In the early pages of Glen David Gold’s new novel Sunnyside, Charlie Chaplin is sighted in more than 800 places at the same time on November 12, 1916. One of these places is on “a small boat bobbing in the swells” off the Northern California coast within sight of a lighthouse whose “brilliant spotlight … [...]
Who said the following during a speech in Ohio? “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white an black races … I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying [...]
Genuine real-life historical figures who actually lived had actual experiences: birth, life, death, interspersed with specific incidents, dialogues, emotions and actions that actually happened. Shouldn’t this be enough for us? After death, these figures remain with us in memories, in films and photographs, in documents they wrote and documents written about them. Yet a certain [...]
Byzantium is the forgotten empire. Spanning the ancient world and the new, the Byzantine Empire emerged at the fall of Rome and lasted all the way to the Renaissance. Perhaps because it thrived during the misnamed “Dark Ages,” and because it was headquartered where Europe and Asia meet (Byzantium is now called Istanbul), it is [...]
Idi Amin’s shag rug, Saddam Hussein’s murals, what appears to be colonic-irrigation equipment in Nicolae Ceausescu palace (whose construction required the demolition of 7,000 structures) … laugh and cry as you pore through vintage photographs detailing the home decor of infamous men and women whom style-guru York calls “the world’s most colorful despots,” but who [...]
Bringing alive in all their horrifying glory seven infernos that changed Americans’ sense of identity and brought entire urban areas to the brink — from a 1760 Boston fire to the 1967 Detroit fire to 9/11, with others in between — historian Hoffer will make you keep sniffing the air in search of smoke. Winningly, [...]
California is so modern — so post-modern — that one hardly thinks of it as a place that needed to be discovered. But once, long ago, the land we now know of as California was unknown to anyone except for a few small bands of Native Americans. The Anza Trail tells a story that for [...]
You’ve gotta wonder why one little murder in St. Louis, in 1895 — a guy shooting a guy in a bar — would unleash a flood of folk songs immortalizing the killer, a carriage driver whom some say was a pimp. But it did, and the legend lives on through recordings by everyone from Woody [...]
From Dolly Parton (apologizing for claiming that Jews control Hollywood) to David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz (apologizing for killing people), this densely packed grab bag — subtitled “25 years of public apologies and the appalling behavior that inspired them” presents transcripts of mea-culpas from famous figures in many fields alongside capsule reminders of what they [...]
With the revealing subtitle The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, this is essentially an expanded rewrite of Smedley Butler’s 1935 anti-war pamphlet War Is a Racket. Carroll traces the history of the Pentagon, and the entire military apparatus of the United States — working on the fundamental assumption that all of America’s [...]