During the past month, I have been doing research on the wet-plate photographic method, also known as the collodion process. This early photographic process was introduced in the 1850s, and by the time the Civil War began it had replaced the earlier daguerreotype...
Pat Gill teaches some of the most popular film classes on the University of Illinois campus. But over the years she has noticed that an increasing number of students have problems with old movies--and by old movies she includes those in the 1980's and 90's. As a...
Thank General Burnsides for the word "sideburns." General Ambrose Burnsides was a Union general during the Civil War known for his facial hair, which came down the sides of his face and connected with his mustache, while his chin remained clean-shaven. These enormous...
One of the great things about researching my novel, The Puzzle People, was that I could go to Youtube and see videos taken of the Berlin Wall as it went up in 1961 and then came down in 1989. In fact, whenever I sat down to work on the novel, many times I would...
What city was the first to install public lighting? Why did Nicodemus, the man who visited Jesus in the dead of night, become more revered in the 1600s? And why did Benjamin Franklin become a night owl? An article that I recently wrote for the University of Illinois...
Jennifer Goran, the Champaign actress who portrays Ellen Craft, the hero of my novel, The Vanishing Woman, was recently featured by the Champaign newspaper, The News Gazette. Jennifer mentions her new venture, portraying "History By the Slice" heroines. Check it out....
No one expected the American Civil War to last very long. Senator James Chestnut of South Carolina even boasted that he would be able to drink all of the blood spilled during the brief conflict. The first major battle--the Battle of Bull Run (known as the Battle of...
Several new memorials have been added since the last time my wife and I were in Washington D.C. (1981), including the moving Vietnam Memorial. However, the new monument that captured our imagination during our recent D.C. visit was the Korean War Veterans Memorial--19...
Over the centuries, some people have believed that just about anybody but William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays. People have credited the plays to Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Walter Raleigh, but the most famous theory is that the plays were...
When I did a presentation at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati last fall, one of the people at the museum said jokingly, "The women here were wondering if the man on the cover of my novel, The Disappearing Man, was going to come along...