Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Author Thom Hatch promises mind-blowing new revelations in his book on the Battle of Little Bighorn. And in other news, Rutherford B. Hayes is rumored to be contemplating a run for president.
Read MoreAn extremely winning new book explores the enormous ways eight particular animal kinds have altered the course of human life on Earth
Read MoreOne hundred years ago, a German U-boat sank the RMS Lusitania, with grievous loss of civilian life. The anniversary is observed by one of our best popular historians
Read MoreA chatty, vivacious new book tracks the four sons of the Royal House of Windsor during the years of World War Two
Read MoreIn April of 1945, the destroyer USS Laffey was bombarded by wave after wave of kamikaze fighters - and yet survived. A gripping new book tells the story of a ship that refused to die
Read MoreIn time for the hundred-year anniversary of the Ottoman killing of over a million Armenians, a gripping new history tells the whole story of the tragedy
Read MoreThe tense and frantic final months of the American Civil War forms the backdrop for Joseph Wheelan's lively new book
Read MoreThe sprawling system of concentration camps established by the Nazis gets its first comprehensive history
Read MoreA fantastic, important new study traces the history of insanity in human history
Read MoreThe military collapse of France in 1940 has been a punch line and byword for decades, but a provocative new book argues that the traditional view is too simple
Read MoreIn 1936 Nazi Germany poured money and manpower into backing General Franco in the Spanish Civil War; a new history powerfully re-interprets that fraught relationship
Read MoreA new book tells the story of the War Cabinet Winston Churchill assembled to fight the Second World War
Read MoreBeyond the battles and trenches of the First World War, a dozen less glamorous but no less vital fights were being waged - in laboratories and darkrooms and publishing offices. A vibrant new book tells the story of the other World War I
Read More800 years ago, King John "Lackland" sealed Magna Carta and unwittingly laid the foundation for some of Western law; a new book takes a fresh look at this much-maligned figure
Read MoreFor more than a thousand years, the sprawling area of the Baltic has played host to history, art, and fitful commerce - a new history tells the story.
Read MoreA fantastic new book tells the story of President Washington and the extraordinary team he assembled to form the new nation's first administration
Read MoreIn 1939 the Nazis established their only concentration camp specifically for women; a comprehensive new book tells the history of Ravensbruck
Read MoreFrom Lizzie Borden to O. J. Simpson, big public show-trials have fascinated the American people. In his new book, renowned legal historian Lawrence Friedman tries to dissect why that is.
Read MoreThe rebel pharaoh who instituted a radical new monotheism gets a highly-detailed and revisionist investigation
Read MoreThe Ottoman Empire joined the fighting of the First World War deeply misunderstood by both sides; a charismatic new book seeks to clarify the story of that odd meeting of East and West
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.