Read Beat (...and repeat)

McKeesport, Pa. has been through a lot in recent decades. Andrew Conte tells the story in his book, Death of the Daily News. The town, located 20 miles from Pittsburgh, once manufactured about 70 percent of all steel tubing used in the United States, earning the moniker of “Tube City.” Like other towns in southwestern Pennsylvania, McKeesport fell on hard times in the 1970s and 1980s as foreign steel imports undercut American manufacturers. The city’s population, that once topped 50,000 in the mid-20th century, is now down to 17,500.

The McKeesport business district, with its movie theaters, furniture stores, jewelr...

Robert Ingersoll lived in Peoria from 1857 to 1877. He was hailed as the greatest orator of his time, the latter half of the 19th century. 

While Ingersoll attracted huge crowds, he had plenty of critics who called him “the Great Infidel” because of his criticism of organized religion. “Religion can make a good man somewhat better,” Ingersoll mused, “but usually it only makes bad men worse.”

While decrying the Bible and organized religion, Ingersoll supported women’s rights while opposing racism and the death penalty. “In an age before microphones and mass media, he was a household name in...

Anti-Communist feelings reached a fever pitch in the United States following World War II. The big war was won, but the Cold War was on.

Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter, addresses this point in his fourth book, Red Scare, where he takes you back to that postwar period, where, as author Stacy Schiff put it in one of the blurbs on the book’s back cover, “a group of hardened conservatives lost their heads and a country lost its way.”

“Everywhere it seemed the Communists were on the offensive and winning,” Risen writes of the lat...

World War II is a never-ending source of history. Decades after the conflict’s conclusion, research and examination continue as we seek to understand how we got to where we are today.

In Building Bridges, Douglas Bristol examines how the military treated Black Americans before, during, and after the national emergency that WWII represented. 

Initially, Black Americans weren’t accepted into the service like their white counterparts. When the first peacetime draft was instituted in 1940, many Blacks were passed over by local draft boards, especially in the South. Spurred on by the federal government, more Black...

Shannon Monaghan is a military historian whose last book, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men, offered an account of select British special operations unit members who were so important during World War II.

This time around, Monaghan covers a more recent conflict, one that’s still going on: the war between Ukraine and Russia. In To Die With Such Men (Hurst & Co.), the reader is taken behind the lines as Monaghan recreates some of the missions fought in the early stages of a war that started in 2022 when Russia invaded the country. Through extensive interviews with members of...

World War II may have ended 80 years ago, but it’s still happening for Jenny Chan, a 2012 University of Illinois graduate.

Chan is president and founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a non-profit based in San Francisco that churns out history regarding World War II’s Pacific front.

In addition to publishing 29 books by a wide variety of authors that document human rights abuses, military battles, resistance efforts, and relate other untold efforts from the war, Chan’s group has produced over 500 short historical videos for Pacific Front Untold on YouTube. The group’s website, pacificatrocities.org, has...

Craig Pittman is one writer who doesn’t have to spend a lot of time digging up story ideas. As a 30-year veteran of the Tampa Bay Times and now a reporter for the Florida Phoenix, Pittman gets tips online or by phone as well as having dozens of reliable sources who will alert him to the latest goings-on in his home state of Florida.

Florida has been Pittman’s beat for decades. “Nine hundred people move to this state every day. I look at it as my job to tell them what they’re in for. A lot of...

Rob Christensen’s new book, Southern News, Southern Politics (University of North Carolina Press), is more than the history of the newspaper, the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., described at one point by a politician as “pretty damn fearless.” It’s a profile of the Daniels family, starting with Josephus Daniels in 1895, whose family’s ownership of the paper spanned most of the 20th century.

The book chronicles the involvement of members of the Daniels family with U.S. presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, all of whom found support from the paper and its ow...

When Christy Mathewson burst upon the scene with the New York Giants in 1900, baseball had a less-than-perfect image. It was a rowdy game played by roughnecks known for their consumption of alcohol and chewing tobacco, said Alan Gaff, author of Baseball’s First Superstar.

Mathewson’s good looks and his quiet, easy-going manner made him a hit with the ladies, Gaff said. “Women came to baseball games,” he noted, adding that “opposing clubs would schedule Ladies Days for games in which Christy would pitch and women would come in throngs.”

On the field, Mathewson racked up big numbe...

When Christy Mathewson burst upon the scene with the New York Giants in 1900, baseball had a less-than-perfect image. It was a rowdy game played by roughnecks known for their consumption of alcohol and chewing tobacco, said Alan Gaff, author of Baseball’s First Superstar.

Mathewson’s good looks and his quiet, easy-going manner made him a hit with the ladies, Gaff said. “Women came to baseball games,” he noted, adding that “opposing clubs would schedule Ladies Days for games in which Christy would pitch and women would come in throngs.”

On the field, Mathewson racked up big numbe...

True crime accounts are all the rage these days. But Tom Chorneau didn’t want to just add another cold case to the national docket.

Instead, the unsolved murder of Myrtle Cook in 1925 is related to political forces flowing through the state of Iowa at the time, with Chorneau, a former reporter, explaining the state’s near-constant battle over temperance.

During the first half-century of statehood, Iowa lurched from wet to dry eight times before Prohibition was ratified in 1919. Cook was president of the local temperance union when she was shot through the heart.

Ch...

How did you learn about the American West? Books came first. Reading material included notorious dime novels that made legends of Buffalo Bill and Jesse James. Newspapers and magazines, meanwhile, focused on the American West in the 19th century as railways turned the frontier into an attraction for tourists who watched herds of buffalo disappearing while Native Americans were being herded onto reservations.

Western history was recorded in so many movies—from silent films like On the War Path (1911) and The Indian Massacre (1912) to John Ford epics like Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946) along with High Noon (1952), A...

Chrysler released a special edition of the Dodge Royal Lancer that Chrysler in 1955 called LaFemme. Marketed as “a car for the modern woman,” the model offered a pink-and-white color scheme along with matching accessories. There was only one problem: women didn’t buy it. Chrysler soon dropped the concept due to low sales.

That’s just one of the examples that Jessica Brockmole details in her book, Pink Cars and Pocketbooks, a study of U.S. auto industry efforts to win over female customers through the 20th century.

Brockmole points out that women were a factor i...

Much is made of the temples and striking artwork of the ancient Maya. Justifiably. Ever since U.S. travel writer John Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood explored the ruins of Copan in Honduras, publishing Incidents of Travel in Central America in 1841, the world has been aware of the “lost world” of the Maya.

Stephens’ dramatic accounts and keen insight at what he found along with Catherwood’s meticulous engravings at numerous Maya sites proved to be a revelation. The public learned about structures like the Temple of the Sun and the Monument at Quirigia, of pyramids and plaz...

Before Alison Kosik wrote What's Up With Women and Money?: How To Do All the Financial Stuff You’ve Been Avoiding she’d been a business correspondent for CNN, often filing stories from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Kosik interviewed heads of business and corporate experts regularly but relegated financial decisions to her husband. Although dealing with business on a daily basis on the job, when it came to her own personal finances, she decided not to get involved.

Although in what she called “a bad marriage,” she confessed to being terrified to leave...

Abbi Waxman, a British-born Californian, is the author of eight books including I Was Told It Would Get Easier, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, and The Garden of Small Beginnings. 

Her latest, One Death at a Time, is promoted as a “feel-good mystery,” a categorization that Waxman seems relatively happy with. But then Waxman confesses to be a relatively happy person. “One Death at a Time is funny. All my books are lighthearted,” she said.

Born in England in 1970, Waxman came to the United States at 21, setting up a lifelong battle between her Britishness and her A...

Frances Perkins is one of those figures in history that you need to know more about. Helping in that regard is the latest book from Stephanie Dray, a historical novel called Becoming Madam President.

Published in March 2024, Becoming is the 10th work of historical fiction for Dray who likes to write about revolutionary women, both those involved in the American Revolution and, as in Perkins' case, women whose work was revolutionary.

Perhaps best known as the Secretary of Labor in Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet, a position she held for 12 years, Perkins is credited with helping...

Jesse Sutanto is a successful writer educated at Oxford and California, lives in Jakarta, and has found her niche: the cozy mystery.

I didn’t know what a cozy mystery was until Jesse explained it. “Nothing truly bad happens to the primary characters. For example, I couldn’t kill off Vera Wong,” she said.

“Cozy mysteries have a lot of standard features,” said Richelle Braswell, a writer who explains some of the many varieties out there in her online essay, “Cozy Mystery Plots.” The stories usually involve an amateur sleuth, no explicit gore and a cute or funny si...

The ancient Maya civilization is known for many things: pyramids, stone sculptures, complex astronomical calculations, a writing system, a rubber-ball game and the subject of anthropologist Dean Arnold's latest book, Maya Blue (University Press of Colorado).

Arnold, an adjunct curator of anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and professor emeritus of anthropology at Wheaton College, has published more than 60 articles about potters, pottery and pottery production.

He has pursued the mystery of what he describes as a beautiful blue pigment that's proved impervious to fading "even after exposure for many hundreds of years...

W.E. B. DuBois went on record in 1896 saying that white supremacy significantly warps whites' perceptions and behaviors. Even earlier--in 1890--as a 22-year-old Harvard College student--he called out Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

He outlined the Davis career in a 10-minute speech as one who "advanced civilization by murdering Indians" and participated in the "national disgrace called the Mexican War" before attaining "the crowning absurdity" of his career, heading up the Confederacy, "the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free."<...

Ida Lupino's "problem" was that she constantly found herself the smartest person in the room, noted biographer Alexandra Seros, a Hollywood screenwriter and the author of Ida Lupino: Forgotten Auteur (University of Texas Press).

Lupino was more than a great actress but also a successful director. The Hitch-Hiker, a film made in 1953, is now considered a film noir classic. The fact that a woman directed the movie places when few women directors worked on major film releases places her in exclusive company, said Seros.

"Actually The Hitch-Hiker was not straight noir, it was a crime...

Maia Lee-Chin, whose book, Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases (Andrews McMeel), was published last year, got more out of Latin class than I did.

But she admits it didn't just happen. "I was forced to enroll in Latin. I considered dropping the course several times, especially while translating Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico. I couldn't understand his long-winded explanations of wartime strategies, and I had no love for Roman history," wrote Lee-Chin.

"Something changed when I first translated the Aeneid from Latin to English. I was struck by the kinship I felt...

The Washington Post calls Mark Greaney the Tom Cruise of thriller writers. Like the Mission Impossible star, Greaney is on a roll, following in the footsteps of Tom Clancy, the thriller writer whose books have sold over 100 million copies.

Greaney, who said he became obsessed with Clancy’s work as a teenager, co-wrote several books with Clancy before the author died in 2013. While carrying on the exploits of Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan, in several books, Greaney started a successful series of his own in 2009 with Court Gentry, the Gray Man, “a legend in the covert realm, moving...

Kimberly Kay Hoang, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, traveled over 300,000 miles, conducting hundreds of interviews to trace the flow of capital from offshore funds in the Cayman Islands, Samoa or Panama to holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Her book, Spiderweb Capitalism, reveals how some of this money finds its way into risky markets in Vietnam and Myanmar.
"Not only was getting access to wealthy individuals around the world highly challenging, but then trying to connect the dots of their relationships with one another in tangled and layered webs felt like being...

“It’s a new world when it comes to journalism. That prompted Patrick Ferrucci, the head of the journalism department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, to go out and see how that world has changed.

The Organization of Journalism offers a profile of six different business models that now bring folks the news or sports, as the case may be. There’s the St. Louis Beacon, a digital nonprofit,  and the Defector, an employee-owned cooperative focusing on sports and culture. The Colorado Sun, a startup led by former Denver Post employees, and the Athletic, a sports...

You already know about the local news crisis. The proof is probably not in your hands with the demise of so many newspapers. The terms “ghost paper” (a publication with an old masthead and little else) and “news deserts” (areas without local news coverage of any kind) are part of the vernacular these days.

Communities have had to be inventive to replace the local news they once took for granted, says Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston and co-author of What Works in Community News with Ellen Clegg, a former editor on the Boston G...

It’s been 80 years since the bloodiest battle of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, a five-week struggle that started during the Christmas season of 1944 that took 19,000 American lives in fighting in the densely wooded Ardennes region of Germany.

It was Germany’s last stand, said O’Connor, who drew on considerable research of that battle in Jeep Show, a novel that focuses on the U.S. Army’s troupe of performers who put on small variety acts for combat infantry just behind the front lines. 

While the USO entertained troops throughou...

Dr. Jordan Grumet is a hospice doctor as well as a podcaster at The Earn & Invest Podcast. He’s also an author whose new book is The Purpose Code, a follow-up Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life, published in 2022.

Grumet describes his own battle to find purpose in life, relinquishing a job as a full-time medical doctor in 2014. While he didn’t want to give up being a hospice physician, he got rid of everything else to hold onto those things he enjoyed: encouraging people to find f...

Books that seek to help you understand the world of finance probably aren’t viewed as the most engaging of literary categories. Consumers, after all, hold that book in their hands for a specific reason: to understand policy rates better or inflation-linked bonds not for a ripsnorting reading adventure.

Paul Podolsky, a former equity partner at Bridgewater Associates and the founder and CIO of Kate Capital, an investment management firm, however, has tried to make his advice on the subject accessible. The Uncomfortable Truth About Money carries a subtitle: How to live with uncertainty and think for yo...

You’re a Japanese American living in Nebraska in 1941. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, sending the United States into war. What do you do?

At 24 when war broke out, Nebraskan Ben Kuroki enlisted to fight for his country. Ben joined the Army Air Force along with his brother. 

In Most Honorable Son by Gregg Jones, Kuroki’s unique wartime experience is related.

Ben Kuroki not only flew a staggering 58 combat missions as a gunner on Army Air Force bombers but battled racism and resentment on the home front.

Despite anti-Japanese sentiment runni...

So many images represent Walt Disney. There’s that mouse, of course, and all those movies. There’s so much music, countless cartoons, and aisles of toys Once there were even comic books. Characters like Donald Duck operated across many different media. We know about the cartoons starring an exasperated duck with a funny voice. But there was also an adventure series with Donald, his nephews, and a miserly Uncle Scrooge in comic books created by cartoonist Carl Barks.

Barks, who worked for Disney from 1942 to 1966, is now singled out for his comic-book creations. Other people have depi...

Pickleball has become the fastest-growing sport in America. Ilana Long, author of Pickleballers, a debut romantic comedy set in Seattle, noted that as many as 50 million individuals are expected to play the sport in 2024.
The game, which Long calls multigenerational, serves as the backdrop for a story about a young woman who, on the rebound of a breakup, finds solace and redemption on the pickleball court.
Long, who said the sport gave her life during the pandemic, says she's met folks on the pickleball court she'd never have run into otherwise. 
The pickleballer in Long's book i...

Whenever the Jurassic Park/World franchise launches another movie entry, the national media runs to quote “a dinosaur guy” for a professional analysis. One of the guys they call is David Hone, a zoologist at Queen Mary University in London and the author of How Fast Did T.rex Run? and the Tyrannosaur Chronicles.

Hone’s latest book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior (Princeton University Press), seeks to provide answers as to how dinosaurs may have moved, fed, grew, and reproduced.

Deducing dinosaur behavior isn’t easy when all you’ve got to go on are a few bones...

A plaque standing in downtown Bloomington, Ill. pays tribute to that city’s circus heritage:

“In the era before movies, television, and the internet, it was the circus that entertained us…For more than 80 years, spanning the 1870s until the 1950s, countless numbers of brave Bloomington men and women risked their lives to entertain massive crowds by performing aerial tricks high up on the flying trapeze.” 

After two local brothers, Howard and Fred Green installed a trapeze rigging in a Bloomington building in 1875, the town became known as a center for trapeze artists. When the Green bro...

Decades before the Civil War, Illinois meant freedom for those seeking to escape slavery.  Larry McClellan’s Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois is his third book exploring the phenomenon known as the Underground Railroad.

McClellan, a resident of Crete, Illinois, some 35 miles south of Chicago, served as a professor of sociology at Governors State University, the Chicago school he helped found 54 years ago.

“It was neither underground nor a railroad,” said McClellan. The Underground Railroad was a freedom movement that depended on a fundamental human situation, he said. “When peop...

The comics page has long been a place for cars and energy. Comic strips like Otto Auto, Toonerville Folks, and Gasoline Alley related a nation that happily motored about in a car-centric world.

Daniel Worden, an art professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, relates that history in Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics.

“This book analyzes how comics represented this transition to fossil fuels from the late nineteenth century to the present, a transition that shaped the comics medium itself,” wrote Worden, who teaches a course on comics at RIT.

“I...

Doug Villhard knew that Red Grange might have been the greatest running back in the history of college football. He was also singularly responsible for helping make the National Football League an established professional league. But Villhard said what drew him to write the historical novel, The Golden Age of Red, was Grange’s alliance with C.C. Pyle, the man who became America’s first sports agent.

The University of Illinois is the setting as the book takes off with Pyle running the Virginia Theater in Champaign, Illinois. The year is 1924 and it's the year that Red...

It’s a story of World War II but it’s also a story of politics, power, seduction, and intrigue. Did I leave anything out?

Pamela Churchill Harriman didn’t as Sonia Purnell’s book, Kingmaker, makes clear. The British biographer and journalist spent five years gathering information on Harriman’s life, including gaining access to a wealth of fresh research, interviews, and newly discovered sources. 

Harriman, who died in 1997, is well-known as Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, the 20-year-old who played cards with Winston in the middle of the night when bombs were falling on London but sh...

The 20th century American department store: a palace of consumption where shopping meant something more than simply getting what one needed. Every major city had at least one department store with a name that lives on even in this age of discounters and online buying.

New York, of course, was the nation’s business capital, main market and fashion center. 

Julie Satow tells the story of how women helped develop the department store and fashion in this country even though men owned the buildings. Inside the store, however, women ruled.

When Women Ran Fif...

The overriding message you get after reading the essays collected by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University history professor, and Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School, is that all the voting issues of today (charges of voting fraud, voter suppression, and foreign interference with the vote) have been with us a long time.
Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue outlines this country's less-than-illustrious past in pursuing democracy.
"The most significant challenges to free and fair elections in the United States have not, and do not...