Read Beat (...and repeat)

Your typical cowboy movie features stagecoaches, lots of horses, Indians, and a saloon with swinging doors. The women depicted are either saloon girls or school teachers, noted Chris Enss, who’s worked hard for the past 30 years to dispel that image.  Enss has written numerous books detailing the history of the Old West, most of it focusing on women's exploits during that period. Her latest b...

Rose Maloof doesn’t think hugging a tree is silly. As the founder of the Old-Growth Forest Network, an organization that seeks to preserve the few old-growth forests we have left in this country, Maloof is passionate about trees. Today, less than 5 percent of Western and only a fraction of 1 percent of Eastern original forests, on average, remain standing. The author of Forty Ways to Know a Tree ,...

You remember the department store, that big, multi-level center of the downtown that offered everything from an afternoon tea to wedding attire? That's where Jack Benny went every year to find a tie for Don Wilson or something for Mary Livingston, but always ran into trouble. Julie Satow recalls the glory days of some of New York’s most distinctive department stores in When Women Ran Fifth Av...

Janet Zandy makes a case for art, both its appreciation and its execution, not just for the select few. In her book, Working-Class Girls Don’t Become Artists (University of Illinois Press), Zandy shares the exploits of nine artists whose work aligns with the histories and living conditions of working-class people. Zandy's work includes the quote, “Workers can also realize that art is a career...

Not all the lessons learned at college take place in the classroom. That’s one of the takeaways from Woodlands of the Mind: Rambles Through Campus Forests by Kevin O’Donnell and Scott Honeycutt. There’s more. You learn that stately old buildings aren’t the only prominent landmarks on campus. Some are growing right outside.  "Readers should take note that this collection of essays is about mor...

Passenger train service of the past is often depicted with bustling city stations and milling crowds pouring onto platforms. But that wasn’t the only way to catch the train back in the day. If you were out in the country in central Illinois, you could just stand by the track and wave. That’s the way one electric railway operated that connected central Illinois cities Peoria, Bloomington, Springfie...

What started as a routine genealogical search turned into a six-year research project for Joe Goodbody, a retired Army colonel and the author of Kentucky Barracuda. The book documents the 19th-century exploits of Parker Hardin French (1826-1878), an adventurer and one of the most extraordinary con men of his time.  French began his career in an America where news  generally traveled only as fast a...

There’s more to Agatha Christie than slick plot twists and quaint settings (like the fictitious Chipping Cleghorn). Christie was an adventurous woman, said Nancy West, the University of Missouri English professor who authored the biography, the latest in the Simon & Schuster series of pocket portraits of famous writers. A world traveler who took up surfing in South Africa and pursued the hobby...

To better understand Annie McClanahan’s book, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks & Gigs in the Age of Service Work , one needs only peruse recent stories such as:  --the Chicago Teachers Union’s bargaining to include a demand to end student homelessness by creating 10,000 new affordable housing units prioritizing Chicago public school households;  --Amazon warehouse workers in Chicago who demanded...

You can't accuse Amy Pollack of rushing into print. Although she first had the idea of Jelly Bean, a fictional fourth-grader, back when she was in fourth grade herself (1960), it wasn't until Pollack had completed more than 40 years of teaching at every level--primary, middle, high school, and college--that she published a story that's now a series. The Still Further Adventures of J...

"The world will be made better by those who refuse to be silent." That statement tells you where Gloria Browne-Marshall stands. A law professor atJohn Jay College in New York, Browne-Marshall is the author of A Protest History of the United States , a book that explores 500 years of protest and resistance in North America. "The Declaration of Independence is a protest document,&quot...

Justin Glawe's new book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened , provides a reporter's account of some of the biggest news stories of the past decade. Starting with the chaos that followed the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, If I Am Coming plunges the reader into the middle of the action both inside and outside the crime-scene tape. Glawe covere...

To understand how the food business works, merely take a trip down the cereal aisle at your local supermarket. Cereal boxes represent food industry billboards: big, bold, and shouting for your (or your child's) attention, said Marion Nestle, who co-authored Sugar Coated with Lisa Sutherland. Nestle has been collecting cereal boxes since the Reagan Administration, when she served as a nutritio...

Toxic polarization is the division in society that pits neighbor against neighbor and family member against family member when political fervor reaches a fever pitch. It's a time when it's dangerous to be a public official, not just in Washington, but when threats are leveled at officeholders at the local level, said Peter Coleman, author of The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarizatio...

“A new status quo has taken hold in Washington DC,” writes Jody Freeman, one of the Harvard Law School professors offering up short essays in America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance .  “The federal government is more partisan and less professional than at any time in the modern era,” continues Freeman.  “The administrative state on which we rely for the bulk of regulatory governance an...

Michael Grunwald provides another take on the climate crisis. It's not just about reducing exhaust fumes from gasoline-powered cars; it's about agriculture. The world's fossil-fuel problem is still number one, but agriculture is number two, the author maintains. Farming is taking up too much of the world's land, land that we need to use for forests and wetlands, notes Grunwald,...

It’s a museum dedicated to McLean County, home to Bloomington-Normal, but the displays are as broad-based and American as apple pie: Abraham Lincoln, Route 66, and baseball. The McLean County Museum of History, 200 Main St. in Downtown Bloomington, occupies the old courthouse building where a staff of 12 come up with concepts and collections that keep the past alive. Since Route 66, now celebratin...

What was the most influential television show of the 1950s? I Love Lucy? Disneyland? Twilight Zone ? Few would probably choose Peter Gunn , the private-eye show starring Craig Stevens that producer Blake Edwards launched in 1958. But a case could be made for the program. It wasn’t the plot or the players that made Peter Gunn so significant but the Henry Mancini soundtrack that introduced West Coas...

Television’s growth in the 1950s mirrored the rise of radio in the 1930s. Unlike radio, however, TV hasn’t looked back, demanding our attention now more than ever in the 21st century. Back in the 50s, television was still feeling its way. Early television was in black and white, screens were small, and stations actually signed off at night, playing the National Anthem before descending into static...

The old west came at us in a rush on 50s TV: So many shows; so many cowboys; so much history; and so much left out. Megan Kate Nelson attempts to fill some of the gaps in our frontier history in The Westerners , a book that chronicles the lives of seven remarkable individuals never depicted on TV or a lunchbox. You learn more about Sacajawea, the Native American woman who helped guide the Lewis &a...

If you have passed through small-town America in recent years, you may have noticed that, for the vast majority of towns, to use the phrase, “they ain’t what they used to be.”  The downtown buildings may still be in place, but are now empty or boarded up. That’s if you even make it to the downtown area to see for yourself now that some businesses have migrated to the highway to serve the traveling...

With the story of the American Revolution being retold as we approach this country’s 250th anniversary, we hear a lot about George Washington, Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine, among the many individuals who played a part in the formation of the United States of America. What we don’t hear much about is that, concurrent with the war that ousted the British, was wh...

Stephen Bezruchka has worked in the healthcare field for over 50 years. A graduate of Stanford Medical School, with a public health degree from Johns Hopkins University, Bezruchka began his career by setting up a community health project in the Himalayas. He spent over 30 years practicing as an emergency physician in the United States before joining the faculty of the School of Public Health at th...

Benita VanWinkle likes going to the movies. She’s gone to theaters in every state of the union. But she doesn’t always stay for the main feature. Instead, VanWinkle, an art professor at High Point University in North Carolina, pursues a picture show of her own. Over the years, she’s photographed some 1,200 theaters across the country. Almost 400 of those pictures make up her new book , America’s H...

Don’t expect a big celebration on Juneteenth (June 19) from author Clyde W. Ford, who explains in A High Price for Freedom . “What a wonderful day that first Juneteenth must have been. Fetters gone. Shackles removed. Whips silenced. Uninformed formerly enslaved men and women reveling in their newly-found freedom. But there’s a problem with this idyllic picture of Juneteenth—most of the above event...