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Richard Snow

Biography

Richard Snow

Richard Snow spent nearly four decades at American Heritage magazine, serving as editor in chief for 17 years, and has been a consultant on historical motion pictures, among them Glory, and has written for documentaries, including the Burns brothers’ Civil War, and Ric Burns’ award-winning PBS film Coney Island, whose screenplay he wrote. He is the author of multiple books, including, most recently, DISNEY'S LAND.

Richard Snow

Books by Richard Snow

Disney's Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World
by Richard Snow - Entertainment, History, Nonfiction

One day in the early 1950s, Walt Disney stood looking over 240 acres of farmland in Anaheim, California, and imagined building a park where people “could live among Mickey Mouse and Snow White in a world still powered by steam and fire for a day or a week or (if the visitor is slightly mad) forever.” On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened its gates…and the first day was a disaster. But the curious masses kept coming, and the rest is entertainment history. In DISNEY’S LAND, Richard Snow presents the entire spectacular story, an epic of innovation and error that reflects the uniqueness of the man determined to build “the happiest place on earth” with a watchmaker’s precision, an artist’s conviction, and the desperate, high-hearted recklessness of a riverboat gambler.

Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle that Changed History
by Richard Snow - History, Nonfiction

No single sea battle has had more far-reaching consequences than the one fought in the harbor at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in March 1862. The Confederacy, with no fleet of its own, built an iron fort containing 10 heavy guns on the hull of a captured Union frigate named the Merrimack. The North got word of the project when it was already well along, and, in desperation, commissioned an eccentric inventor named John Ericsson to build the Monitor, an entirely revolutionary iron warship. Historian Richard Snow brings to vivid life the tensions of the time, explaining how wooden and ironclad ships worked, maneuvered, battled and sank.