Proposed by Jeanne, we discussed Rough Sleepers at Jeanne & Bill’s on April 19, 2024. As a group we were impressed with Dr. Jim. Carolyn recalls that it was enlightening to her – especially the difference between “the homeless” and the “rough sleepers.” She remembers saying that working with Dr. Jim O’Connell would be crazy…
Critically acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt, the first complete one-volume life of the Rough Rider to be published in more than thirty years. From his sickly childhood to charging up San Juan Hill to waving his fist under J.P. Morgan’s rubicund nose, Theodore Roosevelt offers the intimate history of a man who continues to cast…
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Author Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New…
How a group of greatly gifted but deeply flawed individuals—Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madison—confronted the overwhelming challenges before them to set the course for our nation. Author Joseph J. Ellis is Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke and author of the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas…
Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for their paintings. Their dazzling works are familiar to even the most casual art lovers—but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people? Author Sue Roe is an acclaimed biographer and poet with a strong interest in the…
The Pope and Mussolini tells the story of two men who came to power in 1922, and together changed the course of twentieth-century history. One was scholarly and devout, the other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” had many things in common. Author David Israel Kertzer (1948) is an American anthropologist, historian,…
Frances Perkins was named Secretary of Labor by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. As the first female cabinet secretary, she spearheaded the fight to improve the lives of America’s working people while juggling her own complex family responsibilities. Perkins’s ideas became the cornerstones of the most important social welfare and legislation in the nation’s history, including…
In Walter Isaacson’s vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin seems to turn to us from history’s stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. By bringing Franklin to life, Isaacson shows how he helped to define both his own time and ours. Author Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen…
A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Author Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English…
Genius of Place tells the story of one of the most important figures in the history of America, Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted was a fervent abolitionist, noted journalist, Civil War hero, early environmentalist, and the landscape architect behind New York’s Central Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Stanford University, the Biltmore Estate and dozens of other green…
