U.S. History
Aaron Burr on Staten Island
Aaron Burr’s final days on Staten Island are the subject of a delightful new volume by Martha Smith Kakuk and Ray Swick: Aunt Abby and Aaron Burr’s Last Days: Staten Island, the Summer of 1836, and the Death of America’s Most Notorious Man. Brought out in a limited addition by the Printing Press, Ltd. of Charleston,…
Read MoreLooking for America in World War I
On a recent trip to France, as part of research for a novel I hope to write next year, my long-suffering wife endured several days in northeastern France looking for traces of America’s role in World War I. The weather was just right for imagining nasty, soggy trench warfare, where half the casualties were from illness,…
Read More"The Lincoln Deception": One step closer!
I just received a few “advanced reader copies” (i.e., copies for reviewers) of my forthcoming novel, The Lincoln Deception. It’s a great pleasure to see them, though the book doesn’t go on sale until August 27. You can reserve a copy by pre-0rder from Amazon. I dedicated this one — a historical mystery that tries to unravel the secrets of the…
Read MoreBurr's Corsets . . .
Aaron Burr’s devotion to the charms of the fair sex is the apparent justification for a new exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Upper Manhattan, where Burr lived for a few months during his short-lived second marriage at age 77. The show is titled “The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry and Binding.” I did…
Read MoreThe Lincoln Deception
Well, there it is! The cover of my first novel, which will be released on August 27. Sink into the crepuscular gaslight of Washington in 1900 as our mismatched heroes struggle to scrape away the myths, misunderstandings and lies surrounding the John Wilkes Booth Conspiracy, while dodging the powerful secret forces that need to keep the…
Read MorePirates Ahoy!
I don’t think these pirates look much like Captain Jack Sparrow, though it might be more entertaining if they did. Nah, it wouldn’t. I was blown away by a recent notice from Simon & Schuster, publisher of my three books to date, reporting the number of pirated e-copies of my books that they have bullied off the Internet. What’s…
Read MoreReading Madison's Mail
Bulletins from the frontiers of research: When it came to negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, American diplomats James Monroe and Robert Livingston sewed up the deal in a couple of weeks. When it came to squabbling over credit, the two diplomats spent eighteen months writing backbiting letters to James Madison (Secretary of State) explaining in excrutiating detail…
Read MoreWas King Richard III really all that bad?
After 500 years, we now know where the bones of King Richard III of England are. They have been found under a parking lot in Leicester, England, near the site of the Battle of Bosworth where he was slain. The evil genius of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard — hunchbacked, vicious, fiendish clever — was the…
Read MoreA True Collector, Part 2
We last left our hero in the Dallas library of Harlan Crow, admiring the paintings of three World War II leaders (Eisenhower, Churchill, and Hitler). Outside the library, however, lurked even greater wonders: a collection of gigantic statues of some of the 20th centuries most monstrous dictators, including — Lenin Stalin Mao Tse Tung Chou…
Read MoreA True Collector, part 1
While in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get a tour of the Harlan Crow Library, which is in Mr. Crow’s home. It was an amazing treat. After making our way past a couple of Charles Willson Peale portraits, we proceeded into his World War II room (or so I…
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