Stephen Budiansky has written twelve books about military and intelligence history, science, and the natural world. His most recent book is The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, an intimate narrative of terrorist violence in the post–Civil War South—and of the courageous few who dared to stand up for the newfound rights of the freedmen.

A former national security correspondent, deputy editor, and foreign editor of U.S. News & World Report and former Washington editor of the international scientific journal Nature, Budiansky has written extensively on military and foreign affairs—as well as topics as far ranging as Fats Waller’s pipe organ performances, foxhunting, weird dog behavior, and sleazy university marketing tactics—for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and many other publications.

His previous books include Her Majesty’s Spymaster, Battle of Wits, Air Power, The Nature of Horses, and The Truth About Dogs.

Budiansky is a member of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary and a member of the editorial board of Cryptologia, the scholarly journal about codes and codebreaking.

Budiansky graduated from Yale University in 1978 and received a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1979. In 1985–86 he was a Congressional Fellow at the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, where he co-authored a classified study on the future role of “smart” weapons technology in warfare.

His history of the naval War of 1812, Perilous Fight, will be published next year by Knopf.

Stephen Budiansky lives in Loudoun County, Virginia.