overrated & Underrated.”…

Letter From The Editor: Anniversary

September 11, 2001, was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten—a new school a long subway ride up the spine of Manhattan. Rebecca’s inaugural school day consisted of half an hour meeting other children, followed by a four-hour walk home. When the school opened again, her teacher told me, “She’s…

Letter From The Editor: War Memorials

One dour morning early this March I had to drive to eastern Pennsylvania. I’d heard that a patch of the sometime steel town of Bethlehem had been spruced up and now was a bower of postindustrial charm, so after my errand I made a detour and headed over to see it. I drove up a hill and across a…

Letter From The Editor: Old News

The father of my colleague Carla Davidson was a newspaperman back in the racy violence of the Front Page days; he was also an accomplished novelist and television writer and a historian of wide interests. But he never could bring himself to care much about what he called “short-pants history,” by…

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