In 1910, Olive MacLeod received word that her fiancé, the famous naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa. So, she did what any Scottish aristocrat in the early twentieth century would do. She went to find him.

He was born in Virginia in 1755.  Although the rough-cut frontiersman had little formal education, he became one of the nation’s preeminent lawyers and politicians. Meet John Marshall. He was at the center of every political battle—from the nation’s founding in 1776 for the next 40 years.

The definitive, fascinating, all-reaching biography of Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss made our childhood’s whimsical and wonderful, magical and musical. A green Grinch who stole Christmas, a mischievous cat with a funny striped hat, and an elephant on a mission to rescue a tiny village of Whos.  What would he dream up next? 

It is said that if the Tower of London’s ravens should ever leave, the Crown will fall and Britain with it. That puts more than a little pressure on the Ravenmaster which, surprisingly, is a serious title indeed. Get a behind-the-scenes account of life with the legendary ravens at the world’s eeriest monument.

How a Jewish Drive, an American Heiress and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler's Best
As Nazi Germany pushed the world toward war in 1938, there was another race in progress. The Grand Prix in Pau, France. Adolf Hitler wanted to reign supreme there, too. His elite racing team had millions upon millions in resources and driver Rudi Caraccioloa, whose killer instincts had put him at the top of the racing world.  Now meet the underdogs...

In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell did the impossible.  She became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. Her younger sister also did the impossible. In fact, Emily was the more brilliant physician. 

Imagine this: a Reverse Underground Railroad. A black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the Antebellum South. It happened in Philadelphia. 

World War II. The German Wehrmacht had many well-trained and battle-hardened mountain divisions. At the start of the war, the US Army had none. So they did what Americans do: they started from scratch. They turned a wild idea into a reality and created a unique military fighting force, the 10th Mountain Division.  

MAYFLOWER A Story of Courage, Community, and War A 2007 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History The story of the Plymouth Colony began in peril and ended in war. When the Mayflower’s religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor, the Native Americans were facing their own crisis. Diseases spread by European fisherman were killing them. […]

The Spaniards called him “El Draque.”  The dragon. The red-haired, hot-tempered Englishman was one of the most successful pirates ever to sail, making fortunes pillaging galleons laden with New World silver and gold. He was also the most wanted. King Philip II of Spain offered a reward of 20,000 ducats for his capture or death. (That’s about $8 million today.)

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.

The whaling industry drove the early American economy. By the early 1800s, it was one of the most profitable enterprises in the United States, second only to textiles. Whale products were so valuable that people made fortunes.  They also lost fortunes. Some lost their lives. While a life at sea seems like a great venture for some and adventure for others, whaling expeditions were dangerous.  The competition was fierce. The elements were harsh.  The journeys were long. The outcome of each voyage was unknown.

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. 

We're heading east to Gotham. Home of the “The New York Kidnapping Club.” Although slavery had been outlawed in here by the 1830s, this powerful network of judges, lawyers and police officers circumvented anti-slavery laws and sanctioned the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans. 

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.

Mark Epstein’s father started calling him “Pathfinder” when he was 10 years old.  The unusual nickname came from the Pathfinder sleeping bags he sold in his Charlie’s Surplus sporting goods store in Worcester. It took Mark a while to grow into the moniker.  As a kid, he had dreams of playing basketball, but his lack of motivation sidelined him. Later, a divorce sent him south to Charleston, SC without a plan. While struggling to put his life back together, he found his path as an educator, school counselor, basketball coach and advocate for equality.

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.

The United States Constitution was written in 1787.  The first three words are “we the people.”  But we are not the first or the only people to create a written governing document.

It was the last evening of summer in 2013.  Five shots rang out in the Holly, a part of northeast Denver. African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South had settled in this area, which, over time, become the “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis.  Shootings weren’t uncommon in the Holly.  But the identity of the shooter that night came as a total shock. 

Pulitzer Prize Winning Scholar and Critic Louis Menand show us that the Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was a contest of ideas: economic, political, artistic and personal that shaped American culture.

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!

Remember when America’s scrappy navy took on the full might of Britain’s sea power? Probably not. It was the least known campaign of the Revolutionary War.  It was also one of the most crucial. 

In August of 1911, Vincent Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Exactly what happened in the two years before its recovery is a mystery. Many replicas of the famous painting exist, and more than one historian has wondered if the one returned to the Louvre is a fake. Now, present-day art professor Luke Perrone digs for the truth behind his most famous ancestor—you guessed it--Peruggia.

The New York Times named it a New and Noteworthy book.  Critics are calling it “smart, sexy and scientific” “whip-smart and undeniably unique” and “worth every minute spent reading it.”

When settlers spilled across the Appalachians to exploit lands won from the British in the War of Independence, they disregarded on thing:  the rightful owners of the land. This is the untold story of the two Shawnee brothers who retaliated against the threat.

Gena Turgel was a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Bergen-Belsen.  There, she cared for the young Anne Frank who was dying of typhus. Sisters Ida and Louis Cook sponsored refugees, helped smuggle their jewelry, furs and other valuables out of occupied territories and established temporary housing for immigrant families in London. The list goes on: a world tennis champ who became a spy, a Polish immigrant who worked for the OSS, a Jewish refugee who became a partisan to fight the Nazis. These are the girls who stepped out of line, the women who served, fought, struggled and made things happen—in and out of uniform during World War II.

Fill in the blank.  By the end of their lives, most of our founding fathers—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—felt that America’s constitutional experiment was __________________.  The correct answer: utter failure.  In fact, these visionaries didn’t think the republican government they built would last beyond their own generation. 

He was overshadowed by his brilliant father, humiliated in office after the contested election of 1824, viciously assailed by populist opponents for being slippery and effete, and then resoundingly defeated by the western war hero Andrew Jackson in the 1828 election which ushered in an era of unparalleled expansion. John Quincy Adams has never basked in the historical spotlight—until now.

Charles Ponzi, circa 1920 (Wikipedia) THE PONZI SCHEME A Slide Show and Talk Long before Bernie Madoff made off with about $64.8 billion in other people’s money, there was a guy named Ponzi. Charles Ponzi. Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi (1882-1949) was born and raised in Italy. He arrived in Boston aboard the S.S. […]

What if your greatest invention overshadowed your life’s mission?  What if your life’s work, though well-intentioned, harmed those you wanted to help most?  Alexander Graham Bell’s mother was deaf; his wife, Mabel Hubbard, was, too.  His goal in life was to teach deaf students to speak. In fact, he championed “oralism” and went to considerable lengths to stamp out American Sign Language altogether. His greatest invention, the telephone, was the surprising outcome of his effort to create a speech reading machine. The Invention of Miracles looks at this genius in an entirely different way.

No crime in history had more eyewitnesses.  It was November 24, 1963, two days after President Kennedy was shot.  Jack Ruby, a troubled nightclub owner, slipped quietly into the Dallas police station and assassinated the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

It was a perilous time, the height of the Cold War.  The Soviets built the wall in Berlin and were testing the most destructive bombs in nuclear history.  They were also beating the United States to every major milestone in space.  It the United States couldn’t compete in the race to the heavens, how could it compete with the Soviets on Earth?

Now here’s a book worth toasting: Drunk.  Join us for an afternoon at Cape Cod Winery for an entertaining and enlightening deep dive into humanity’s oldest indulgence: drinking.

And then they were gone. More than one-thousand homes and businesses.  Restaurants, movie theaters, churches, doctors’ offices, a hospital, a public library, a post office.  Looted, burned, and bombed from the air. In the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map—and erased from the history books—in less than twenty-four hours.

This highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. Writer Glennon Doyle called it “one of the most beautiful biographies I have ever read.”  Laura Freeman of The Times (London) said, “I would not have wished it shorter.”  

Thanksgiving has been celebrated nationally on and off since 1789.  While Governors of Massachusetts had proclaimed a local holiday of Thanksgiving, Sarah, J. Hale, the editor of Goey’s Lady’s Book, promoted a National Day of Thanksgiving.

When George Washington became president in 1789, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing--Americans. In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called "the infant woody country" to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since.

Author Sarah Chayes thinks the United States resembles some of the most corrupt countries in the world. She says that corruption is an operating system of sophisticated networks in which government officials, key private-sector interests, and out-and-out criminals interweave. Their main objective: not to serve the public but to maximize returns for network members.

In December 1774, Benjamin Franklin met Caroline Howe in a London drawing room for “half a dozen Games of Chess.” These meetings weren’t about board games. That was the cover story. Caroline’s brothers—British General Sir William Howe and Richard Admiral Lord Howe—were there. They were all part of a last-ditch attempt to forestall the outbreak of the American War of Independence.

The last truly quiet town in America lies deep in the Appalachian Mountains: Green Bank, West Virginia. While astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory use the latest technology to search the depths of the universe, residents live device-free.  No WiFi. No iPads.  There is a ban on anything emanating radio frequencies that might interfere with the Observatory’s telescope.

Longtime ESPN writer Ivan Maisel never thought he’d write a story like this.  In February 2015, he received a call that would change his life forever: his son’s car had been found abandoned in a parking lot next to Lake Ontario. Two months later, Max's body was found in the lake.

His weapon of choice was poison. His victims were mostly women. In the span of 15 years, he murdered as many as ten people in the United States, Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedent in the late nineteen century. He was as brazen as Jack the Ripper. In fact, many people claimed he was the notorious serial killer. In truth, he was Thomas Neill Cream.  Dr. Thomas Neill Cream.  

This complex story begins in the eighteenth century. America’s Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams had great respect for the Persian Empire. In turn, Iranians saw America as an ideal to emulate for their own government.  So, how did two countries that once had such heartfelt admiration for each other became such committed enemies?

They called him the Little Giant.  But Illinois’ Stephen A. Douglas packed a lot of power and persuasion into his five-foot-four-inch frame. He was a U.S. senator, leader of the Democratic Party and one of two Democratic Party nominees for president in the 1860 election. The debates he held with Abraham Lincoln are some of the most famous in American history.  Well, we all know how that election turned out.  But Douglas never belonged where the history books put him: in Lincoln’s shadow.

Countries die. Sometimes it’s murder, sometimes it’s by accident, and sometimes it’s because they were so ludicrous, they didn’t deserve to exist in the first place. Occasionally they explode violently. A few slip away almost unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either “got too greedy” or “Napoleon turned up.” Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence.

In 1932, Mildred Harnick began holding secret meetings in her apartment.  Together, this small band of political activists wrote leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. Under the cover of night, they slipped the leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms, and phone booths around Berlin. Mildred also began helping  Jews escape, plotting acts of sabotage, and recruiting more and more working class Germans to the cause.  By 1940, hers was the largest underground resistance group in Berlin.

A lawyer.  A mechanic. A Ouija board.  One of the greatest cons ever.  But Harry Jones and Cedric Hill weren’t your typical Confidence Men. They were British officers imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I.