History Author Show

October 9, 2017 – This week, our time machine flies up to the Great White North — the very heart of Canada — for a road trip to Brandon, Manitoba’s Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum, a national historic site dedicated to the memory of the men who fought and died in the skies during the Second World War. It’s the only museum of its kind in the world, marking where...

October 2, 2017 – Today, our time machine follows professional baseball players, onto the battlefields of Europe in World War One a century ago. We hear the story about how the game, players, fans and the War Department clash in From the Dugouts to the Trenches: Baseball During the Great War , by author Jim Leeke. Jim is a contributor to the Society for American Baseball Research Baseball Bi...

September 25, 2017 – This week, our time machine follows one woman’s modern quest to recover property stolen by Nazi Germany. It was only a single theft in the National Socialist State’s vast, systematic plundering of Jewish wealth, but the Wolff family’s story quickly becomes our story, and we find ourselves rooting for justice. Author Dina Gold’s grandmother, Nellie...

September 18, 2017 – Hello, true believers! This week, we meet a national treasure who serves as a bridge from the Golden Age of comic books to today’s blockbuster, multi-film CGI universes. It’s the origin story of the man who — along with talented co-creators like artists Jack Kirby and Joe Simon — created such iconic characters as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, th...

September 11, 2017 – his week, our time machine travels back to 1840 for a belt of hard cider courtesy of presidential candidate — William Henry Harrison. A hero in the War of 1812, “Old Tippecanoe” and served in a variety of public offices, before winning the Whig nomination and making a bid for the presidency with Virginia Democrat John Tyler. In 2017, we expect the atmos...

Thanks to everyone who joined us for an Author’s Evening with Eva Stachniak at the Kosciuszko Foundation on Sept. 12, 2017. September 4, 2017 – This week, our time machine travels back to early 20th Century Eastern Europe, where we’ll meet ballerina Bronislava Nijinsky. Bronia was a remarkable dancer and woman, who charted a course for greatness despite the upheavals outside and...

August 28, 2017 – This week, our time machine takes us into Nazi-occupied France, to meet a bold patriot with a famous Uncle Charles. Her name was Genevieve de Gaulle, and she did the hard work of resistance behind enemy lines, that the general urged from exile. Paige Bowers tells Genevieve’s story in The General’s Niece: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied Fra...

August 21, 2017 – This week, our time machine heads back 100 years, to a time when surging numbers of women were demanding the right to vote. Our guest is Deborah Kops, who has written more than twenty nonfiction books for children and young adults, including her latest for ages 11 to 18. It’s Alice Paul and the Fight for Women’s Rights: From the Vote to the Equal Rights Amendmen...

August 14, 2017 – This week, our time machine travels back to the Gilded Age and pre-World War Two America, to hear the voices of those who held crowds enthralled. Our guide on this journey is Jeremy C. Young, and his book is, The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870–1940 . In it, Jeremy traces the modern relationship between leaders and supporters, bac...

August 7, 2017 – This week, our time machine takes to the skies of Germany as war clouds gather on the horizon, to meet two very different women, united in history by their determination to soar in the brand new — and male-dominated — world of human flight. This week, our time machine takes to the skies of Germany as war clouds gather on the horizon, to meet two very different wo...

July 31, 2017 – This week, our time machine travels back to the twenty-sixth year of Augustus Caesar’s reign, where we’ll sit down for countless scrumptious meals. Serving up this unique tale is debut author Crystal King who brings us Feast of Sorrow: A Novel of Ancient Rome . In it we meet infamous gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius, credited as author of the oldest cookbook known to...

July 24, 2017 – This week, we introduce children to the woman behind the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. The book (for young readers ages 4 to 8) is Maya Lin: Artist-Architect of Light and Lines , by San Francisco children’s author Jeanne Walker Harvey. Just how did a college student managed to win the design competition for what’s now the most frequently visited monument...

July 17, 2017 – This week, the old-time machine leads a funeral procession, starting at George Washington’s crypt at Mount Vernon and ending over 200 years later paying out respects to Gerald R. Ford in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Returning for a second time-travel adventure is Louis Picone, author of: The President is Dead! The Extraordinary Stories of the Presidential Deaths, Final Days,...

July 10, 2017 – This week, infamous bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde carjack our time machine, and take us back to the days of jazz and Prohibition, years before their bullet-riddled fate in 1934. Just who were those two people as individuals, before they melted into an infamous and romanticized duo swaddled in myths? We’ll dive into Bonnie Parker’s origin story, by riding shotgun w...

              Featured in The New York Sun  – Discover the Fallen Heroes in Your Family Tree This Memorial Day Weekend – Dean Karayanis Featured in The New York Sun – After 77 Years, Hiroshima Bombing Stands Up to Second-Guessing – Dean Karayanis July 3, 2017 – This week, our time machine enlists in the U.S. Navy with a trio of my fe...

June 26, 2017 – This week, our time machine visits New York City’s oldest bar, McSorley’s Old Ale House . Our theme song, “New York Ain’t New York Anymore,” laments the loss of places where “the sawdust is gone from the floor.” Well in this East Village landmark, where the clock has literally stopped, and that means still spreading the sawdust every...

June 19, 2017 – This week, our time machine joins up with legendary explorers Lewis and Clark, and traces the clash of cultures between the Europeans and Native American Nez Perce tribe through William Clark’s son, Daytime Smoke. Our guide on this journey is David Osborne, who shares his ambitious debut novel, The Coming . David has five nonfiction books to his credit, and you’ve...

June 12, 2017 – This week, we’ll visit the turbulent 1960s after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Once there, we’ll witness his younger brother and attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, charting his own political path forward. With his foe LBJ in the White House, and only 38 years old, Bobby no longer has JFK’s career to put first, but his own. Our guide on t...

June 5, 2017 – This day after this episode airs is June 6th, the anniversary of the D-Day landings in 1944. This week, our time machine hits those bloody beaches of Normandy, where we’ll meet the oldest man and highest-ranking officer to go ashore with the first wave: General Ted Roosevelt, Jr. As the oldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt, Ted had the name, the looks, the expectat...

May 29, 2017 – We’re uploading this episode for Memorial Day 2017, to pay tribute to the men and women who gave their lives in service to the United States. Leading us on this trip into the past, is Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, a licensed New York City Sightseeing Guide, United States Marine veteran, and author of World War I New York: A Guide to the City’s Enduring Ties to the Great Wa...

May 22, 2017 – This week, our time machine visits a small Jersey Shore town with big White House history. The spot is The Church of the Presidents in Long Branch, a spot where seven commanders-in-chief vacationed in the Gilded Age. They started coming to the beach with the man who crushed the Confederacy, General Ulysses S. Grant, and continued through five of the next six — Rutherford...

May 15, 2017 – This week, for our 100th interview, our time machine visits some of the most heated fighting — political and on the battlefield — during the American Civil War. We’ll experience the great conflagration through the eyes of a soldier and his young love, whose father just happens to be a Democratic state senator, who begins to doubt Lincoln’s war effort as...

May 8, 2017 – This week, our time machine hoists the Jolly Roger, that notorious black flag with a skull and crossbones that sent shivers down the spine of God-fearing men and woman on the high seas. Shortly after we set sail, we’ll meet Massachusetts fisherman Philip Ashton, whose capture and escape from pirates, earned him status as America’s real-life Robinson Crusoe. We’ll al...

May 1, 2017 – This week, our time machine touches down at the height of the Red Scare, in the Oval Office of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose public stance of ignoring Senator Joseph McCarthy’s descent into demagoguery — refusing even to mention his name — has long been cited by historians as proof that the old World War Two general just didn’t care. Some even da...

April 24, 2017 – This week’s episode airs on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and features debut novelist Barbara Stark-Nemon’s ambitious novel, Even in Darkness . Spanning a century and three continents, Barbara tells the story of her real-life great-aunt, Kläre Kohler, from early years in a prosperous German-Jewish family, through an adulthood of love, two World Wars, a concentration...