History Author Show

April 17, 2017 – This week, our time machine attends the Gilded Age performances of a man who heralded the Borscht Belt, Vaudeville, and paved the way for performers from Mel Brooks to Barbra Streisand and Jerry Seinfeld. He did so by performing Jewish characters — for the first time — with dignity, humor, and emotional depth. Born in 1849, M.B. Curtis gained worldwide fame &#821...

April 3, 2017 – This week, our time machine compares some of the Western world’s big thinkers. Centuries ago Plutarch, the Father of Biography, wrote Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans to reveal new insights about their careers by making comparisons. Robert Lloyd George applies this method to our time in A Modern Plutarch: Comparisons of the Greatest Western Thinkers , using the Unit...

March 27, 2017 – This week, our time machine goes inside a succession of Nazi Concentration camps, and views them through the great Norwegian statesman, Odd Nansen. Editing Nansen’s diaries — written painstakingly and smuggled out of the camps — is Timothy J. Boyce , and the resulting book is From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps . A...

March 20, 2017 – This week, we meet a man born Albrecht Dittrich in East Germany, who infiltrated the U.S. as a KGB agent at the height of the Cold War — and in the decades since, Barsky’s life has taken all the twists and turns you’d expect from a fictional spy thriller. From ardent communist to patriotic American citizen. From unquestioning atheist, to agnostic, to the wi...

March 13, 2017 – This week, we step into the Tardis, and travel back in time to a United Kingdom facing a rebellion in the late 1600s. The leader of this uprising to seize the crown is Charles II’s illegitimate son, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. He’s the sort of figure we love: One wronged by generations of falsehoods, until a dedicated historian tells the true story. That a...

March 6, 2017 – This week, our time machine travels back to the earliest days of the United States, to what’s sometimes called the Second War of independence: The War of 1812. For the first time in this fight against Great Britain, Congress used the Constitution’s power to declare war, and for the last time, the men doing the fighting supplied their own weapons — an idea th...

              Featured in The New York Sun – DeSantis and Trump Go to War Over ‘Woke’ – Dean Karayanis February 27, 2017 – This week, our time machine turns Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle. We’re pedaling our way to the end of Black History Month, with a last stop on the basketball courts just off the coast of Massachusetts. Cultural critic and...

February 20, 2017 – This week, we mark Presidents Day by putting some serious years and miles on the old DeLorean, starting with a visit to the Tidewater region of Virginia in the mid 1700’s, and ending over 200 years later across the ocean in Hawaii. In between, we’ll make a bunch of stops in Ohio, a handful in New York, and others scattered across the nation. Our guide on this...

February 13, 2016 – This week’s episode falls on the day we observe Lincoln’s birthday, so our time machine travels back to the final days of the American Civil War, as Abraham Lincoln turns his weary eyes forward to ending the rebellion and pushing for his vision of a new, reunited United States. The Great Emancipator does so by leaving the White House for his longest break sinc...

February 6, 2017 – This week, in honor of Black History Month, our time machine travels back in time to meet a forgotten American hero in the fight for equality — a hero, with a bicycle. You may never have heard of Marshall “Major” Taylor, but this son of an Indiana Civil War veteran was the most popular athlete in America and heralded throughout the world, back at the heig...

January 30, 2017 – This week, we mark the anniversary of the first Baseball Hall of Fame class on January 29, 1936. In that year, Ty Cobb earned 222 ballots, just four votes short of a unanimous decision, so the date gave us a chance to revisit one of our earliest interviews, and a book we cited often as a journalistic high water mark for history. Joining us again to chat about the unfairly...

January 23, 2017 –  This week, our time machine turns on the four-wheel drive, as we hike into Allegheny National Forest , hunting for history. Established in 1923, the forest covers over half a million acres of the northwestern Pennsylvania foothills, and offers us the chance to experience the same sights, sounds and wildlife, as our forebears stretching back to the dawn of civilization. Jo...

January 16, 2017 – This week, our time machine travels back to one of the past’s darkest corners, to meet Victor Capesius. Before the war, he was a friendly neighborhood druggist in Romania. But as World War Two progressed, this ethnic German rose from anonymity, to infamy, standing at the side of Dr. Josef Mengele, The Angel of Death. Patricia Posner brings us the true tale of this Na...

January 9, 2017 – This week, our time machine whisks us back the Pan-American Exposition, a Gilded Age world’s fair powered by the newly harnessed power of electricity. “The Pan” covered 350 acres near Niagara Falls, and heralded the wonders of the 20th Century. But it also featured lingering stereotypes of a pre-flight world, and the tragic assassination of President Willi...

January 2, 2017 – Hello, Happy New Year! This week, our time machine turns tower crane, as best-selling author and historian Hugh Howard introduces us to two men whose vision for building shaped the 20th Century. His book is, Architecture’s Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson . Conducting the interview is Thriller author and practicing architect Tom Grace , who previously...

December 21, 2016 – We’re uploading our Monday, December 26, 2016, episode a little bit ahead of schedule — call it an early Christmas gift. Our guest is Peter Lion, who brings us The American St. Nick: A True Story . It’s the unique tail of a World War Two G.I., who ended up playing a big role in tiny Luxembourg. In the lull between the Nazi withdrawal and the Battle of th...

December 19, 2016 – This week, our time machine swerves Into the Past Lane. Our guest is, Edward T. O’Donnell, host of the Into the Past Lane podcast and author of Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age . You may not know who Henry George is, but his ideas swirled around the campaign for president throughout the recent election, and his approa...

December 12, 2016 – This week, our time machine goes looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike, and finds it at the birthplace of Ben Franklin, the Constitution, and cheesesteaks. We previously visited the City of Brotherly Love for our interview at McGillin’s Olde Ale House est. 1860 and Dr. Mütter’s Marvels , with side trips to check out the Paoli Battlefield and to meet S...

              Featured in The New York Sun – Americans, Who Walked on the Moon, Cower in the Face of an Orange Sky – Dean Karayanis December 5, 2016 – In this episode we meet 103-year-old Lt. Jim Downing, the second-oldest survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack, who will speak at the 75th commemoration in Hawaii on December 7th, 2016 . Jim not only...

November 28, 2016 – This week, our time machine touches down during Adolf Hitler’s reign in Germany, to answer a big question: How? How did this failed Austrian painter — a little-noticed corporal in the Great War — persuade the German people in droves to follow him into the abyss of total war? The usual answers are charisma and a ruthless stamping out of domestic dissent....

November 21, 2016 – The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, a precursor to our own First Amendment protections of religious liberty. The Spaldeen we discussed in Geoff Griffin’s Brooklyn Bat Boy: A Story of the 1947 Season that Changed Baseball Forever . This week, New York Times Urban Affairs Correspondent Sam Roberts puts some serious miles on our Time Machine, and fills its trunk with th...

November 14, 2016 – This week, our time machine may sound like it’s taking a sideways journey into the fictional world of Harper Lee’s iconic book, To Kill a Mockingbird . We touch down in 1930’s Alabama, and find a small town rocked when a black man is charged with raping a white woman. Only one local lawyer dares to defend the accused. That man was Foster Beck, and his so...

November 7, 2016 – This week, we bring you our first book in a graphic format, and our first guest time-traveling with us from France. Marcelino Truong is author and illustrator of Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63 . This graphic memoir shows us America’s early involvement in the Vietnam War, through the eyes of young Marcelino, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French-bo...

October 31, 2016 – This week, is Halloween, so we’re piling into the Munsters Car, cranking up the Dark Shadows music , and talking about two books that would fit neatly Morticia Addams’ nightstand. Our guest is genealogist and author Kathleen Shanahan Maca, who brings us Galveston’s Broadway Cemeteries, and Ghosts of Galveston. One of the oldest cities in Texas, Galveston...

October 24, 2016 – This week, with an eye on the upcoming U.S. presidential election, our time machine visits the childhood of the 43 bouncing baby boys who’ve served in the Oval Office — which, yes, means changing Grover Cleveland’s diaper on two, non-consecutive occasions. Dr. Harold I. Gullan brings us, Cradles of Power: The Mothers and Fathers of the American Presidents...