During his lifetime, Archbishop Oscar Romero chose to live the Christian Gospel in a radical way, defending, supporting, and serving the poor, and confronting the oppressive and murderous violence of the Salvadoran dictatorship. As a result, in March...

Her parents never really explained what a D. P. was. Years later Daiva Markelis learned that "displaced person" was the designation bestowed upon European refugees like her mom and dad who fled communist Lithuania after the war. Growing up in the Chi...

On the surface, Lucie Christine – the pseudonym given to a nineteenth-century Frenchwoman named Mathilde Boutle – was a very ordinary upper-middle-class woman, fulfilling her daily responsibilities to her husband and children. But underneath, Lucie C...

Galileo's telescopic discoveries, and especially his observation of sunspots, caused great debate in an age when the heavens were thought to be perfect and unchanging. Christoph Scheiner, a Jesuit mathematician, argued that sunspots were planets or m...

Street-smart, wickedly funny, piercingly perceptive, and eloquent enough to win a Pulitzer Prize, Mike Royko continues to have legions of devoted fans who still wonder "what Royko would have said" about some outrageous piece of news. One thing he har...

Combining the incisive pen of a newspaperman and the compassionate soul of a poet, Mike Royko became a Chicago institution – in Jimmy Breslin's words, "the best journalist of his time".Early Royko: Up Against It in Chicago" will restore to print the...

Alain L. Locke (1886-1954), in his famous 1925 anthology "The New Negro", declared that "the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem". Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke had his finger directly on that pulse, promot...

Geographer Jack Ives moved to Canada in 1954, and soon after he played an instrumental role in the establishment of the McGill Sub-Arctic Research Laboratory in central Labrador-Ungava. This fascinating account of his fifty-plus years living and work...

In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365-1430?), one of the most renowned and prolific woman writers of the Middle Ages, wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular and widely read "Romance of the Rose" for its blatant and unwarran...

After laughing their way through his classic and beloved depictions of nineteenth-century American life, few readers would suspect that Mark Twain's last years were anything but happy and joyful. They would be wrong. Contrary to the myth perpetrated...