History Author Show

July 29, 2019 - What do you get when two icons of the Industrial Revolution pile into a Model T and speed off to look for America? A one-of-a kind road-trip, peppered with Jazz Age characters like Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, President Calvin Coolidge, and hardscrabble fiddler Jep Bisbee. Gassing us up for this journey is Jeff Guinn who brings us The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip.

Then as now, time spent stuck in a car brought frayed nerves and zany mishaps -- literally bumps in the road -- but there's no better way to get the cut of someone's jib.  Jeff Guinn is an award-winning former investigative journalist and the bestselling author of numerous books. They include Go Down Together: The True Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, and, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral

Find more about our guest at his Simon & Schuster author page or toss him a like on Facebook.

The New York Sun - This Presidents Day, Let Us Take Inspiration From Our Leaders’ Hardships - Dean Karayanis

July 15, 2019 -  Meet the "indispensable man" of the American Revolution, when he was just a hot-headed 22-year-old, growing into the shoes that laid down the footsteps for all future presidents to follow. Peter Stark brings the first face on Mount Rushmore to live in Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America's Founding Father. Peter Stark is an adventure writer and historian. He's a correspondent for Outside magazine, and you've seen his work in places like Smithsonian, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Men's Journal.

Peter Stark's His previous book, Astoria, was a finalist for a PEN USA literary award. You can find our guest at PeterStarkAuthor.com, @StarkAdventurer on Twitter, Facebook.com/PeterStarkAuthor, and @PeterStark_Adventure_Historian on Instagram.

If you're in the New York City area on July 31, 2019, Peter will appear at 7pm, as part of the New-York Historical Society's "Non-Fiction at the Bryant Park Reading Room" summer series. Join him there!

July 1, 2019 - Our time machine travels back to the American Revolution, where we'll meet Nathaniel Marten, a young Post Rider tasked with the solemn duty of gathering signatures for the Declaration of Independence. Our guide on this journey is Karen A. Chase, who brings us Carrying Independence: A Founding Documents Novel.

Carrying Independence has already garnered accolades, securing second place in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Unpublished Novel Competition, and rolled its way into the semis at the Screencraft Cinematic Book competition. Her first effort, Bonjour 40: A Paris Travel Log, also met with critical acclaim, earning seven independent publishing awards.

Visit our guest at KarenAChase.com, or on social media via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  Today, she lives in historic Virginia. But Karen A. Chase was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, and has a couple of ancestors who fought in the War of Independence -- which gained her membership in the National Society of that Daughters of the American Revolution.

Jun 17, 2019 - We welcome a familiar passenger back our time machine. It's Dr. Paul Kahan, who we last chatted with about his book Amiable Scoundrel: Simon Cameron, Lincoln's Scandalous Secretary of War. Prior to that, he entertained and enlightened us with The Bank War: Andrew Jackson, Nicholas Biddle, and the Fight for American Finance. We put together a video trailer for that book, to share some of the illustrations and political cartoons of the time.

Dr. Kahan holds a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Temple University, an M.A. in Modern American History & Literature, and B.A.s in history and English. He’s also the author of two books on Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, as well as The Homestead Strike: Labor, Violence, and American History Critical Moments in American Industry . You can learn more about today's guest at PaulKahan.com, or follow him on Twitter @Paul_Kahan.

June 3, 2019 - We find ourselves at the bleeding borders of Hitler's Third Reich, nearing the peak of its power in Europe, with Andrew Nagorski, author of 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War. We watch as Hitler's miscalculations, deteriorating mental state, and policy of terror, give the United Kingdom powerful new allies in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. But these moves didn't just sealed National Socialism's fate. They sowed the seeds of the postwar shattering of the Big Three's alliance that led to the 50-year Cold War chill.

Andrew Nagorski gives us a fuller picture of these key 12 months of the 20th Century, employing his skills as a veteran author, interviewer, and foreign correspondent. We last chatted with him about his book, The Nazi Hunters, which you can find in our archives at HistoryAuthor.com, iTunes, our iHeartRadio channel, GooglePlay, or wherever you're listening now.

Visit AndrewNagorski.com or follow @AndrewNagorski on Twitter for more on these books and other, including, Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power.

May 20, 2019 - Our time machine travels back to the Northern Ontario, Canada of 1934, to witness a unique and risky series of births. Through the eyes of fictional midwife Emma Trimpany, we'll meet the Dionne family. They're humble farmers eking a living out of the land, when they're blessed with not one but five bundles of joy -- the first identical quintuplets to survive birth.

But the story turned dark when the Canadian government separated the infants from their parents and put them on display, as the center-ring act of a bizarre, moneymaking circus. Our guide on this journey is Shelley Wood, author of her debut novel, The Quintland Sisters. Shelley Wood's work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Room, The Antigonish Review, Bath Flash Fiction, and The Globe and Mail. She earned the Frank McCourt prize for creative nonfiction, Freefall Magazine’s short prose contest and Causeway Lit’s creative nonfiction prize.

Visit our guest at ShelleyWood.ca, follow her @ShelleyWood2 on Twitter, or toss her a like at Facebook.com/ShelleyWoodAuthor.

May 6, 2019 - Our time machine travels back to the nuclear nightmare at the Soviet Union's V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station -- as destined to fail, as the political system of its namesake. On April 26, 1986, Reactor No. 4 exploded, and in the 30 years since, a name that few in the world could have placed, has become synonymous with radioactive Armageddon. What really happened?

Communist propaganda long obscured the story of the accident behind the Iron Curtain. Here with his Geiger counter to tally the cost and causes is Adam Higginbotham, who brings us, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and recently declassified archives, Higginbotham has written the true history at last in a book that reads like a thriller.

You've seen our guest's work in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, and Smithsonian. Find him online at AdamHigginbotham.com or @HigginbothamA on Twitter.

April 22, 2019 - We welcome a familiar face back into our time machine, and travel back to a parched New York City, suffering from a drought that began in a sweltering 1949, and stretched into 1950 with no end in sight. Desperate for rain, Mayor William O’Dwyer hired Dr. Wallace E. Howell, a handsome, 35-year-old meteorologist out of Harvard who approached weather modification as a cool-headed scientist, not a Music Man-style huckster.

We meet this headline-making man with his head literally in the clouds in Howell's Storm: New York City's Official Rainmaker and the 1950 Drought, by author Jim Leeke. Jim is a contributor to the Society for American Baseball Research Baseball Biography Project, as well as the writer or editor of several books on U.S. and military history.

We chatted previously with Jim about his books, Nine Innings for the King: The Day Wartime London Stopped for Baseball, July 4, 1918, and, From the Dugouts to the Trenches: Baseball During the Great War, as well as his Civil War novel for young adults, Matty Boy. A string of appearances, which makes Jim our first four-peat guest.

Find Jim on Twitter @JimLeeke.

April 8, 2019 - Our time machine welcomes aboard book lovers live at the Meet the Author Series presented by Mayda Bosco at the Closter Public Library in New Jersey. Together, we travel back to the Brooklyn and Massachusetts of the pre- and post-World War 2 era, for a tale of sibling strife that's as old as Cain and Abel. This is the engaging, absorbing story of two very different sisters, Ruth and Millie Kaplan. Raised in Brooklyn, each carries a hope chest full of hurt and secrets from their childhood.

Although they try their best to escape it, they're forced together again as adults at the Springfield Armory, where the Arsenal of Democracy gears up to support the war effort. Many years have passed, but marriages, husbands, and even kids of their own can't stop them from sliding right back into the sandbox of roles forged in childhood.

Weaving this tale of hurt feelings, estrangement, and siblings who are just running wildly different emotional operating systems, is Lynda Cohen Loigman, author of The Wartime Sisters: A Novel. It's the sophomore offering after her critically acclaimed debut The Two-Family House, a 2016 nominee for the Goodreads Choice Awards in Historical Fiction.

Visit our guest LyndaCohenLoigman.com, follow her @LyndaLoigman on Twitter or LLoigman on Instagram, and toss a like to her author Facebook page.

March 25, 2019 - In this episode, our time machine travels back to post-World War 2 Israel. When we arrive, we'll follow its return to statehood -- beset by enemies on three sides and their back against the sea on the fourth -- through the eyes of two fictional brothers and the woman they love. Our guide on this journey is Martin Fletcher who brings us Promised Land: A Novel of Israel.

In it, we meet characters shaped in very different ways by the darkness of the Holocaust. Peter protects Israel as an agent for the Mossad, his kid brother Arie builds it as a businessman -- and then there's Tamara, an alluring Jewish refugee from Egypt, seeking a new life in the reborn nation. The love triangle of these three vivid characters spans the first twenty years of Israel's modern existence, as war, intrigues and jealousy threaten to tear their lives -- and the struggling nation -- apart.

You've seen Martin Fletcher's work as NBC News Bureau Chief in Tel Aviv and he's earned recognition with the National Jewish Book Award, a Columbia University DuPont Award, several Overseas Press Club Awards, and five Emmys. His books include The War Reporter, Jacob's Oath, and Walking Israel. His latest novel is the first in a trilogy, each covering two decades, bringing readers up to the president day.

Visit our guest at MartinFletcher.net or toss him a like at Facebook.com/MartinFletcherFPage.