Higham was born in London in 1925, volunteered for the Royal Air Force in Canada in 1943, and served as a pilot and air field controller in Europe, India, Burma, and Thailand. He graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in history and literature, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1959. Higham taught history of aviation courses at Kansas State University for 35 years. He was editor of the quarterly journal, Aerospace Historian, for 18 years. His books include, Air Power : A Concise History, Brittan’s Imperial Air Routes 1918-1939, Diary of a Disaster: British Aid to Greece, 1940-1941, The Bases of Air Strategy: Building Airfields for the RAF, 1914-1954, and Soviet Aviation and Air Power. He contributed 23 articles to the British Dictionary of Business Biography and numerous articles to the New Dictionary of National Biography.