History Author Show

January 15, 2018 - Our time machine travels back to the Union-occupied city of Alexandria, Virginia, to get an abolitionist woman's perspective during America's Civil War. Our guide on this journey is Paula Tarnapol Whitaker, author of A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur's Struggle for Purpose. Paula met up with us in Virginia at the Lyceum, Alexandria's History Museum, where we felt close to this woman ahead of her time.

In the fall of 1862, with the Civil War raging, 47-year-old Julia Wilbur said goodbye to the family farm near Rochester, New York, and boarded a train to the capital of a divided nation. An ardent abolitionist, Wilbur spent most of the next several years in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C.

Pushing back against the limitations women faced at the time, Julia Wilbur aided escaped slaves and hospitalized Union soldiers, later serving in the Freedman's bureau as African-Americans made their first steps to full citizenship. Based on diaries, letters, and other primary sources, A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time introduces us to a woman who threw herself into a changing society, and helped bend it in the direction of liberty.

You can find our guest online at PaulaWhitacre.com, @PTWhitacre on Twitter, or Facebook.com/PTWhitacre.

*According to our new schedule, our next episode will be on January 29th.

January 1, 2018 - Happy New Year, history lovers! To kick off 2018, we welcome thriller author Tom Grace to discuss the sixth novel in his series featuring ex-Navy SEAL Nolan Kilkenny: Undeniable. Tom's novels feature cutting-edge technology, and we discuss how DNA science is solving historical mysteries. Did Adolf Hitler have a son? Was Warren G. Harding our first black president?

What sinister uses will criminal minds cook up when editing DNA is as easy as editing a Word document? Ancestry.com is set to double their database to 12 million people in the New Year. Our trained genealogist can help you unlock the history written in your chromosomes at HistoryAuthor.com/Family-History.

Find Tom online at TomGrace.net, on Twitter @Tom_Grace, or like him as Facebook.com/AuthorTomGrace. All his novels are available in paperback from Regnery Fiction.

Tom has guest hosted on the History Author Show three times. Jeanne Walker Harvey: Maya Lin: Artist - Architect of Light and Lines. Hugh Howard: Architecture's Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson. Gerald Posner: God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican.

December 25, 2017 - This week, our time machine visits 1939, clicks on the radio, and listens to The Campbell Playhouse production of A Christmas Carol hosted by Orson Welles and staring Lionel Barrymore as Ebenezer Scrooge. When Charles Dickens published the story in 1843, he did so as what we'd call social commentary, reflecting the soul-searching of his fellow Britons about the true meaning of Christmas.

Even 175 years later, we can see the importance of Dickens' central themes in our own world, where so many TV shows have parodied the tale. Like the WPIX Yule Log here in New York City, Lionel Barrymore's Christmas Eve performances grew into a tradition from the first in 1934 to his final appearance in 1953, a year before his death. Barrymore also features in a great television Christmas tradition, as the miserly Mr. Potter in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, written by a fellow Rutgers alumnus: Philip Van Doren Stern.

We hope you enjoy listening to this radio play and the interview with Mr. Welles that follows, as much as we enjoyed researching the stories behind it. As Tiny Tim says, "God bless us, everyone."

December 18, 2017 - This week -- just in time to get stuffed into your young reader's stocking -- we travel back to a familiar location, at a pivotal moment in the American Revolution. The year is 1780, when one of the greatest heroes of the Continental Army -- General Benedict Arnold -- decides to betray the patriot cause by surrendering West Point to the British with the help of British spymaster Major John André.

We talked about these infamous men when we interviewed Robert Norden, tavern keeper at the Old '76 House in Tappan, New York, where patriots kept the captured Andre locked up after his capture and before his execution. You can enjoy that episode in the archives at HistoryAuthor.com or your favorite on-demand audio outlet.

Our guide on this journey is award-winning young adult novelist and nonfiction author Selene Castrovilla who brings us: Revolutionary Rogues: Revolutionary Rogues: John André and Benedict Arnold. It's the real history behind heavily dramatized stories such as AMC's Turn: Washington's Spies and the smash Broadway musical Hamilton.

Selene's third YA novel Melt, Book One of the Rough Romance Trilogy, racked up six honors including the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Spark Award. Revolutionary Friends, her third nonfiction picture book, earned four awards including Booklist Top Ten Biography for Youth.

Visit our guest at SeleneCastrovilla.com, like her at Facebook.com/Selene.Castrovilla, follow @SCastrovilla on Twitter and SeleneCastrovilla on Instagram. You can also check out the artist behind the images half of Revolutionary Rogues at JohnOBrienIllustrator.com. Lovers of the Marquis de Lafayette can also honor his legacy of Franco-American friendship by joining The American Friends of Lafayette, which Selene spoke about so passionately in this episode.

December 11, 2017 - This week, our time machine travels back to the American Civil War in All the Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign from Peach Tree Creek to the City's Surrender, July 18-September 2, 1864. Our guide on this journey is Stephen Davis, a longtime Atlantan and Civil War enthusiast since the fourth grade. All the Fighting They Want serves as a companion to his previous paperback, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw to the Chattahoochee, May 5-July 18, 1864.

The books are part of the Emerging Civil War Series, published by Savas Beatie LLC. Learn more about their titles at SavasBeatie.com or on Twitter @SavasBeatieLLC.

Stephen Davis has served as Book Review Editor for Blue & Gray magazine for more than twenty years, and you've seen his many articles in scholarly and popular journals. His previous books are 2001's Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe Johnston and the Yankee Heavy Battalions, and 2012's What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta.

December 4, 2017 - This week, our time machine travels back 50 years to one of the Vietnam War's massive set pieces: The Tet Offensive. This series of simultaneous attacks by the communist North on 36 cities, aimed to weaken support both within the Vietnamese republic in the South and across the Pacific in the United States.

Our guest, Doug Stanton, embeds his readers with 46 fresh, young American soldiers in Echo Company: An Army reconnaissance platoon of the 101st Airborne Division. Some of those men had only been in country for a few weeks when they found themselves facing waves of battle-hardened Viet Cong guerrillas, often in hand-to-hand combat, at the point of a bayonet.

Doug Stanton captures their story through the eyes of 20-year-old Stanley Parker in The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War. Mr. Stanton is a journalist, lecturer, screenwriter, and the author of New York Times bestsellers In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors.  He also brought us Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, which is the basis for a Jerry Bruckheimer film coming in 2018.

Doug Stanton's work has appeared in a wide number of top publications, and he's been a contributing editor at Outside. He's also a founder of the National Writers Series. For more, visit DougStanton.com or follow him on Twitter @DougStantonBook.

Also mentioned in this episode is author/illustrator Marcelino Truong's graphic memoir on growing up in the ultimately doomed Republic of Vietnam: Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63.

The New York Sun - McKinley High: Cancel Culture Targets Assassinated President in Hawaii - Dean Karayanis

November 27, 2017 - This week, our time machine visits the Gilded Age to witness William McKinley's rise to the White House. Little remembered or misremembered today, at the time of his assassination in 1901, the Civil War veteran was the most popular president since Abraham Lincoln, and nothing like the caricature portrayed by mid-20th Century authors.

Robert W. Merry sets the record straight in President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. You've seen Mr. Merry was editor of The National Interest from 2011 to 2013, and previously served as a Washington correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and executive editor of the Congressional Quarterly. He's now editor at The American Conservative.

You've seen his work everywhere from the New York Times to National Review, and seen his appearances on shows like Meet the Press. His previous book resurrected another overlooked president: A Country of Vast Designs, on James K Polk, and Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.

Also mentioned this week: Our interview with Candice Shy Hooper, author of Lincoln's Generals' Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War--for Better and for Worse.

Featured in the New York Sun - How Capitalism Paved the Way for the First Thanksgiving - Dean Karayanis

November 20, 2017 - This week -- just in time for Thanksgiving in America -- we set sail with the intrepid Pilgrims on The Mayflower. Once aboard, we'll meet the Winslow family, and gain a perspective that links the broader experience -- from Native American contacts to intrigues back home in Europe.

Tracing the voyage with us is reviewer and broadcaster Rebecca Fraser author of The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America. The daughter of noted British historian Lady Antonia Fraser and former president of the Brontë Society in the U.K. Her previous books include The Story of Britain.

You can find her on Twitter at R Fraser Author.

November 13, 2017 - This week, we'll see a familiar face in the passenger seat of our time machine under a big cartwheel hat, as we travel back to 1908 Los Angeles. Our guest is Jennifer Kincheloe, here to chat about her second novel, The Woman in the Camphor Trunk -- An Anna Blanc Mystery.

Since we last spoke, Jen has earned the Colorado Gold Award for Mystery, and spots as a finalist for the MacAvirty Sue Feder Historical Mystery Award, the Left Coast Crime "Lefty" Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel, and the Colorado Author's League Award for Genre Fiction.

You can catch our interview on her acclaimed debut novel, The Secret Life of Anna Blanc, in the archives at HistoryAuthor.com or wherever you're listening, and find our guest online at JenniferKincheloe.com, on Twitter @JenKincheloe, or Facebook.com/TheSecretLifeOfAnnaBlanc -- where she shares all the great Gilded Age images you could ever want and then some.

November 6, 2017 - This week, our time machine travels back to a time when the United States fought its first major overseas conflict, joining a fight idealized as making the world safe for democracy. Our guide on this journey is Margaret E. Wagner, a senior writer/editor in the Library of Congress Publishing Office. She brings us America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History.

This book is almost an art history museum sitting on your coffee table, offering up over 250 images, along with 4-color illustrations -- many never seen before. Margaret Wagner has applied the talents she put into her previous books, The Library of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War; The American Civil War: 365 Days, and, World War II: 365 Days. She's also co-author of The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference and The Library of Congress World War II Companion.