By Andrea Pitzer Is it possible to tell the story of Auschwitz, the abyss at the center of the twentieth century? When I wrote “One Long Night,” a history of concentration camps around the world, my central question … Read more
The Queen is dead. Long live the King. OK, that may be the most predictable line I’ve ever written, but a version of it has been working for the Brits for, what, about 1,100 years … Read more
As abortion rights in the United States grew more and more tenuous this summer, Los Angeles Times reporter Brittny Mejia grew curious about the history of those rights. That led her to uncover a pivotal court … Read more
How’s this for a story? At the start of a bloody war that shocked the world, a ship braved Antarctic ice and sailors risked their lives, returning with a tale for the ages. That’s the story of Ernest Shackleton … Read more
Last week, Sen. Mitt Romney called for preserving evidence of the destruction caused by the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol “so that 150 years from now, as people tour the building, they’ll say, ‘Ah, this was … Read more
Worthy books are released almost every day. No doubt more than a few authors bemoaned the publication of their hard work this past year, when so much of the world’s attention was distracted by a lethal pandemic and lethal … Read more
“Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” So begins Nikole Hannah-Jones’s stunning and provocative essay that … Read more
This week on Storyboard we spotlighted two pieces of historical nonfiction, with one telling the story of America’s first detectives, back in the time of Charles Dickens, and the other reaching back just 40 years, to the brutal Argentine dictatorship that … Read more
Matthew Pearl is a sucker for underdog stories, origin stories and untold stories. Those all came together when the author of best-selling historical fiction thrillers such as “The Dante Club” and “The Poe Shadow” asked: Who were America’s first detectives? And … Read more
Last year, Malcolm Gay, an arts reporter at The Boston Globe, stumbled across the seemingly impossible: an untold story about the Holocaust. There’s an inheritance that was lost and can never be recovered. That to me was one of … Read more
