A grim, glowering fortress loomed in the darkness, bathed in the glow of arc lights shadowing its battlements and towers. This was the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, thirtyish miles south of Chicago. Convicted … Read the article
Issey Miyake, the Japanese fashion designer who died in August 2022, was known for the finely pleated garments he first introduced in his Spring/Summer 1989 collection. In 1993, he launched a separate line, dubbed “Pleats Please,” to … Read the article
78 years ago Joe Moser was shot down during his 44th mission. Joe is the main character in my most recent solo book, Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival. It was published in hardcover … Read the article
You helped bring down Al Capone before you turned thirty. What do you do for an encore?… Read the article
August 29th is the anniversary of the discovery of Ishi. No, this is not an island or one of Jupiter’s moons. At the time when Ishi was found, on August 29, 1911, he was touted as the … Read the article
These were children who had known only a world of violence. Yet amid the bloodied ruins of Berlin in 1945, apartment blocks and entire streets transformed into canyons of jagged rubble, older women and men moving around … Read the article
Annie Oakley is one of those Wild West figures whose name is familiar to many people but they don’t know much about her. In honor of the anniversary of her birthday on August 13, let’s find out … Read the article
Scorpions’ Dance by Jefferson Morley is the untold story of President Richard Nixon, CIA Director Richard Helms, and their volatile shared secrets that ended a presidency. In the following excerpt from the book, Morley covers Helms’ not … Read the article
There are two reasons to write about James Butler Hickok right now. One is baseball. We are in what the sport’s scribes call the “dog days” of the season when the pennant races become as hot as … Read the article
Robert Peary gets all the accolades (and plenty of warranted skepticism) for being the first to the North Pole, but he would never have made it there (if he did) without the intrepid master mariner and ice … Read the article