Booknotes+

Who killed Jane Stanford? She died in 1905. She was the wife of Leland Stanford, a former railroad magnet, governor of California and U.S. senator. Their son Leland Stanford Jr. died at age 15 in 1884 of typhoid. In his honor, Stanford University was born in 1891. But why all these years later is there a book about who killed the doyenne of Stanford's family? Our guest, Emeritus Stanford Universit...

Kidada Williams is an associate professor of history at Wayne State University in Detroit. In her research work, she has focused on African Americans' accounts of lynching and the impact of terrorist night riders on the lives of enslaved people. Williams, who received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2005, has just published her latest book, "I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and S...

The United States of America was originally built on two important documents. The first, the Declaration of Independence, was signed by 56 men in the middle of 1776. The second, the Constitution, was signed by 39 men in September 1787. Six of those men put their John Hancock on both documents. To find out more, we talked with authors Denise Kiernan and Joseph D'Agnese who have written short backgr...

In its 41 years of existence, the Southeastern Guide Dogs organization in Palmetto, Florida, has created over 3,000 human-guide dog pairs. In 2006 they launched their program to help military veterans. One of the first things you learn if you take a tour of their facilities is: "We rely 100% on private donations. No government money is involved." Titus Herman, CEO of Southeastern Guide Dogs, has l...

Historian Robert Kagan has been writing about foreign affairs for most of his 64 years. The first book in his planned trilogy on American foreign policy was published in 2006 and focused on U.S. history before the founding up to the Spanish-American War. Mr. Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has just completed the second book in the trilogy titled "The Ghost at the Feast: Americ...

In our most recent podcast, Roger Parloff gave us an inside look at the Proud Boys trial which has been underway in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia since January 12th. In this follow-up to Mr. Parloff, we asked Dr. Megan Squire, a computer scientist, how she applies data science techniques to track and expose what she calls "networks of hate and extremism" online. She has studi...

In the two years since January 6, 2021, close to 1000 people have been charged with federal crimes relating to the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The legal process used by the federal justice system to deal with these cases is complicated and often out of sight to the American people. Attorney and journalist Roger Parloff, senior editor at Lawfare, has been live tweeting the trials of the Oath Keeper...

The language of 2023: "threat to democracy," "Antifa," "Stop the Steal," "fascism," "Proud Boys," "Brexit," "artificial intelligence," "BleachBit." Who understands all this? Where does the language come from? We asked British author Dorian Lynskey, our guest this week, to help us. His latest book is titled "The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984." In the introduction, Lynskey...

In Yale history professor Beverly Gage's 837-page cradle-to-grave biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she writes, "I do not count myself among Hoover's admirers." However, in the introduction, she says her book "G-Man" is less about judging him than about understanding him. Hoover ran the FBI for 48 years until he died at age 77 in 1972. Prof. Gage, who did her undergraduate work at Yale and received he...

Back in the period between June to November of 1962, Paul Gregory reportedly knew Lee and Marina Oswald better than anyone else. Two hours after President Kennedy's assassination, Mr. Gregory, then a student at the University of Oklahoma, was watching television and saw members of the Dallas police escorting a suspect into police headquarters. Paul Gregory said out loud, "I know that man," meaning...

Steve Kornacki, our guest this week, is the national political correspondent for NBC News. You see him often around campaigns and election nights in front of what the network calls the "Big Board." He recently finished a 7-part podcast series called "The Revolution with Steve Kornacki." It's the story of how the Republicans took over the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years...

Gordon Chang, our guest this week, is a well-known opinion writer, book author, and graduate of Cornell Law School. His father was born in China. His mother is of Scottish ancestry. Gordon Chang was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up 25 miles outside of New York City. At Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, he was president of his class. Mr. Chang spent almost two decades in Ch...

On the cover of Bloomberg reporter Mark Bergen's most recent book, "Like, Comment, Subscribe," it says it will take the reader "Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination." Mr. Bergen, our guest this week, has reported on Google for the past seven years. YouTube was bought by Google in 2014 for $1.6 billion. In the prologue to the book, Bergen reports that more than 2 billion people visit Y...

The title of Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont's latest book is "Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad." Prof. Delmont, our guest this week, writes in his introduction that: "Nearly everything about the war – the start and end dates, geography, vital military roles, home front, and international implications – looks different form the...

A couple of weeks ago, the conservative Heritage Foundation published its 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength. At that time, we discussed the Index's findings with the editor, Dakota Wood. The Heritage study concluded that the current U.S. military is at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict.  We wanted another point of view on the current U.S....

Adam Hochschild, in his new book "American Midnight," writes about what he says is left out of the typical high school American history book, especially when the subject is the United States during and immediately after World War One. "This book is about what's missing," writes Hochschild, "It's a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of Black Americans, an...

To people who know him well, Mark Dimunation is, first and foremost, an accomplished storyteller. Second and not least, he has been for twenty-five years the chief of the Library of Congress' Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The library has over 850,000 items in the collection, including Charles Dickens' walking stick, the Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640, and the contents in Abraham L...

Stacy Schiff has written books about Benjamin Franklin, Cleopatra, and the Witches of Salem. And now it's Samuel Adams, a Massachusetts man Thomas Jefferson called the Father of the American Revolution. Stacy Schiff, appropriately born in Adams, Massachusetts, is our guest this week. Her book is titled "The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams." Mr. Adams was born in Boston and lived for 81 years from 1722...

In October, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, released its 578-page 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength. Retired Marine Lt. Col. Dakota Wood edited the Index, which includes essays and analysis from over 16 experts chosen by the Heritage Foundation. The introduction to the Index concludes: "America’s leadership role remains in question, and its security interests are under substantial pr...

At age 37, Vivek Ramaswamy has already built and sold several companies. Before he began his career as an entrepreneur, he managed to serve as the valedictorian of his 2003 senior class at St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was a nationally ranked junior tennis player. Then there was a Harvard biology degree and graduation from Yale Law School. Ramaswamy has written two books. His lat...

"The Great Stewardess Rebellion" is about the women who changed the working conditions for stewardesses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The author, Nell Wulfhart wrote the New York Times "Carry-On" column from 2016 to 2019. In the introduction to her book, Ms. Wulfhart writes that: "It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that in the 1960s the airplane cabin was the most sexist workplace...

Brad Snyder offers a full and fascinating portrait of the life and legacy of Felix Frankfurter. This is the biography of an Austrian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States at age eleven speaking, not a word of English, who by age twenty-six befriended former president Theodore Roosevelt, and who by age fifty was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers. It is the story of a man...

Charles Kupchan is a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. He has served on the National Security Council for both the Clinton and Obama White Houses. Prof. Kupchan has a doctorate and a master's degree from Oxford and an undergraduate degree from Harvard. He is the author of 10 books. His latest is titled "Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from t...

Jay Gould revolutionized the world of finance in the 19th century. In “American Rascal,” Greg Steinmetz tells his story. Jay Gould was a brilliant strategist in any scrap over money. For a good example of Mr. Gould’s cunning, consider how he outgeneraled his fellow robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt in what might be called the Bovine War. The former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and current...

Author Troy Senik says in his new book, "A Man of Iron," that Grover Cleveland was the self-made, scrupulously honest man Americans often say they want as their president. President Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms as commander and chief, a term as Governor of New York, and even as sheriff in western New York's Erie County.  In this episode, Mr. Senik, a former speechwriter for George W....