American historians

Gordon Baxter (December 25, 1923 – June 11, 2005), nicknamed Bax, was a well-known Texas radio personality, an author of books and a columnist for newspapers and magazines. He was a lifelong resident of Southeast Texas, having grown up in Port Arthur where he was born.
He lived near Beaumont during most of his professional years and was probably best known locally as a radio heartland humorist in the Jean Shepherd tradition. He was also known nationally to several generations of pilots who read his columns on the joys of flying in the aviation magazine, Flying.
Baxter was entranced by aviation from childhood. At the age of ten, he paid "a 1933 fortune" of five dollars for his first airplane ride in a Curtiss Condor and was hooked on flying. Despite a slow start in the cockpit and as a writer, by the end of his writing career he had spent more than 25 years with Flying, written 13 books and contributed to a Microsoft CD-ROM title, World of Flight.
During World War II, Baxter joined the Army Air Corps, hoping to be a pilot. Baxter himself noted that his ruination as a military pilot was predicted in high school by a math teacher who told Gordon that he spent too much time dreaming and drawing airplanes and not enough time studying. In the Army Air Corps, he trained in a Stearman. He entered the Merchant Marine as an officer, but after his ship was sunk in the South Pacific, he became a turret gunner in B-17s. Once there, he became a sharpshooter in every turret position. It was only after World War II that he succeeded in soloing in a Luscombe, eventually becoming an active pilot in the late 1950s.

Anson Frank Rainey (January 11, 1930 – February 19, 2011) was professor emeritus of ancient Near Eastern cultures and Semitic linguistics at Tel Aviv University. He is known in particular for contributions to the study of the Amarna tablets, the noted administrative letters from the period of Pharaoh Akhenaten's rule during the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. He authored and edited books and articles on the cultures, languages and geography of the Biblical lands.

Norris Cecil Hundley, Jr. (October 26, 1935 – April 28, 2013) was an American academic, historian, and writer, best known for his 1992 book, The Great Thirst, which details the history of water usage in California from 1770 to the 1990s. Both as a historian and an academic, Hundley was renowned for inventing the professional history of water rights in the Western United States

Samuel Pfrimmer Hays (April 5, 1921 – November 22, 2017) was a pioneering environmental, social and political historian. Born in Corydon, Indiana and raised on a local dairy farm. He earned a graduates degree from Swarthmore College in 1948, and a Ph.D. at Harvard University. He authored multiple works including "The Response to Industrialism 1885-1914" in 1957, "Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency," "Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985” and "A History of Environmental Politics since 1945". He established the Archives of Industrial Society at The University of Pittsburgh where he served as a professor from 1960 until 1990.
Hays served as president of the Urban History Association in 1992. In 1997 he came the first recipient of the American Society for Environmental History Distinguished Scholar award. In 1999 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Award from the Organization of American Historians. Hayes was an environmental activist. He owned a 311-acre tract of land in Harrison County, Indiana, near Corydon, and he donated the land to the county as a nature preserve. The county operates it as the Hayswood Nature Reserve.