History Author Show

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 approach to solving...

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 Simon Cameron, "Linc...

              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 witnessed his ship, USS West Virginia, go up in flame...

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. But here on the Histor...

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 the everyday ob...

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 son, Joseph Madison Beck, j...

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-born wife -- wh...

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 has suffered many tragedi...

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. There have been so ma...

October 17, 2016 - This week, our time machine travels back to 1965, where we'll meet Jonathan Daniels -- a white seminary student who answered Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s call to help with voter registration in Loundes County, Alabama. After the voting rights marches, Daniels remained to assist civil rights workers -- and gave his life saving black teenager Ruby Sales from a shotgun blast. Today...

October 10, 2016 - This week, our time machine returns to the days of the Revolutionary War, and views it through the eyes of Isabel and Curzon, two of the African-American children held in slavery. Laurie Halse Anderson's trilogy, The Seeds of America, includes the books Chains, Forge, and the just-released blistering conclusion, Ashes. Laura Halse Anderson is a New York Times-bestselling author...

October 3, 2016 - This week, our time machine has a familiar face in the passenger seat. It's Paul Kahan, who joined us previously to discuss The Bank War: Andrew Jackson, Nicholas Biddle, and the Fight for American Finance. You can catch that interview at History Author.com or wherever you're listening now, and you enjoy the video we produced illustrating the political and journalistic changes oc...

September 26, 2016 - This week, our time machine spins us back to Boer War in the twilight of the 19th Century, when the republics that preceded today's South Africa fought the British Empire over gold and diamonds. While there, we'll see a familiar face from World War Two forty years later. The name Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill invokes the balding, cigar-chomping, British bulldog who sta...

September 19, 2016 - This week, our time machine makes a return visit to 1870s, to check back in on Union Pacific Railroad tycoon Dr. Thomas C. Durant, and his children, William and Ella. We first met the Durants when we chatted about Sheila Myers' novel, Imaginary Brightness, as they had their comfortable lives in London shattered by a Gilded Age economic panic. Book 2, Castles in the Air, finds...

September 12, 2016 - It's important to actually walk the earth where a given historical event occurred. This week, we'll do just that at the Paoli Battlefield Historical Park & Paoli Memorial Grounds, just under an hour west of Philadelphia. Our guide is Jim Christ, vice president of the Paoli Battlefield Preservation Fund. The Battle of Paoli, also called "The Paoli Massacre," unfolded at mid...

September 5, 2016 - This week, our time machine turns team bus, as we head back not so far into history, to the late '80s and early '90s, when your humble host was on the football field -- at least at pregame and halftime -- for the Cresskill High School marching band, and as a member of Rutgers University's Marching Scarlet Knights: The Pride of New Jersey. Rutgers won the very first football gam...

August 29, 2016 - In this episode, our time machine sets sail in the aftermath of World War Two, on a mission to feed the hungry that endures to this day, through Heifer International -- those folks who help you give the gift of livestock. It's a storybook for kids called The Seagoing Cowboy, and it tells the story of the ships that once carried weapons and soldiers, turning to humanitarian cargo:...

Aug 22, 2016 - For this episode, our time machine takes us back to the aftermath of the First World War, where we'll visit a defeated member of the Central Powers that targets ethnic minorities for wholesale slaughter. It's not Nazi Germany, but Ottoman Turkey -- in the final chapter of their genocide against Greeks, Armenians and other Christians, that the nation denies to this day. Our guest, Lo...

August 15, 2016 - This week, we follow the journey of the men and women who -- in the aftermath of World War Two in Europe -- dedicated themselves to visiting justice upon Hitler's Henchmen. Veteran author and foreign correspondent Andrew Nagorski brings us these stories in The Nazi Hunters, stripping away the myths and caricatures of popular fiction. The book is also an implicit call to action, b...

August 8, 2016 - This week, our time machine whisks us back to meet the great master, Michelangelo: Sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer. He was also the original brooding artist, who for the first time connected the artist to the work, a link we consider essential today. Our guide is Miles J. Unger, here to explore what the great artist is whispering to us across the centuries with hi...

August 5, 2016 – Today, we’re going to hear from author, journalist and producer Denise Kiernan. Her latest book is, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. Kiernan is the author of several history books, including Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence, and Signing Their Rights Away: The...

August 3, 2016 - It’s Classical Wisdom Wednesday, presented by Classical Wisdom Weekly. For almost a year now, we've brought you ancient wisdom for modern minds, every Wednesday morning before your first cup of coffee. But today -- the History Author Show's 1st Anniversary, August 3, 2016 -- represents our last midweek installment. While Van Bryan will lend his voice to future episodes, he's focus...

August 1, 2016 - In this episode, our time machine takes us out to the ballgame, where we'll root, root, root for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The year is 1947, and Dem Bums just signed Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player in Major League History. Sitting next to us in the 50¢ grandstand seats, is Geoff Griffin, author of the children's book, Brooklyn Bat Boy: A Story of the 1947 Season tha...

July 29, 2016 - Today we’re going to hear from popular historian and frequent TV news guest, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Her latest book is, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. She previously touched on the extended Roosevelt family twenty years ago, writing No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front During World War II, for...

July 27, 2016 - It’s Classical Wisdom Wednesday, presented by Classical Wisdom Weekly- bringing ancient wisdom to modern minds, every Wednesday morning before your first cup of coffee. The subject of death has been a source of fascination, and unease, for philosophers and religious seekers for centuries. How exactly should we feel about our deaths? Should it be a source of concern? Should we fear...