This week we offer the second part of two special episodes featuring David Maraniss, the veteran journalist and author of 13 highly regarded books. His latest book, Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, will be published by Simon and Schuster in August 2022. Maraniss is a New York Times bestselling author, associate editor at The Washington Post and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. In addition, his reporting and writing has earned him… Read More »

This week we offer the first of two special episodes featuring David Maraniss, the veteran journalist and author of 13 highly regarded books. His latest book, Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, will be published by Simon & Schuster in August 2022. Maraniss is a New York Times bestselling author and associate editor at The Washington Post. In 1992 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on then presidential… Read More »

This week we interview Tomiko Brown-Nagin, author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, published by Pantheon in January 2022. Brown-Nagin serves as Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and Professor of History at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, she was appointed chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the… Read More »

This week we interview John Markoff, a Pulitzer Prize winning, veteran science and technology journalist for The New York Times, the Pacific News Service, InfoWorld, Byte Magazine, and The San Jose Mercury. Markoff also has shared his journalistic skills as a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism, and as an adjunct faculty member of the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism. His latest biography about a man… Read More »

This week we interview Alejandro Madrid, an award-winning Cornell University musicologist who specializes in music and expressive culture from Latin America and Latinxs in the United States. He has authored more than a half dozen books, including his latest, Tania Léon’s Stride. A Polyrhythmic Life, published by the University of Illinois Press in December 2021. Tania Léon, now in her late 70s, is a sought-after composer, conductor, educator, and tireless advocate for the arts.… Read More »

This week we interview Paulina Bren, an award-winning writer and Vassar College historian. Her latest book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free is a New York Times Editor’s Choice. The Barbizon has received international press coverage and it has been optioned by HBO and Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke. Foreign rights have been sold to Italy, Spain, Hungary, South America, China, Russia and South Korea. Paulina Bren is a well-known scholar of… Read More »

This week we interview Sheena Harris, a Woodburn Associate Professor of history and coordinator of the Africana Studies Program at West Virginia University. Previously, she served as an Associate Professor of history and the Inaugural Director of Student Engagement Initiatives at Tuskegee University. She is a first-time biographer and author of Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman, published by the University of Tennessee Press in February 2021. A powerful… Read More »

This week we interview Tyrone McKinley Freeman, an award-winning associate professor of Philanthropic Studies and director of undergraduate programs at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. His latest book, Madam C.J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy During Jim Crow, was published by the University of Illinois Press in September 2020. His work has appeared or been cited in the New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, TIME, Harvard … Read More »

This week we interview biographer and historian, Debby Applegate. Her first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. This book also was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, NPR’s Fresh Air, the Washington … Read More »

Happy New Year! This week we interview Gary Ginsberg, author of The New York Times bestseller, First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (and Unelected) People Who Shaped Out Presidents, published by Twelve in July 2021. The book explores nine select American presidents (Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton) and the relationships they had with their best friends. A lawyer by training, Ginsberg worked… Read More »