History Author Show

April 3, 2017 - This week, our time machine compares some of the Western world's big thinkers. Centuries ago Plutarch, the Father of Biography, wrote Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans to reveal new insights about their careers by making comparisons. Robert Lloyd George applies this method to our time in A Modern Plutarch: Comparisons of the Greatest Western Thinkers, using the United States and United Kingdom, in place of Greece and Rome.

Mr. Lloyd George is the great-grandson of David Lloyd George, who served as Britain's prime minister during the Great War, was the architect of its social welfare system, and led the redrawing of maps after the Armistice.  Modern listeners may have seen our guest's extensive writings on global economics across the East-West divide, and may have read his previous books including David and Winston, contrasting his great-grandfather with Churchill.

March 27, 2017 - This week, our time machine goes inside a succession of Nazi Concentration camps, and views them through the great Norwegian statesman, Odd Nansen. Editing Nansen's diaries -- written painstakingly and smuggled out of the camps -- is Timothy J. Boyce, and the resulting book is From Day to Day: One Man's Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps.

As a friend of Norway's royal family and son of a prominent anti-Quisling voice, the Gestapo snatched Odd as a hostage in an effort to keep patriot insurgents in check. If you heard my interview with Neal Bascomb, author of The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb, you know that Norway holds a special place in our hearts, especially as it relates to their valiant resistance during the war.

March 20, 2017 - This week, we meet a man born Albrecht Dittrich in East Germany, who infiltrated the U.S. as a KGB agent at the height of the Cold War -- and in the decades since, Barsky's life has taken all the twists and turns you'd expect from a fictional spy thriller. From ardent communist to patriotic American citizen. From unquestioning atheist, to agnostic, to the witnessing Christian he is today.

Jack's book is literally like no other. It's titled, Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America. Learn more about his story at JackBarsky.com.

March 13, 2017 - This week, we step into the Tardis, and travel back in time to a United Kingdom facing a rebellion in the late 1600s. The leader of this uprising to seize the crown is Charles II's illegitimate son, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. He's the sort of figure we love: One wronged by generations of falsehoods, until a dedicated historian tells the true story.

That author is Dr. Anna Keay, and the book that sets the record straight is The Last Royal Rebel - The Life & Death of James, Duke of Monmouth. Dr. Keay earned her PhD on court ceremonial in the reign of Charles II at the University of London, and is director of the Landmark Trust, a charity that rescues historic buildings and turns them into places for all of us to holiday among the memories of our past.

You can find her at AnnaKeay.co.uk or @AnnaLandmark on Twitter, and plan your next holiday in the past, at the Landmark Trust.

March 6, 2017 - This week, our time machine travels back to the earliest days of the United States, to what's sometimes called the Second War of independence: The War of 1812. For the first time in this fight against Great Britain, Congress used the Constitution's power to declare war, and for the last time, the men doing the fighting supplied their own weapons -- an idea that seems incredible today, where the term "militia" itself is given very different connotations than national defense.

Our guest is James N. Gibson, and his book is, A War without Rifles: The 1792 Militia Act and the War of 1812. Mr. Gibson was born into the U.S. space program through his father, and is himself an Aerospace Engineer. His resume features time with such giants in the field as Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, as well as work on the International Space Station and Space Shuttle programs.

His previous books include Nuclear Weapons of the United States: An Illustrated History, and The Navaho Missile Project: The Story of the "Know-How" Missile of American Rocketry. You can learn about these and his other works at JNGibson.com, or follow him on Twitter @JNGibson55. And for more on the War of 1812, catch our interview with John McCavitt and Christopher T. George, co-authors of, The Man Who Captured Washington: Major General Robert Ross and the War of 1812.

Featured in The New York Sun - DeSantis and Trump Go to War Over ‘Woke’ - Dean Karayanis

February 27, 2017 - This week, our time machine turns Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle. We're pedaling our way to the end of Black History Month, with a last stop on the basketball courts just off the coast of Massachusetts. Cultural critic and sportswriter Bijan C. Bayne is here to share his latest book: Martha's Vineyard Basketball: How a Resort League Defied Notions of Race and Class.

The island off Cape Cod may not conjure up the sound of a basketball thunking on asphalt, much less the Civil Rights Movement, but Bijan describes the history happening right under the Converse of players from many backgrounds and colors, perched on all rungs of the social ladder, including names as diverse as Charles Lindbergh, James Taylor, Jaleel White, and Barack Obama.

You can find our guest on Twitter at @BijanCBayne or check out his blog by clicking this link. And if you enjoy the topic of basketball history, be sure to check out Bijan's first book: Elgin Baylor - The Man Who Changed Basketball.

February 20, 2017 - This week, we mark Presidents Day by putting some serious years and miles on the old DeLorean, starting with a visit to the Tidewater region of Virginia in the mid 1700's, and ending over 200 years later across the ocean in Hawaii. In between, we'll make a bunch of stops in Ohio, a handful in New York, and others scattered across the nation.

Our guide on this journey is Louis Picone, author of Where the Presidents Were Born: The History & Preservation of the Presidential Birthplaces. From George Washington to Barack Obama, the book shares insights and history of the homes, highways and hospitals of the first 43 men who've served as our commander-in-chief.

Louis and I are both from the Garden State of New Jersey, we decided to meet up at one of the hidden presidential jewels of the Jersey Shore. It's the Church of the Presidents in Long Branch where seven commanders-in-chief worshiped, more than anywhere outside the nation's capital. In a future episode, we'll visit the chapel (now home to the Long Branch Historical Museum Association) to hear more about Presidents Grant, Hayes, Arthur, Harrison, McKinley, Wilson and Garfield -- who passed away right across the street from an assassin's bullet.

We'll also do a follow-up with Louis on his second book The President is Dead! The Extraordinary Stories of the Presidential Deaths, Final Days, Burials, and Beyond. If love walking in the baby steps of our presidents, check out LouisPicone.com, toss a like to Facebook.com/LouisLPicone, and follow this week's historian @LouisPicone on Twitter.

February 13, 2016 - This week's episode falls on the day we observe Lincoln's birthday, so our time machine travels back to the final days of the American Civil War, as Abraham Lincoln turns his weary eyes forward to ending the rebellion and pushing for his vision of a new, reunited United States. The Great Emancipator does so by leaving the White House for his longest break since the war began, and spending them with General Ulysses S Grant's command at City Point -- known today as Hopewell -- 130 miles south of the nation's capital.

Our guide on this trip is Noah Andre Trudeau who brings us, Lincoln’s Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days that Changed a Presidency, March 24 – April 8, 1865. Mr. Trudeau is the author of several books on the Civil war. His first, Bloody Roads South, which won the Civil War Round Table of New York's prestigious Fletcher Pratt Award, and his fourth, Like Men of War -- a combat history of black troops in the Civil War -- earned the Grady McWhiney Research Foundation's Jerry Coffey Memorial Book Prize.

You can browse all his works at Lincoln1865.com.

February 6, 2017 - This week, in honor of Black History Month, our time machine travels back in time to meet a forgotten American hero in the fight for equality -- a hero, with a bicycle. You may never have heard of Marshall "Major" Taylor, but this son of an Indiana Civil War veteran was the most popular athlete in America and heralded throughout the world, back at the height of the Jim Crow era in the early 20th Century.

A devout Christian who never touched alcohol (well, okay, once) and turned down massive sums of money because he refused to race on the Sabbath, Major Taylor inspired Americans of all colors, and laid the groundwork not just for superstar athletes on all fields of play. But more than that, he helped pedal the American republic, towards that more perfect union.

Our guest is Terry Kerber, who along with his brother Conrad co-authored, Major Taylor: The Inspiring Story of a Black Cyclist and the Men Who Helped Him Achieve Worldwide Fame. Check out the Major Taylor Association for more on this inspirational wheelman.

January 30, 2017 - This week, we mark the anniversary of the first Baseball Hall of Fame class on January 29, 1936. In that year, Ty Cobb earned 222 ballots, just four votes short of a unanimous decision, so the date gave us a chance to revisit one of our earliest interviews, and a book we cited often as a journalistic high water mark for history.

Joining us again to chat about the unfairly maligned Georgia Peach, is Charles Leerhsen, author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty. Mr. Leerhsen scratched the myth of Cobb as a belligerent, dimwitted racist and dirty player, and found he'd been maligned by a hack sportswriter named Al Stump, who smeared a man who was in fact an intellectual, lover of children, and supporter of baseball's integration.

So how have baseball fans embraced the true story in the year and a half since the book's publication? How has Charles Leerhsen fared after literally rewriting history to restore perhaps the greatest player ever to pick up a bat? We'll dig into those questions, and then share the original chat for those of you who missed it.

You can find our guest @CharlesLeerhsen on Twitter and at Leerhsen.com, or like the book at Facebook.com/TyCobbBook.