People like John M. Barry

John M. Barry (born 1947) is an American author and historian who has written books on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the influenza pandemic of 1918, and the development of the modern form of the ideas of separation of church and state and individual liberty. He is a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and Distinguished Scholar at Tulane's Bywater Institute.

Barry was born in Providence, Rhode Island and graduated from Brown University in 1968. He entered a Ph.D. program at the University of Rochester but withdrew from graduate school in the middle of the semester after he received his M.A. in History in 1969. He then coached high school and college football. In 2021 he was inducted into the Tulane University Athletic Hall of Fame for his role as a coach of the 1973 Tulane football team, and his first several published articles appeared in a professional journal for coaches, Scholastic Coach. In the 1970s he began freelancing for magazines and moved to Washington DC, where he frequently contributed to The Washington Post Sunday Magazine and was Washington editor of the now-defunct Dun's Review and Dun's Business Month.