I trudged along a canal in Berlin back in 2011, hoping to see the inside of one of the few remaining watchtowers in the city—a guard tower where East Berlin soldiers kept an eagle eye out for people escaping to West Berlin. The guards had shoot-to-kill orders. When...
NOTE—An earlier blog, Doing Your Research Right, discussed my research habits when writing historical novels. This is a follow-up blog.  *  *  * I guess I should have known what day it was when I showed up at the old watchtower in Berlin in 2011. I didn’t...
The teenage girl entered the forest on what appeared to be an ordinary stroll, stopping to pick wildflowers along the way. In truth, she was on a secret mission to deliver an important message to a British paratrooper hiding in the Arnhem forest during World...
The world-famous fantasy epic, Lord of the Rings, might never have been written if the author had not come down with a fever. The author of the trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien, was an officer for the British army during World War I. But when he came down with “trench...
An elderly man shoves two packages out of a fourth floor window, and then he crawls out and sits on the ledge, staring down at the ground below. Then slowly, carefully, he turns himself around, lowers himself from the ledge, and lets go, plunging down four stories,...
Who would have thought that a supermarket company's commercial could capture one of the most poignant moments in a bloody war--World War I? The Christmas season is behind us, but I have to mention the commercial that the Sainsbury Company produced this past Christmas,...
I did an interview on my Berlin novel, "The Puzzle People," this past week in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Wall came down on November 9, 1989, when an East German bureaucrat accidentally announced the immediate opening of...
This week, as the world observed the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the forgotten stories from the amazing year of 1989 was what took place in Leipzig, East Germany, just one month before the Wall came down on November 9. A Monday prayer...
It seems hard to imagine today, but the Nazis rose to power because they were considered a populist movement at one time, working for the common good. But how could people come to believe such a thing? I recently interviewed University of Illinois professor Peter...
A wrong turn triggered World War I. To find out how, check out a recent story that I wrote for the University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. A Wrong Turn in History