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December 18, 2015 – Today, author Barry Strauss explores the political, military, and social motivations behind history’s most famous murder. Mr. Strauss is professor of history and classics at Cornell University, and a leading expert on ancient military history. Visit him @BarryStrauss on Twitter or at BarryStrauss.com. And don’t miss our full interview on his book, The Death of Caesar, when we upload it on December 21, ...
December 14, 2015 – Ma and Pa McGillin opened the door to their home in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency and just after the Liberty Bell cracked. As the decades passed, their tavern endured, tucked away in an alley, as if hiding from old Father Time. Originally called The Bell in Hand, McGillin’s has survived wars, economic panics, challenges from upstart chain restaurants and <shudder> Prohibition. Vis...
December 11, 2015 – It’s History in Five Friday, presented by Simon & Schuster — kicking off your modern weekend, with people from the past. Today, author Dianne Hales reveals the woman immortalized by the great master, Leonardo Da Vinci. Everybody remembers Mona Lisa’s smile, and has seen her face, but no one knew her full story — until now. You can find Dianne Hales on Twitter @DMHales, at Facebook.com/MonaLisaALife...
December 7, 2015 – On this Pearl Harbor Day, we mark the Japanese attack on Hawaii, and travel back 75 years to meet Aarol W. “Bud” Irish in the European Theater where he fought the Nazis. On the Memorial Day after Bud passed away in 2006, his daughter Teresa opened her father’s mysterious old Army trunk and found stacks and stacks of letters from the front. Through these, she met her father as a young man, and shared him with ...
November 30, 2015 – Historian of First Ladies Betty Boyd Caroli introduces us to the diminutive, quiet woman who stood behind one of the most controversial presidents of the 20th Century through some of America’s most difficult years. The book is Lady Bird & Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage that Made a President. But Clauda “Lady Bird” Johnson was more than just the flower lady. She was a shrewd busi...
November 27, 2015 – It’s History in Five Friday, presented by Simon & Schuster. For the day after Thanksgiving, we’re joined by historian of first ladies Betty Boyd Caroli, whose previous books include The Roosevelt Women: A Portrait In Five Generations, and The First Ladies: From Martha Washington to Michelle Obama. Today, she introduces us to a woman who was at the center of public life for half a century, and yet who few...
November 23, 2015 – The Old ’76 House in Tappan, New York, is a National Landmark, one where you can eat a meal fit for overthrowing a king. The building itself predates the American Revolution by over a century, and served an active role in the fight for independence. Every major figure including General George Washington spent time at this great American tavern. In 1780, it even served as a make-shift prison for Major J...
November 20, 2015 – It’s History in Five Friday, presented by Simon & Schuster. Today, author Clint Hill shares his eyewitness account of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination fifty-two years ago on November 22, 1963. Mr. Hill was the Secret Service agent assigned to protect Mrs. Kennedy that day, and the man seen leaping onto the back of the car after the fatal shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. His latest book is titled,...
November 16, 2015 – Today, we travel back 75 years to a dark period of the Second World War. But the battlefield where liberty and tyranny clash isn’t Midway or Normandy Beach. It’s the hallowed halls of the United States Supreme Court. Our guide into this world is Kermit Roosevelt. His novel is Allegiance, a legal thriller built around the internment of Americans with Japanese ancestry — 62% of them American ...
November 13, 2015 – Today we’re going to hear from writer/journalist Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, and the acclaimed biography: Steve Jobs. The Innovators includes names like Grace Hopper, Lord Byron’s daughter, Bletchley Park’s Alan Turing, ENIAC, John Mauchly, J. Presper ...
November 9, 2015 – In honor of Veterans Day and Remembrance Day on November 11th, Bristol writer Jacqueline Wadsworth takes us back to “the war to end all wars” in Letters from the Trenches: The First World War by Those Who Were There. We hear from soldiers on the Western Front, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Italy, Northern Russia — and, of course, from the women and children suffering through the Great War back hom...
November 2, 2015 – For our first historical fiction author, we’re pleased to introduce Jennifer Kincheloe’s debut novel: The Secret Life of Anna Blanc. Join us in 1907 Los Angeles, where Anna Blanc chafes under the thumb of her controlling father and yearns for a life of crime — solving them that is. Inspired by the wild Santa Anna winds, Anna joins a suffragette protest, lies to everyone in her life, and take...
October 29, 2015 – In this special, Halloween episode, we’re traveling back to the days before the American Civil War, when doctors would take their scalpels to fully awake patients — the pre-microbial era when the causes of common diseases remained a mystery, and when oil lamps and flammable clothing combined to engulf a staggering number of people in flames. This, was the age of monsters. Yes, monsters. Not costum...
October 26, 2015 – What if John Wilkes Booth’s gun had misfired? And what if we could blast off to a Mars colony founded by the Carthaginians, or head 250,000 years into the past when a race of giants dominate Africa? Writer and archaeologist Jordan Harbour, explores stories like these at the Twilight Histories podcast. And like a David Lynch film, things keep getting weirder. The Twilight Histories is a podcast, Jordan s...
October 23, 2015 – Today we’re going to hear from Harold Holzer, one of America’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln’s life and the politics of the Civil War era. His book is, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion. Mr. Holzer shows us an activist Lincoln through journalists who covered him from his start through to the night of his assassination — when one reporter ran to the box w...