Richard D. Heffner received his AB and MA from Columbia University and has taught history and political science at the University of California, Sarah Lawrence College, the New School for Social Research, and NYU. University Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers since 1964, he also produces and moderates his prizewinning weekly public television series, Richard Heffner’s Open Mind, which he began in 1956, and for twenty years was chairman of the motion picture industry’s film-rating system. In addition to A Documentary History of the United States, Mr. Heffner has edited and introduced the Signet Classic edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Random House/Schocken Books published his Conversations with Elie Wiesel; Carrol & Graf published his As They Saw It: A Conversational History of Modern America. He is joined now by journalist and civic educator Alexander Heffner.