Open That Scab

Maria Smilios is the author of The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis. Working as a development editor in the biomedical field, Smilios came upon the story of the African-American nurses who played a key role in the cure of tuberculosis and she just had to share it. The result is a gripping account of the lives of the women who came to New York and performed heroically against tremendous odds.

H.W. Brands is one of the pre-eminent historians today and has written numerous books that have not only won plaudits and awards but have changed the way we look at figures as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. We discuss his new book, Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of the American Politics. With one eye glued to our current political situation – in p...

Fergus Bordewich is one of the premier historians currently living, and his prior seminal works include Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America; Bound For Canaan: The Underground Railroad and The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government. His new book, Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Batt...

When David Garrow – Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Martin Luther King Jr. biography Bearing the Cross – first saw Barack Obama on television making his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, he was intrigued. He immediately read Obama’s book Dream’s From My Father and felt that the book read more like a novel than a piece of history. Garrow eventually went on a nine year journey to deconstruct the mythology that s...