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The Normans: A History of Conquest

The Norman’s conquering of the known world was a phenomenon unlike anything Europe had seen up to that point in history. Although best known for the 1066 Conquest of England, they have left behind a far larger legacy. They emerged early in the tenth century but had disappeared from world…

Electric City: Ford and Edison’s Vision of Creating an 1920s Tech Utopia

During the roaring twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would…

Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium

Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination and entrepreneurial zeal. This unlikely element ascended on the market as a desirable item – a present for a queen, a prize in a treasure hunt,…

An Alternate History of the Lincoln Assassination Plot

How deeply was the Confederate Secret Service involved in the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln? Did the Confederate Secret Service assassinate Abraham Lincoln?” There are some strong indications that it did, but the facts uncovered in researching this question only raise more questions than they answer. After all, we are…

What if Tsarist Russia Hadn’t Gone Communist? Revolutionaries Like Boris Savinkov Tried to Accomplish This

Although now largely forgotten outside Russia, Boris Savinkov was famous, and notorious, both at home and abroad during his lifetime, which spans the end of the Russian Empire and the establishment of the Soviet Union. A complex and conflicted individual, he was a paradoxically moral revolutionary terrorist, a scandalous novelist,…

Hollywood Hates History: El Cid (1961)

Eleventh-century Spain was a violent borderland of Christian-Muslim bloodshed, but on the eve of the First Crusade, the two religions cooperated as much as they warred in Iberia. And who else to capture the heart of medieval Spain than Charlton Heston himself? Based on the real-life Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar,…

American Dunkirk – How Half a Million New Yorkers Were Evacuated from Manhattan Island on 9/11

The most famous large-scale sea rescue in history is the Dunkirk evacuation. Here nearly 400,000 Allied soldiers were surrounded by the German army in 1940, and Winston Churchill said, "the whole root and core and brain of the British Army" had been stranded at Dunkirk and seemed about to perish…

Hollywood Hates History: The Messenger – The Story of Joan of Arc (1999)

What happens when you cast Milla Jovovich as Joan of Arc, take away her combat finesse she displayed in the Resident Evil series, but have her embody the fringe historical theory that the Maid of Orleans did not follow God’s orders to liberate France but was actually a schizophrenic? Why…

Reviving Lost WW2 Stories With An M1 Rifle

You wouldn’t believe how these ninety-year-old WWII heroes come alive when you put a rifle in their hands. Andrew Biggio, a young U.S. Marine, returned from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq full of questions about the price of war. He went looking for answers from those who had survived the…

A Small Island in the English Channel Was the Birthplace of the Russian Revolution

Russia’s revolutionaries, anarchists, and refugees of the 19th century found an unlikely place to scheme against the Czar. These political radicals, writers, and freethinkers -- exiled from their homeland -- found sanctuary both in Britain and on the Isle of Wight during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This tiny…