History Author Show

June 29, 2020 – Doctor. Major General. Hero of the American Revolution. Martyr who spilled his lifeblood fighting the British at Bunker Hill. And yet most of us have never heard of him. Our guide on this journey is Christian Di Spigna, who brings us Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero . Christian Di Spigna is a regular speaker a...

June 15, 2020  – Investigative journalist and attorney Gerald Posner shares the highpoints of the pharmaceutical industry’s transformational successes, as well the moments they’d prefer to keep buried. We go along for the ride in his latest book, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America . It’s a page-turning journey to meet the scientists whose successes have impro...

June 1, 2020 – Meet the commanders who led America to Victory in mankind’s most terrible conflict before they had stars on their shoulders. Our guide on this journey is 82 nd Airborne veteran and paratrooper Benjamin Runkle. He brings us Generals in the Making: How Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Their Peers Became the Commanders Who Won World War II . It’s the first comprehens...

May 18, 2020 – In an iconic, ad-libbed moment at the old Yankee Stadium, a terminally ill baseball player declared himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” A decade earlier, he’d sat down to write the remarkable story of his career in newspaper columns that remained buried for almost a century — until now. In Lou Gehrig: The Lost Memoir , we meet Major Lea...

May 4, 2020 – What if a former U.S. congressman told you he had a secret about the most infamous presidential assassination, but died before revealing it? It’s a turn-of-the-century whodunit, courtesy of historian David O. Stewart ‘s novel, The Lincoln Deception (A Fraser and Cook Historical Mystery) . His Holmes and Watson team features the white Dr. Jamie Fraser, and African-Am...

April 20, 2020 – In 1863, the Confederate States held a last stronghold on the Mississippi River: Vicksburg. Losing it, and the slavocracy would be sliced in half, mortally wounding their cause. Donald L. Miller musters us into the Grand Army of the Republic’s campaign to capture this city on its high bluff in Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign That Broke the Confederacy . Donald L. Mil...

April 6, 2020 – Pack your full-body swimsuit, everybody. We’re headed for Coney Island in the summer of 1911, where we’ll meet a young heiress, Peggy Batternberg. Peggy falls in love, dives into the seedy world where the other half lives, and stumbles upon the mystery of young women found murdered under the boardwalk. Our time machine travels back to America’s Playground, C...

March 23, 2020 – Adolf Hitler … had a need for speed. After all, it was the key feature in blitzkrieg, lightning war. So the Nazis poured resources into developing the fastest engines, sleekest race cars, and best drivers. Who dared stand against them? We’ll meet the Jewish driver who took on these would-be Aryan supermen in Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a...

March 9, 2020 – Jerry Mitchell joins us with Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era .  In addition to what we today know as the Mississippi Burning case, this unique memoir covers our guest’s efforts in the assassination of Medgar Evers, the 16th Street Church bombing, and the firebombing of Vernon Dahmer. By refusing to ignore pleas for...

February 24, 2020 – What if the Revolution sparked in 1776 had collapsed? In this episode, our time machine travels back to the last days of the American Revolution, to track down rumors of an unthinkable plot by the Continental Army to mutiny over lack of pay. Only George Washington stood against the passions of men that may have included such patriots Alexander Hamilton and James Madison?...

              Featured in The New York Sun – Biden’s Tumble at Air Force Ceremony Stands Out in Long List of History’s Presidential Pratfalls – Dean Karayanis February 10, 2020 – Recorded live at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, our time machine travels back to the end of the Great War and the dawn of Prohibition....

              Featured in The New York Sun – Gorbachev, Reagan, and ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ – Dean Karayanis January 27, 2020 – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan drops in on the key flashpoints of the Nuclear Age, from Harry S Truman first getting word that the Manhattan Project had birthed its radioactive fruit, to the Cuban...

January 13, 2020  – Our time machine travels back to the Civil Rights era, to meet a man who fought the racial discrimination of his day on the basketball court, while using his platform to support those battling in courts of law. In the process, he was the first man ever described as a “superstar.” We enjoy this 6′ 5″pioneer’s story in Elgin Baylor: The Man Who...

December 16, 2019 – Our time machine travels back to the death throes of the Confederate States of America with New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist S.C. Gwynne who brings us Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War . Click here for an excerpt — “Chapter One: The End of Begins.” You can also enjoy our History in...

December 2, 2019 – Why would a Gilded Age woman climb the tallest mountains in the world? For the same reason a man would, of course: Because it’s there. We meet the pioneer whose ambitions shattered glass ceilings on the very top of the world in Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman . Our sherpa as we climb through this compelling woman’s life...

November 18, 2019 – What if you woke up to find your 12-year-old daughter dead, and the local police destroyed your house looking for evidence to pin the murder on your innocent son? Attorney Donald E. McInnis introduces us to the real-life family that endured this nightmare in She’s So Cold: Murder, Accusations and the System that Devastated a Family . On a winter day in 1998, the tow...

November 4, 2019 – How did a “spinster” who declared, “I don’t care for children,” and called them “little wretches,” launch an organization that not only saved millions of them, but changed the way the world treats young people to this day? Clare Mulley returns to introduce us into this enigmatic force for good in The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biogr...

              Featured in The New York Sun – The Online Addiction Running Rampant in America – Dean Karayanis October 21, 2019 – Our time machine travels back to the Jazz Age, where we’ll meet gambling mastermind Arnold Rothstein, whose lust for a sure thing inspired the most audacious and infamous scam in sports history: Fixing the World...

October 7, 2019 – What’s a “honeyfuggle,” and why did Theodore Roosevelt call William Howard Taft one? In this episode, presidential historian Mike Purdy checks in with the 44 men who’ve served as our presidents as they roast, criticize, and belittle fellow commanders-in-chief in a manner that would make Don Rickles smile. And who wouldn’t want to hear Benjamin Harris...

September 23, 2019 – What if your family name was infamous? What if you were the only loyal American in a clan where everyone — even your little, old grandmother — backed treason? Jane B. Singer introduces us to just such a man in The War Criminal’s Son: The Civil War Saga of William A. Winder . It’s the true story of Confederate General John H. Winder and his son, Union Ca...

September 9, 2019 – Bob Batchelor introduces us to the boisterous, brass-knuckles bootlegger who quenched Dry America’s thirst in the Roaring Twenties. His book is The Bourbon King: The Life and Crimes of George Remus, Prohibition’s Evil Genius . We last caught up with Bob to chat about his book Stan Lee: The Man behind Marvel . You can find that interview in our archives at iHeartRadi...

August 26, 2019 – Women aren’t allowed to be police officers in 1908 Los Angeles, but that’s never stopped Anna Blanc from catching killers. Besides, it’s not her  fault she keeps stumbling across corpses, or that she’s the keenest legal mind this side of Sherlock Holmes. Jennifer Kincheloe joins us to chat about her latest mystery staring her whiskey-sipping fallen s...

August 12, 2019 – Our time machine boldly goes where no man has gone before, fulfilling President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to put an American on the moon and return him safely to earth by the end of that decade. Half a century after NASA fulfilled JFK’s vision in the summer of 1969, we look back at the long road of 10,000 small human steps and giant technological leaps, t...

July 29, 2019 – What do you get when two icons of the Industrial Revolution pile into a Model T and speed off to look for America? A one-of-a kind road-trip, peppered with Jazz Age characters like Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, President Calvin Coolidge, and hardscrabble fiddler Jep Bisbee. Gassing us up for this journey is Jeff Guinn who brings us The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford a...

              The New York Sun – This Presidents Day, Let Us Take Inspiration From Our Leaders’ Hardships – Dean Karayanis July 15, 2019 –  Meet the “indispensable man” of the American Revolution, when he was just a hot-headed 22-year-old, growing into the shoes that laid down the footsteps for all future presidents to follow. Peter...