Baseball history is straight out of left field. You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented the game. Neither did. You may think that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first game in 1846. They didn’t. And, for the record, baseball wasn’t born in Cooperstown, Hoboken or New York City, the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings weren’t the first professional club, and Jackie Robinson wasn’t the first to cross baseball’s color line.

Before retiring, she made The Daily Beast’s list of “150 Women Who Shake the World.” She is Admiral Sandy Stosz, USCG (ret).  And she is a woman of “firsts” The first women to command an icebreaker on the Great Lakes, the first woman to lead a US Armed Forces service academy, and the first woman assigned as deputy commandant for mission support, directing one of the Coast Guard's largest enterprises. Now, the woman who has commanded two ships and led large Coast Guard organizations during times of crisis and complexity has written her first book

Great armchair tour: Boston’s fifty oldest buildings.  Great tour guide. Joseph Bagley is  the city archaeologist of Boston, a historic preservationist and a staff member of the Boston Landmarks Commission. 

The case: Find the true origins of William Shakespeare’s work.  The sleuth: contemporary renegade scholar Dennis McCarthy.  The suspect:  Sir Thomas North, an Elizabethan courtier. Using plagiarism software, McCarthy has found direct links between North’s published and unpublished writings and Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and other Shakespeare’s plays. What’s more, Shakespeare’s plotlines seem lifted straight from North’s colorful life. 

Not everyone knows the Underground Railroad ran in two directions.  While the North was salvation for many US slaves before the Civil War, thousands of people went south. Mexico had abolished slavery in 1837, making it the Promised Land for thousands.

The year: 1638.  The setting: Providence, near Plymouth Colony.  The crime: A runaway indentured servant brutally stabs and robs a young Nipmuc tribesman returning home from trading beaver pelts. With his last breath, the victim reveals the details of the attack to Providence’s governor, Roger Williams.  An all-out manhunt, dramatic capture and tension-filled murder trial follows. It is the first trial the two-year-old Plymouth Colony has faced.

In 1897, the young Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache set sail on a three-year expedition to the icy continent of Antarctica, the unchartered end of the earth. After a series of costly setbacks, he had two options: turn back in defeat or sail deeper into the freezing waters toward glory—the first expedition to reach the magnetic South Pole.  De Gerlache chose glory.