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Not all wars are won with weapons. Some are won by spies and stings. During World War II, the British turned stately homes like Trent Park in North London and the Latimer House and Wilton Park in Buckinghamshire into prisons for high-ranking German officers and commanders.  After giving them “phony” interrogations, they gave them luxury accommodations.

Most history books give Abraham Lincoln all the credit for winning the Civil War.  This original perspective puts the House and Senate at the center of the conflict, showing how Congress took drastic measures to defeat the Confederacy. 

Against a lavish backdrop of pageantry and ambition, court intrigue and war, historian Nicola Tallis illuminates how a dynamic, brilliant woman orchestrated the rise of the Tudors. In 1485, Henry VII became the first Tudor king of England. He owed much of his victory to his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort.

Legend goes that the colony in Jamestown was a false start.  It’s often told as a cautionary tale of lazy louts who hunted gold until they starved or shiftless settlers in need of the hard discipline of martial law. Yet, author Joseph Kelly comes to a radically different and decidedly American interpretation of these first Virginians.

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.

More than 5,000 ships left Ireland during the great potato famine in the late 1840s, transporting the starving and the destitute away from their stricken homeland. The USS Jamestown was the first vessel to sail in the other direction. In March 1847, Captain Robert Bennet Forbes and his crew left Boston loaded with precious food to help the millions of Irish citizens unable to escape.

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

Thomas Dresser never saw a ghost or thought they existed—until he sat down to write this book. So what changed the local historian’s mind?  Too many eerie tales that have stood the test of time.

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?

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.

For thousands of years, West African griots (men) and griottes (women) have recited the stories of their people. Without this oral tradition, Bettye Kearse would never have known she is a descendant of President James Madison and his slave, and half-sister, Coreen. 

This is the story of the United States outside the United Sates. It is the expansive tale of America’s global conquests, the actual territories this country has inhabited and governed to build an empire.

Winston Churchill knew the outcome of the war rested on the battle for the Atlantic.  What he didn’t know was his solution would evolve from a game.

The 1960 Rome Olympics: 18 days of theater, suspense, victory and defeat. Some of the most honored athletes in Olympic history competed there: decathlete Rafer Johnson, sprinter Wilma Rudolph, Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila, and Louisville boxer Cassius Clay, who at eighteen seized the world stage for the first time, four years before he became Muhammad Ali.

In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 landed behind barbed wire fences on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain.

Three edgy superpowers. One tension-filled week. The Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin apart—just when victory was close at hand. But there’s more to this story:  three intelligent (and very glamorous) young women were also there: Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill and Kathleen Harriman.

What happens when a bestselling novelist hooks up with a hard-hitting Boston-based true crime writing team? An explosive new book about the last days of a music legend: John Lennon. “We were the best bloody band there was,” the former Beatle said.  “There was nobody to touch us.” Nobody except the nowhere man. 

It took a global war and a pandemic to blaze this trail. A month after war broke out in 1914, doctors Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson set out for Paris. They opened a hospital in a luxury hotel and treated hundreds of casualties plucked from France's battlefields.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. The established script for a family like this was: work hard, set goals, move up, be happy. But there was another story behind the scenes: psychological breakdown, shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

The second most powerful man in the world was Admiral William D. Leahy.  Aside from FDR, no American did more to shape World War II.  Not Douglas MacArthur. Not Dwight Eisenhower.  Not even the legendary George Marshall.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the national bestseller "Cleopatra" unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials.

When Germans Embraced the Third Reich
This is the chilling story of the beginning of the end. In the early 1930s, Germans were ravaged by the economic depression and pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, the country turned itself inside out. The deeply divided fractured republic gave way to a one-party dictatorship. The rise of Hitler.

Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America
Thomas Jefferson had three daughters. The similarities end there. Two were white and free; one was black and enslaved.

Boston 1918. The deadly Spanish flu spread. The streets emptied. The war raged on. The enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor. Anyone who looked or sounded German was suspect. A fever gripped the city and wouldn’t let go. 

Terror, Tension, and the American Ambassador's Struggle to Avoid Pearl Harbor

In the second half of 1941, America was tightening its noose around Japan’s neck.  President Roosevelt’s economic sanctions were crippling the country, but its leaders refused to yield to American demands.  Roosevelt thought it was just a matter of time.  Joseph Grew, America’s ambassador to Japan, knew time had nothing to do with it.

This is the first major literary biography of America’s most beloved nineteenth century poet in more than 50 years.  It’s time to remember the life, the times, the works--the soul--of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The Hotel That Set Women Free
Sure, Manhattan’s got the Plaza, the Algonquin and the Waldorf Astoria.  But young women with a suitcase and a dream checked into The Barbizon.  The iconic hotel was built on 140 East 63rd Street in Manhattan in 1927 at the height of the Roaring Twenties. It was intended to be a haven for “modern women” seeking careers in the arts.  It became a magnet for ambitious young women who wanted adventure, independence and big-city careers.  Not to mention fame and fortune, too.

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. […]

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 […]

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.