Edwin Cole Bearss: History's Pied Piper

by John C. Waugh

Edwin Cole Bearss, Chief Historian Emeritus of the National Park Service, has become a legend to match history itself. A virtual walking encyclopedia of America’s past, an absolute polymath, he has made himself into icon, a historian immeasurably gifted to interpret that past in all of its compelling drama.

First as a historian for the National Park Service, then as its chief historian, and now as a tour guide extraordinaire, he has been instrumental in his long career in laying out many of this nation’s most famous battlefield parks and historic sites. And he has brought and continues to bring history in all its drama back to life, popularizing it for hundreds of admirers and followers. He is truly a Pied Piper of the past.

This is a brief, richly illustrated biography of that extraordinary historian.

71 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2003

About the author

A Brief Self-Serving Bio

I'm a journalist turned historical reporter:

1956–1973, staff correspondent and bureau chief on The Christian Science Monitor. Honors included the American Bar Association’s 1972 Silver Gavel Award for the best national reporting, for a series on American prisons.
1973–1976, media specialist on the staff of Republican Vice President Nelson Rockefeller of New York.
1983–1988, press secretary to Democratic U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.
Since 1989, writing about history full-time — books on the Civil War era.
Covering the past is not unlike covering the present, except all my sources are dead (I prefer it that way). It also means I can return to my favorite century, the 19th, on a daily basis.

Between stints in the newspaper and political worlds, and since, I've contributed to periodicals, including Civil War History, American Heritage, Civil War Times Illustrated, Columbiad, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald American, and Country Magazine.

Over the years I've also been a consultant to various organizations — National Archives and Records Administration, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Atlantic Richfield Company, President’s Council on Environmental Quality, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and West Virginia Public Radio.

My first book, The Class of 1846, published in 1994, won the New York Civil War Round Table’s Fletcher Pratt Literary Award for the best non-fiction book of that year.

I have now written 11 books since flunking retirement in 1989. Number 12 will be out in October 2014. I have discovered over the years that if you put one word after another long enough, they add up.

I was born in California, reared in Arizona, and now live in North Texas. I'm a product of the Tucson public schools and the University of Arizona (1951, journalism major, history minor) plus graduate work in history and political science at UCLA and St. Johns College. I'm married to Kathleen Dianne Lively, a social work administrator and a Texan. We have two grown children, Daniel, a lawyer in Providence, Rhode Island, and Eliza, a teacher in Austin, Texas, and four grandchildren.