Newsroom

“A man, a van, and a crazy plan.” That’s how my editor described it. My coauthors, American’s Larry Heaney and Eric Rickart, knew me well enough to believe I could pull it off. Having spent months in the field by myself studying Philippine mammals, the idea of...

Last March, I received an unusual email. It came to the Press’s general mailbox and was passed around until it landed on my desk. The email was from a high school student on a speech and debate team who was preparing a performance on Hollywood’s...

Like many of my colleagues that study horses and zebras and asses, when I take off my objective scientist hat, what remains is someone who genuinely loves horses. I love the smell of them. I love hearing my horse’s nicker when I go to feed him in the morning...

A reviewer of my just released fourth book, Faces of the Civil War Navies, asked me a question that I found difficult to answer. What’s your favorite story? The question seems simple and straightforward on is face. But I’ve spent the last four years immersed...

Perhaps it’s the election of 2016. More and more of us, it seems, are obsessively checking the news on cable channels and websites several times a day. Or we haunt Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates. We typically think of this obsession with the news...

Maryland Blood is a stirring, true-life adventure story spanning four centuries of American history. Seen through the unique lens of one Maryland family’s eyes, the adventures unfold through Hambleton letters preserved in archives across the United States...

America is losing the fight against HIV/AIDS. Last year, CDC leaders summarized the evidence in the New England Journal of Medicine. The most compelling data show that for the last 20 years the annual number of new HIV infections in the United States has...

One of the interesting things I learned while researching my book, was the way our conception of pain has changed over time. Prior to 1900, pain was viewed as an immediate and short-lived response to an injury or illness – the body’s emergency warning system...

The traditional media used in education has at least one major Achilles heel. No matter how well produced and instructional the content may be, the learning experience is primarily passive and the extent to which learners can control the flow of that content...

The following is an excerpt from chapter nine of Gregory Dowd's latest book, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Late in the Revolutionary War, in Passy, France, [Benjamin] Franklin lifted his pen in a most extraordinary...