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...
In 1989, tens of thousands of protesters tore down the Berlin Wall. But as The New York Times points out, the irony is that in 2013 people are protesting because they want the Wall to stay up--or at least one stretch of it. The East Side Gallery is the...
Bay Forest Books released a new book trailer for The Vanishing Woman, produced by Stan Severance. Check it out:Â http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uai2yECAxCc The opening lines of the trailer say, "Eliza called her father 'Papa'. Her half-sister, Ellen, called him...
When I was writing my novel The Puzzle People, I came across a photo of the Church of Reconciliation as it was being blown up in 1985 (shown on the left). But what caught my eye in the photo was the cross on the church steeple flying off in mid-air. So I described the...
I was listening to the audio version of Adam Goodheart's amazing book, 1861, when the phrase "The Little Dougs" leaped out at me. As a Doug myself, I have to say I like the sound of the Little Dougs, the name that supporters of the famed Illinois Senator, Stephen A....
Julia Ward Howe woke up before sunrise one morning in 1861, and history was made. When she woke, Julia heard the tramping of soldiers marching beneath her window in her room in Washington. Suddenly, the words of a poem came to her, and she leaped out of bed and began...
On Martin Luther King Day, actress Jennifer Goran had the crowd mesmerized as she portrayed Ellen Craft (the Vanishing Woman) at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park near Indianapolis. Even the youngest in the audience seemed to be caught up in her story, judging...
Jennifer Goran, a Champaign actress, did her first presentation this past week as Ellen Craft, the slave who escaped in 1848 by posing as a white man. Jennifer did a marvelous job bringing Ellen and her story to life for seventh and eighth grade students in Champaign,...