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I never set out to write a book reinterpreting the financial, social, and political relationship between the American railroad and telegraph industries in the nineteenth century. I have always had an interest in the history of communication and, to a lesser...

This is a story about monsters, but not the kind you’re thinking of. Most real monsters do not have leathery wings or claws. They do not fit that stereotype. This is only partly a story of the hoary past. Though it begins in the late 1600s, it resonates with...

And some there be, which have no memorial; As though they had never been; And are become as though they had never been born . . . That passage from the book of Ecclesiasticus, which begins Hodges’ Scout, came out of the blue. More honestly, it came as an...

April 22 (1899) is the birthday of Vladmir Nabokov, the Russian-American author who died in 1977 and is most remembered for his controversial novel Lolita. What is extraordinary–Jerry Griswold suggests in this edited excerpt from his Audacious Kids: The...

When I started writing Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848, it had nothing to do with manufacturing. It actually started as a study of piracy and US-Spanish relations during the Latin American independence...

The Maryland Campaign of 1862 was one of the pivotal moments of our Civil War. It resulted in the bloodiest single day of the war, with the Battle of Antietam on September 17, the largest surrender of U.S. soldiers until World War II, at Harpers Ferry...

As a writer, it’s rare to feel that a story is destined for you. I felt that way with my first book, Ginseng, the Divine Root, about forests and a secretive subculture around a medicinal plant from American forests that for over two centuries has been exported...

In March 2017, eight scholars from a variety of disciplines gathered at Texas A&M University for a two-day conference called "1917: A Global Turning Point in History and Memory." The discussions and presentations were later developed into a special issue of...

The skyscraper is certainly not an understudied building typology. It has received plenty of scholarly attention in the century-and-a-half of its existence. A recent search for skyscrapers in the Library of Congress catalog resulted in 391 listings, which...

A few blocks away from Baltimore’s lively Inner Harbor stands one of railroading’s most iconic buildings: the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Roundhouse, known as the “Birthplace of American Railroading” and now the home of the B&O Railroad Museum. Built in 1884...