History Author Show

March 11, 2019 - Our time machine travels back to the American Civil War for a look at the toll paid by civilians and the countryside trampled under the boots, hooves and wagon wheels of rampaging armies. We're all familiar with the devastation wrought on soldiers, but after a century-and-a-half, those sacrifices have become romanticized -- and battlefields once soaked with blood and littered with corpses, are now pristine national parks.

Here to catalog the loss of ordinary citizens who didn't wear Confederate butternut or Union blue, is Dr. Joan Cashin, noted historian and author of the first full environmental history of the conflict. It's titled War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War. Joan earned a B.A. from The American University and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Today, she is a Professor of History at the Ohio State University in addition to her duties as editor of Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old South.

Her previous books include A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier and First lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis's Civil War. She also edited the book War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era. You can follow our guest on Twitter @JoanECashin or check out her bio page at the Ohio State University.

February 25, 2019 - We welcome a familiar face back into the passenger seat of our time machine. It's Tom Clavin, who we last chatted with about the book, Valley Forge, he co-authored with Bob Drury. Tom returns solo with the definitive true story of James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok.

A soldier in the Civil War, spy for the Union, scout, lawman, gunfighter, gambler, showman, actor, and romantic, he crossed paths with General Custer, befriended the boy who grew up into Buffalo Bill Cody, and locked horns with Calamity Jane -- which may surprise those who've grown up with Hollywood portrayals of the pair as lovers.

Wild Bill's life story is also peppered with Ben Thompson, Kit Carson, and a slew of too-slow gamblers and gunmen looking to beat the fastest gun in the West and steal the title themselves. We can enjoy all these stories in Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier's First Gunfighter. Tom Clavin is the author or coauthor of sixteen books, including the #1 best-seller Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West.

You can visit our guest at TomClavin.com.

February 11, 2019 - We welcome one of our favorite authors back into our time machine. It's Neal Bascomb. We last caught up with him in Nazi-occupied Norway for the bone-chilling tale of The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler's Atomic Bomb. Neal's latest book is The Escape Artists: A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War.

It's the tale of Allied airmen set out to defeat Kaiser Wilhelm's dreaded prisoner of war camp, Holzminden, and outwit its infamous commandant, Karl Niemeyer who swore that no one would get out alive. Dipping into memoirs and letters seen for the first time here, Neal Bascomb brings this forgotten story to life, in a rare bit of encouraging news for the home front during the darkness of the Great War.

It's a legacy of innovation that not only taught captured allies escape in far greater numbers when World War 2 arrived, but that informs how we prepare military personnel for capture to this day.

Visit our guest at NealBascomb.com, follow him @NealBascomb on Twitter, or like him on Facebook at Neal R. Bascomb.

January 28, 2019 - Mark Braude, who we chatted with previously about his book: Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle, brings us the tale of a legendary military leader who's almost too big for the word legend. Napoleon Bonaparte of France. We meet the titan of France not at the peak of his power, but at his low-point: Cast out, kicked off the throne, and walking among the citizens of a tiny island as one of them.

The book is The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Exile to Escape. Mark Braude is a National Endowment for the Humanities 2017-2018 Public Scholar and former lecturer of history at Stanford University, having earned a Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Southern California, as well as a Masters in French Studies from our own New York University.

Visit him at MarkBraude.com.

January 24, 2019 - Our time machine transports us back to the Savannah, Georgia, of 1858, where we'll meet Charles Lamar. Ignoring the law of the United States, Lamar organizes the transportation of hundreds of Africans aboard the yacht Wanderer. This criminal act strikes a hammer blow on the fault lines of America society, marking the first importation of human beings as slaves in four decades. Piecing together the true story with a treasure trove of newly discovered documents is Jim Jordan who brings us The Slave-Trader's Letter-Book: Charles Lamar, the Wanderer, and Other Tales of the African Slave Trade.

Jim Jordan researches and writes about the colonial, antebellum, and Civil War South. He's the author of the novel Savannah Grey: A Tale of Antebellum Georgia, and its sequel, Penny Savannah: A Tale of Civil War Georgia. In 2018, he earned the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Counsel of the University System of Georgia's Award for Excellence in Documenting Georgia's History.

Visit him at JimJordanAuthor.com.

If you enjoy Civil War diaries that shed new light on the conflict, check out these interviews in our archives:

Theodore P. Savas -- The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865.

Paula Tarnapol Whitaker -- A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur’s Struggle for Purpose

Gene Barr -- A Civil War Captain and His Lady: Love, Courtship, and Combat from Fort Donelson through the Vicksburg Campaign

December 31, 2018 - Our time machine travels back to a two-mile sliver of land in New York City's East River. Since 1971, it has been known as Roosevelt Island. But the Victorians knew it as Blackwell's Island, a dreaded name synonymous with illness, insanity, poverty, prisons and purgatory. You could suffer there for a variety of crimes, or for things as simple as being a woman walking alone late at night, an immigrant who didn't speak English, or someone too poor to make bail.

Charles Dickens described the place as "a lounging, listless madhouse."

Joining us to tell the true story of those who preceded us in the great story of Gotham is Stacy Horn. She brings us, Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York. Stacy's book is the first contemporary investigative account of Blackwell's, which she delivers by digging into the records of reformers, reporters and journalists like the intrepid Nellie Bly.

Stacy Horn is the author of five nonfiction books, including Imperfect Harmony. She's the founder of the social network Echo and also works at the ASPCA, listing among her credentials "cat butler." Find her at StacyHorn.com or @StacyHorn on Twitter.

December 17, 2018 -Our time machine welcomes aboard Winston Groom, acclaimed author of Forrest Gump, for a seat at the conference table with the Big Three. The book is The Allies: Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II. It's a fresh look at the interactions between these very different men as they navigated the fight against Hitler and the inevitable stresses of a culture clash between democracy, empire, and dictatorship.

Winston Groom is a master storyteller, and it's with that eye he approaches The Allies. Born in the nation's capital and raised in Alabama, he is also a Vietnam veteran and former journalist. His novels include Shrouds of Glory, Better Times Than These and As Summers Die, as well as Forrest Gump and its sequel, Gump & Co. His non-fiction work includes Conversations with the Enemy: The Story of PFC Robert Garwood, which earned a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.

December 3, 2018 - In this episode, our time machine turns Zamboni and hits the ice for the greatest fanned shot in sports marketing history, when the New York Islanders -- a decade removed from their four-in-a-row Stanley Cup dynasty of the early '80s -- chose a new mascot that resembled nothing so much as frozen food pitchman The Gorton's Fisherman.

Joining us to do color commentary is our friend Nicholas Hirshon who brings us We Want Fish Sticks: The Bizarre and Infamous Rebranding of the New York Islanders. We last heard from Nick when he invited me to conduct a live interview at the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Our guest that day was Ephemeral New York's Esther Crain who chatted with us about her book, The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910.

Nick Hirshon is assistant professor of communication at William Paterson University and a former reporter for the New York Daily News. You've seen his work in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Hockey News. His previous books are Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum -- the arena where the Islanders built that dynasty -- and Forest Hills, about his Long Island hometown, with a forward by actor Ray Romano.

Visit him online at NickHirshon.com, @NickHirshon on Twitter and Instagram, or Facebook.com/NHirshon. You meet Nick and talk hockey at these author events...

November 19, 2018 - Our time machine hauls out the big, bulky Speed Graphic camera and watches the ultimate watcher of watchers in 1930s, '40s and '50s New York City: Arthur Fellig. Helping haul the tripod around to various crime scenes and disasters is Christopher Bonanos who brings us Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous. Even if you don’t know the name, you've seen his gritty images from the 1930s through '50s.

It's an incredible body of work produced by a photographer who hammed up claims of an uncanny ability to show up at a crime scene just as the cops did -- a human Ouija board.

Christopher Bonanos is city editor at New York magazine where he covers arts and culture and urban affairs. His previous book is Instant: The Story of Polaroid. Follow him on Twitter @HeyBonanos and @PolaroidLand on Instagram.

November 5, 2018 - Our time machine soars over the Great War's trenches -- and gets down and dirty on ground level -- through the eyes of a pilot in the very early days of U.S. air power. Our guide on this journey is Patrick Gregory, co-author of An American on the Western Front: The First World War Letters of Arthur Clifford Kimber 1917-18.

Written along with his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Nurser (Kimber's niece), Patrick Gregory has produced a true labor of love, bringing to life the only Great War record of its scope from the period of America's involvement. In addition to having a family friend in former President Theodore Roosevelt, Lt. Kimber also had the distinction of carrying the first official U.S. flag to the nation's European allies, adding rich details to the story of one doughboy among so many.

Patrick spent most of his career as a journalist at the BBC, working for 20 years at Westminster and helmed a number of political and history documentaries, as well as working in journalistic democracy-strengthening initiatives in the Asia-Pacific area.

Visit him online at AmericanOnTheWesternFront.com or @AmericanOnTheWF on Twitter.