This is an epic story of two nations, two allies with shared history.  It is also the story of a very uneven partnership.  It is the story of the United States and the Philippines. And it is an important story to tell. 

It started with a dazzling two-week southeast Asian cruise. It became a twelve-day ordeal aboard ship in Tokyo.  Just as Gay and Phil Courter were about to disembark from the Diamond Princess, they suddenly found themselves at the epicenter of a global crisis over a contagious new virus.

Insiders call it the Craft. It was founded in London in 1717. Within two decades, it had spread across the globe. Today, its members number six million worldwide, over a million in the United States alone.  It is one of the most famous, most influential and most misunderstood of all secret brotherhoods. And, at times, it has been the most feared.  It is Freemasonry. 

Rose Dugdale was born into extreme wealth. She had an idyllic childhood in Devonshire, was presented to Elizabeth II at the court’s annual debutante ball and earned her PhD in economics from Oxford.  She also joined the IRA, spearheaded the first aerial terrorist attack in British history and pulled off the biggest art theft of her time.

They were an unlikely wartime team, an eccentric and eclectic band of American physicists, engineers, inventors and everyday Joes and Janes.  They worked in a secretive organization known only as Section T.  Their mission: to build something that would help the Allies knock enemy airplanes out of the air.

Describe George Washington in three words. General. Statesman. Businessman.  Wait--businessman? Just when you think you know everything there is to know about our first president, along comes a book like George Washington, Entrepreneur. While Washington was indeed a gifted general and a political pragmatist, he was also a patron of inventors, inveterate tinkerer and heavyweight thinker.

He was an Irish immigrant, who, despite bouts of mania, overthrew his impoverished upbringing and bent the New York media world to his will. She was his steadying hand, a notoriously fearless journalist who defied the gender expectations of her time.  Meet S.S. McClure and Ida Tarbell. Together, with their reporters Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens, they created one of the most influential magazines in American history: McClure’s.

It began with plutonium.  Or maybe it really began with fear—fear that the Germans would be the first to weaponize the atom. That’s the real reason, in a matter of months, the United States built the vast Hanford nuclear facility on the banks of the mighty Columbia River in eastern Washington State.  There, far from prying eyes, they charged scientists like Glenn Seaborg and Enrico Fermi, with finding a way to create the substance at the core of the most destructive weapons ever developed: plutonium. 

Henry Every was one of the 17th century’s most notorious pirates.  The press published wildly popular—and wildly inaccurate—reports of his nefarious exploits. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead.  Every and his crew pulled off one of the most lucrative crimes in history which triggered the first international manhunt and the trial of the century. But that’s not really their legacy.

On The Trails of the World's Lost Treasures--from the letters of Lincoln, Churchill, and Einstein to the Secret Recordings Onboard JFK's Air Force One

Olga.  Tatiana. Maria. Anastasia.  The Russian Grand Duchesses were among the most photographed and talked about young royals of the early twentieth century. Yet, over the years, most only remember their tragic end in a basement at Ekaterinburg in 1918.

Greenland. Population 56,000. Five times the size of California. It’s covered in an ice sheet 700 miles wide and 1,500 miles long. That’s nearly three quadrillion tons of bone-chilling ice. For the last 150 years, explorers and scientists have sought to understand this remote and mysterious island. 

Florence Finch was an unlikely warrior.  Her mother was Filipino; her father was an American serviceman. As World War II drew close to the Philippines, Florence fell in love with a dashing American naval intelligence agent, Charles “Bing” Smith, stationed in Manila.  When Bing was killed in battle, the mild-mannered housewife became a fervent resistance fighter.

They couldn't have been more different. Eleanor came from one of the nation’s most powerful political families; her marriage to her distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt took her straight to the White House. Lorena Hickok, known as Hick, grew up in rural South Dakota and worked as a servant girl after escaping from an abusive home. At different points, they were lovers, confidantes, professional advisors, and caring friends. Together, they played significant roles in one of the most tumultuous periods in American history.

By the end of Reconstruction, more than 500,000 African Americans had registered to vote across the South. The vast majority were former slaves. By 1906, less than ten percent remained. Beginning in 1876, the Court systematically dismantled both the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment, at least for African Americans, and what seemed to be the guarantee of the right to vote in the Fifteenth.

Almost 150 years ago, most of Chicago burned to the ground.  The fire started in Catherine and Patrick O’Leary’s barn on October 8, 1871 and grew out of control quickly by jumping branches of the Chicago River twice on its relentless northeastward path through the city’s three divisions.

In 1871 there were 252,539 miles of stone walls in New England and New York―enough to circle the earth ten times. But what do we actually know about them?  Who built them, and why?

The Fight for Women's Suffrage and the Century that Followed
Nancy Pelosi’s forward to Victory for the Vote reminds us “that the trailblazing suffragists did not wait for change, they worked for change!”  And work they did!

George Washington. Napoleon Bonaparte. Toussaint Louverture. Simon Bolivar. If the revolutionary world wanted to do without kings and queens, who would lead?  Without divine right, what would give leaders their authority? Military valor?  The consent of the people?  Their own Godlike qualities? These four “men on horseback” all struggled with this question.