Archive for July 2009
The Wages of Mendacity
Fed up with bestselling authors who plagiarizes and just make up facts? Me, too. I let it rip on Huffington Post today. After a day spent struggling with the microfilm readers at the Library of Congress, trying to nail down the facts for my new project, I was stunned to read how Ben Mezrich wrote the book…
Read MoreReconstruction, Andrew Johnson and the South
In the last several weeks, I have talked about my book, Impeached, before several groups in the South: Altanta, Lexington (KY), Nashville, Memphis. I was somewhat anxious about these appearances. After all, The book (and my talks) are highly critical of Southern policies towards the freed slaves.immediately after the Civil War. I also take a…
Read MoreThe French Revolution
No, not the decade-long upheaval in Europe that veered between liberty and riot. The novel set in San Francisco by Matt Stewart, which is being released on Twitter RIGHT NOW, as part of a great new experiment in social media. The media has had a field day with this story, including the Wall Street Journal…
Read MoreAaron Burr on Writers
In researching my current project on the Aaron Burr Conspiracy of 1805-07, I found the following declaration by Mr. Burr, in a letter to his daughter. Of all races of animals, authors are the vainest, but the sensorium of vanity is in their offspring. No eulogies of their works can be too gross or too…
Read MoreBook TV, Saturday, July 11
On Saturday, July 11, at 1 p.m., C-SPAN’s Book TV will air a panel discussion on the Civil War that I participated in last month at the Printers Row Book Festival in Chicago. I was talkiing, naturally enough, about Impeached. The other panelists were Tom Campbell, who has done an interesting book about abolitionists in…
Read MoreStranger than Fiction
I caught a remarkable movie last night on Turner Classic Movies: “The Baron of Arizona.” It tells the tale of James Addison Reavis, a swindler in the class of Bernie Madoff. In the late nineteenth century, Reavis claimed much of the state of Arizona under a bogus Spanish land grant. Several points in the story…
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