Meister Frantz Schmidt executed 394 people during the course of a nearly half century as an executioner, mostly in the important German city of Nuremburg. In addition, he tortured, flogged [...]
Part 2 of two parts. Here's the first part. Like the rest of the world, Atlantic Monthly Press and Northwestern University historian Carl Smith weren’t planning on Covid-19. But that’s [...]
Part 1 of two parts Carl Smith’s Chicago’s Great Fire, published in August by Atlantic Monthly Press, is an important book of Chicago history, a rousing crackerjack work that’s highly [...]
Betty Lovejoy and her younger sisters Emily and Annie Ruth, all successful black women, have come together in Mulberry, Georgia, to bury their mother, known by the family nickname as [...]
Devastation is devastation, whether brought about by fire or pandemic. The Great Chicago Fire occurred nearly a century and a half ago, but the experience of living through that [...]
He tossed his sin stone By Patrick T. Reardon He tossed his sin stone into Lake Deuteronomy, set fire to his crops and headed for Egypt City. [...]
“Visceral” is one of those no-nonsense words. It goes right to the gut. You can look at art, look at the world, with your intellect. But, if you turn a [...]
Jesus and the people of Judea lived under the heel of the Roman army and of Tiberius, the emperor, which is a fancy name for dictator. The Zealots were the [...]
In its odd way, John Brunner’s 1984 novel The Tides of Time is an adventure story. It’s also a thriller and a mystery that propels the reader along in search [...]
It takes some hubris to rewrite the Christian gospels, but maybe not that much. A lot of people have done it. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John seem [...]
