History Author Show

January 23, 2017 - This week, our time machine turns on the four-wheel drive, as we hike into Allegheny National Forest, hunting for history. Established in 1923, the forest covers over half a million acres of the northwestern Pennsylvania foothills, and offers us the chance to experience the same sights, sounds and wildlife, as our forebears stretching back to the dawn of civilization.

Joining us with his walking stick is author Robert Hilliard, author of, A Season on the Allegheny. Rob has written on sports, history, and the outdoors for over two decades. He's formerly a contributing editor with Ohio Valley Outdoors magazine, and contributed to the history anthology, Rivers of Destiny.

You can pick up his trail by following him on Twitter @RobHilliard_66, or toss him a like at Facebook.com/ASeasonOnTheAllegheny. You can also read his piece on The Pennsylvania Tuxedo, by Woolrich, "The Original Outdoor Clothing Company." You can also check out the history behind Johnny Cash's song, "As Long as the Grass Shall Go," off his Bitter Tears Album, and how President John F. Kennedy broke a treaty with the Seneca, which dated back to George Washington, to build the Kinzua Dam.

January 16, 2017 - This week, our time machine travels back to one of the past's darkest corners, to meet Victor Capesius. Before the war, he was a friendly neighborhood druggist in Romania. But as World War Two progressed, this ethnic German rose from anonymity, to infamy, standing at the side of Dr. Josef Mengele, The Angel of Death.

Patricia Posner brings us the true tale of this Nazi SS officer in, The Pharmacist of Auschwitz: The Untold Story. Together with her husband, Gerald Posner, our guest has authored 12 nonfiction books including Mengele: The Complete Story, Hitler's Children, and most recently, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power. (Enjoy our interview on that title here.) We also make reference to our chat with Andrew Nagorski about his book, The Nazi Hunters.

You can find our guest online at TrishaPosner.com. Her personal Twitter account is @TrishaPosner, and the one for the book is @AuschwitzPharm1.

January 9, 2017 - This week, our time machine whisks us back the Pan-American Exposition, a Gilded Age world's fair powered by the newly harnessed power of electricity. "The Pan" covered 350 acres near Niagara Falls, and heralded the wonders of the 20th Century. But it also featured lingering stereotypes of a pre-flight world, and the tragic assassination of President William McKinley -- America's most beloved chief executive since Abraham Lincoln.

Our guide to Buffalo in 1901, is Margaret Creighton, professor of history at Maine's Bates College and author of The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World's Fair. You may have enjoyed her previous book, The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History -- Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle, which was up for the Lincoln Prize.

You can find her online at MargaretCreighton.com or on Twitter at MCreight88. And to explore the exposition from here in the 21st Century, visit PanAm1901.org.

January 2, 2017 - Hello, Happy New Year! This week, our time machine turns tower crane, as best-selling author and historian Hugh Howard introduces us to two men whose vision for building shaped the 20th Century. His book is, Architecture's Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson.

Conducting the interview is Thriller author and practicing architect Tom Grace, who previously interviewed Gerald Posner, author of God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican.

Mr. Howard's numerous books include Mr. and Mrs. Madison's War: America's First Couple and the War of 1812; The Painter's Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art;  Thomas Jefferson: Architect; and the classic Houses of the Founding Fathers.

You can find him online at HughHoward.com, and follow him on Twitter @HowardHistorian.

December 21, 2016 - We're uploading our Monday, December 26, 2016, episode a little bit ahead of schedule -- call it an early Christmas gift. Our guest is Peter Lion, who brings us The American St. Nick: A True Story. It's the unique tail of a World War Two G.I., who ended up playing a big role in tiny Luxembourg. In the lull between the Nazi withdrawal and the Battle of the Bulge, Corporal Richard Brookins helped bring to life the idea of his Jewish comrade, Harry Stutz. Cpl. Stutz learned that St. Nicholas Day had been banned during the occupation as un-German, meaning many children of Wiltz had never experienced it. His inspiration grew into a parade like no other, with Cpl. Brookins in the back of a Jeep, leading the procession through town.

Brookins hardly thought about his role as the war dragged on, but the people of Wiltz never forgot, even after their city was destroyed and many of the children killed in Hitler's doomed counter-offensive. The American St. Nick tells the story of how Wiltz tracked down Brookins years later, and informed him that he'd become a legend. At 93-years-old earlier this year, Luxembourg gave him their highest honor, and in the mean time he'd been back to perform his role several times -- and when he's not there, someone from Wiltz is given the honor of filling in. Not just as St. Nick. But as the American St. Nick.

You can catch the PBS documentary on this true tale of Christmas cheer, all through the month of December. It's produced by The World War II Foundation, also under the name The American St. Nick. You can learn more at AmericanStNick.com or by following Peter on Twitter @AmericanStNick.

December 19, 2016 - This week, our time machine swerves Into the Past Lane. Our guest is, Edward T. O'Donnell, host of the Into the Past Lane podcast and author of Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age. You may not know who Henry George is, but his ideas swirled around the campaign for president throughout the recent election, and his approach to solving political and economic problems are timeless.

Ed earned his Ph.D. in American History from Columbia University, and is an Associate Professor of History at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA. You can follow him on Twitter @InThePastLane, give his show a listen at InThePastLane.com/Podcast, and find him online at EdwardTODonnell.com.

December 12, 2016 - This week, our time machine goes looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike, and finds it at the birthplace of Ben Franklin, the Constitution, and cheesesteaks. We previously visited the City of Brotherly Love for our interview at McGillin's Olde Ale House est. 1860 and Dr. Mütter's Marvels, with side trips to check out the Paoli Battlefield and to meet Simon Cameron, "Lincoln's Scandalous Secretary of War."

Now, Irene Levy Baker joins us with an eye on touring more of Philly's historic sites in her book, 100 Things to Do in Philadelphia Before You Die. And if you purchase your copy through 100ThingsToDoInPhiladelphia.com and mention you heard Irene on The History Author Show, Irene will sign your copy. It makes a great gift!

You can also find Irene @100Philly on Twitter, and Facebook.com/100ThingsToDoInPhiladelphia.

Featured in The New York Sun - Americans, Who Walked on the Moon, Cower in the Face of an Orange Sky - Dean Karayanis

December 5, 2016 - In this episode we meet 103-year-old Lt. Jim Downing, the second-oldest survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack, who will speak at the 75th commemoration in Hawaii on December 7th, 2016. Jim not only witnessed his ship, USS West Virginia, go up in flames on that day of infamy, but he later served in the Korean War, and in 1956 stumbled into the H-Bomb test at Bikini Atoll.

A man of great faith and soon to be the oldest male author in the Guinness Book of World Records, Jim Downing is also a spiritual leader with The Navigators, a worldwide Christian ministry. This unique and inspiring veteran joins us to share his memoir, The Other Side of Infamy: My Journey Through Pearl Harbor and the World of War.

If you enjoy this first-person account of the war, check out our chat with Roger Boas, who's a few years short of 100 and a veteran of George S. Patton's Third Army. He shared many war stories and his struggles to adjust to civilian life in Battle Rattle: A Last Memoir of World War Two.

November 28, 2016 - This week, our time machine touches down during Adolf Hitler's reign in Germany, to answer a big question: How? How did this failed Austrian painter -- a little-noticed corporal in the Great War -- persuade the German people in droves to follow him into the abyss of total war?

The usual answers are charisma and a ruthless stamping out of domestic dissent. But here on the History author show, we always seek out a fuller picture than we get in most history books. Nathan Stoltzfus does just that, challenging the traditional view of the asparagus sucker's rise to power in the book, Hitler's Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany.  Of course, none of this is to soften the image of Hitler as evil or excuse his crimes, but to give us a deeper understanding about how he seduced a nation.

Professor Stoltzfus received his Ph.D. in Modern European history from Harvard in 1993, and is the Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University. His previous books include Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, and Protest in Hitler's “National Community” -- Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response. You can follow him on Twitter at Nate_Stoltzfus.

For more on Hitler's domestic efforts to implement his will at home, check out our interview with Winston Churchill's great-grandson, Jonathan Sandys, as we chat about his book, God and Churchill: How the Great Leader's Sense of Divine Destiny Changed His Troubled World and Offers Hope for Ours.

November 21, 2016 - The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, a precursor to our own First Amendment protections of religious liberty. The Spaldeen we discussed in Geoff Griffin's Brooklyn Bat Boy: A Story of the 1947 Season that Changed Baseball Forever. This week, New York Times Urban Affairs Correspondent Sam Roberts puts some serious miles on our Time Machine, and fills its trunk with the everyday objects that defined Gotham since it's earliest, pre-colonial days. Bagels. Subway tokens.

His book is A History of New York in 101 Objects, now in paperback.

And like the city itself, the book is an ongoing conversation. Sam Roberts encourages readers to email him at [email protected] to argue for their favorite object, or against something he already included. Who knows? Maybe your object will be among the next 101 that define Greater New York.

You can catch Sam's columns in the paper, follow him @SamRob12 on Twitter, or check out one of his eight previous titles including, Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America.