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Moses Jacob Ezekiel may be a 19th-century sculptor who’s been largely forgotten, but his work hasn’t been. A member of the Jewish faith who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Ezekiel is described as a complex figure. Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, examines some of that complexity in her book, Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor...

David Obst wants to end America’s love affair with the car. Saving Ourselves from Big Car defines “Big Car” as that complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench auto dependence. Author David Obst (pronounced “oops-t”), the former literary agent for Woodward and Bernstein, is still on the case. Instead of Watergate, he’s exposing h...

When it comes to World War II, you often hear about "the arsenal of democracy," a characterization of U.S. factories that produced all the food, medical supplies, tanks, planes, and tractors that helped win the war. In Launching Liberty , Doug Most writes about the U.S. effort required to build the ships needed to transport those goods overseas. The Liberty Ships were 440-foot cargo ship...

If draining the swamp strikes you as a good idea, you're not listening to Clare Howard and David Zalaznik. The pair, former journalists with the Peoria Journal Star , have just written their second book extolling the benefits of wetlands. Their first, In the Spirit of Wetlands (2022), captured the beauty and importance of wetlands in Illinois. This time, Wisdom of the Marsh (Syracuse Universi...

Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country. The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry. Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia , a wartime...

Tiffany Jenkins takes a look at privacy in her new book, Strangers and Intimates . As Jenkins points out, the whole concept of privacy is a relatively recent development. She points to an article published in 1890 by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who finished one-two in their graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1875. Brandeis went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. The two legal sc...

T. Lindsay Baker’s Eating Up Route 66 is not your typical Mother Road guidebook. It’s a history—with business notes, photographs, and recipes. Baker, a retired history professor from Texas has written plenty about the American West. Twelve years of research went into his latest effort, and not just in libraries and museums. An antique-car enthusiast, Baker traveled the road in a 1930 Ford station...

If you haven’t read an oral history before, it’s like flashing through comments that sometimes follow an online article. Only with a difference: you don’t see those back-and-forth arguments that always seem to break out among those commenting. For Garrett Graff, it’s his third oral history effort. After 9-11 ( The Only Plane in the Sky ) and D-Day ( When the Sea Came Alive ), this time it’s the cr...

When you get through reading America America by Greg Grandin, a Yale University history professor, you have to wonder what might have been when it comes to U.S. policies regarding Latin America over the years. Grandin figures that Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes in Latin American countries between 1961 and 1969. He goes into great detail outlining U.S. involvement in countries like Cuba...

Liza Tully’s previous literary effort was a grim thriller set in Siberia. “It was a suspense novel, but I realized it was very dark,” she said. The author, who wrote Finding Katarina M under the pseudonym Elisabeth Elo, decided to follow that with something a little lighter. The result? The feel-good mystery, The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant . Her latest effort teams Aubr...

Michael Doyle's Nightmare in the Pacific is a book about an aspect of World War II you probably haven’t heard before: the saga of Artie Shaw, the big-band leader who took his group on a whirlwind tour of the Pacific in 1942-1943. What makes this story so interesting are the characters involved: Artie Shaw, himself, the motley group of band members that Shaw recruited himself, as well as figur...

A new book looks at the short history of the freedom of choice. Some of us have more choices than we’ve ever had—from what to buy and where to live and whom to love, even what to believe--but how did that come about? That’s the basis of the book Sophia Rosenfeld has written, called The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life . Rosenfeld said she wanted to find those times when the early...

China is sometimes described as the forgotten theater of war during World War II. But it’s unlikely that the Chinese people have forgotten their eight-year war with Japan, a ferocious engagement that began four years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's estimated that as many as 20 million Chinese died in the war. In Fallen Tiger s, Daniel Jackson recounts U.S. involvement in China, where...

Play This Book Loud is the literary equivalent of a trip to the record store, that enchanting experience of searching for something new from something old.  Joe Bonomo (pronounced Bo-know-mo, not the Turkish Taffy), an English professor at Northern Illinois University, starts his book that way, recalling the days of the coronavirus when he was offered hand sanitizer and plastic gloves at Green Tan...

McKeesport, Pa. has been through a lot in recent decades. Andrew Conte tells the story in his book, Death of the Daily News . The town, located 20 miles from Pittsburgh, once manufactured about 70 percent of all steel tubing used in the United States, earning the moniker of “Tube City.” Like other towns in southwestern Pennsylvania, McKeesport fell on hard times in the 1970s and 1980s as foreign s...

Robert Ingersoll lived in Peoria from 1857 to 1877. He was hailed as the greatest orator of his time, the latter half of the 19th century.  While Ingersoll attracted huge crowds, he had plenty of critics who called him “the Great Infidel” because of his criticism of organized religion. “Religion can make a good man somewhat better,” Ingersoll mused, “but usually it only makes bad men worse.” While...

Anti-Communist feelings reached a fever pitch in the United States following World War II. The big war was won, but the Cold War was on. Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter, addresses this point in his fourth book , Red Scare , where he takes you back to that postwar period, where, as author Stacy Schiff put it in one of the blurbs on the book’s back cover, “a group of hardened conservatives los...

World War II is a never-ending source of history. Decades after the conflict’s conclusion, research and examination continue as we seek to understand how we got to where we are today. In Building Bridges , Douglas Bristol examines how the military treated Black Americans before, during, and after the national emergency that WWII represented.  Initially, Black Americans weren’t accepted into the se...

Shannon Monaghan is a military historian whose last book, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men , offered an account of select British special operations unit members who were so important during World War II. This time around, Monaghan covers a more recent conflict, one that’s still going on: the war between Ukraine and Russia. In To Die With Such Men (Hurst & Co.), the reader is taken behind the...

World War II may have ended 80 years ago, but it’s still happening for Jenny Chan, a 2012 University of Illinois graduate. Chan is president and founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a non-profit based in San Francisco that churns out history regarding World War II’s Pacific front. In addition to publishing 29 books by a wide variety of authors that document human rights abuses, military battle...

Craig Pittman is one writer who doesn’t have to spend a lot of time digging up story ideas. As a 30-year veteran of the Tampa Bay Times and now a reporter for the Florida Phoenix , Pittman gets tips online or by phone as well as having dozens of reliable sources who will alert him to the latest goings-on in his home state of Florida. Florida has been Pittman’s beat for decades. “Nine hundred peopl...

Rob Christensen’s new book, Southern News, Southern Politics (University of North Carolina Press), is more than the history of the newspaper, the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., described at one point by a politician as “pretty damn fearless.” It’s a profile of the Daniels family, starting with Josephus Daniels in 1895, whose family’s ownership of the paper spanned most of the 20th century....

When Christy Mathewson burst upon the scene with the New York Giants in 1900, baseball had a less-than-perfect image. It was a rowdy game played by roughnecks known for their consumption of alcohol and chewing tobacco, said Alan Gaff, author of Baseball’s First Superstar . Mathewson’s good looks and his quiet, easy-going manner made him a hit with the ladies, Gaff said. “Women came to baseball gam...

True crime accounts are all the rage these days. But Tom Chorneau didn’t want to just add another cold case to the national docket. Instead, the unsolved murder of Myrtle Cook in 1925 is related to political forces flowing through the state of Iowa at the time, with Chorneau, a former reporter, explaining the state’s near-constant battle over temperance. During the first half-century of statehood,...

How did you learn about the American West? Books came first. Reading material included notorious dime novels that made legends of Buffalo Bill and Jesse James. Newspapers and magazines, meanwhile, focused on the American West in the 19th century as railways turned the frontier into an attraction for tourists who watched herds of buffalo disappearing while Native Americans were being herded onto re...