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by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch Belmont, New HampshireSeptember 1960 New York Daily News Archive/New York Daily News via Getty Images Richard Pavlick of Belmont, New Hampshire, really cares about flags. American flags, that is. When they’re hung, where they’re displayed, and how they’re raised and lowered. Once, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to march […]
The Duchess of Windsor. Attributed to Angela Laviosa. Courtesy of Wikipedia. In Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson, New York Times bestselling author Paul French examines a controversial and revealing period in the early life of the legendary Wallis, Duchess of Windsor–her one year in China. Read on […]
Four Against the West by Joe Pappalardo is a thrilling true saga of legendary Texas figure Judge Roy Bean and his brothers―and their violent adventures in Wild West America. Read on for a chapter excerpt from Four Against the West that focuses on the legendary American saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Texas, Phantley Roy […]
Illustration of Socrates, in a basket, based on Aristophanes’s The Clouds. Was Socrates a real person? is one of the most googled questions about perhaps the most important philosopher in history. Socrates’s existence as a historical figure is, however, universally accepted by scholars. He was executed in 399 BCE, aged over seventy, so it’s estimated […]
Commander Winfield Scott Schley (4th from left) and men who rescued Greely Expedition survivors (Public domain, Wikimedia Images) In 1881, Cdr. Winfield Scott Schley was at the Charlestown Navy Yard reading a newspaper article about the US Army Signal Corps’ ambitious Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. He considered it unusual— even foolhardy—that the US Navy wasn’t […]
William A. Pinkerton with railroad special agents Pat Connell (left) and Sam Finley (right) from the Library of Congress. Even if you’ve only watched a handful of “Wild West” films or TV shows, you’ve probably encountered the Pinkertons. These hired guns are often mistaken for police, but they rarely carry official badges. Instead, Pinkerton detectives […]
Exclusive picture of President Jimmy Carter in Stuart E. Eizenstat’s biography, President Carter. Far more complex, both politically and technically, was a divisive debate over whether to build the B-1 bomber, which presents a good lesson in how difficult it is, even for a president with a military background like Carter’s, to balance the appetites […]
Florence Kelley’s father, William, taught his daughter to read in 1866 using books that chronicled child labor. When she was seven, he had her studying “a terrible little book with woodcuts of children no older than myself, balancing with their arms heavy loads of wet clay on their heads, in brickyards.” And she didn’t just […]