How many guides to Disney World can there be? There are official and unofficial, avant-garde and vegetarian, some for idiots, some for grown-ups, for kids, for Mickeys, for $$$$, for nada, etcetera. Who cares? Pack ’em up! This... Read More

The musical works of Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky have woven their way into the fabric of Western culture over the past 100 years. The 1812 Overture, with its booming cannon passages, is a standard during Fourth of July... Read More

The United States has been feeling the profound effects of Japan’s cultural influence over the last decade. This influence can be traced back through several different pop cultural icons such as martial arts, monsters (Godzilla),... Read More

Many evenings, Millie Smiley would suddenly have a desire to run to the local store for provisions for making fudge and for TV dinners. Author Kotulski, her daughter, speaks of these times as strangely comforting and yet simultaneously... Read More

Anna Marie Hahn was one of the most notorious serial killers of her time. There was even a rumor circulating that she “had spread arsenic on her ample breasts, which her male victims sucked.” She was sent through the “Good-Bye... Read More

When ordinary people die, remaining behind are gravestone epigraphs, photographs, and obituary notices pasted in family scrapbooks. Henry Beetle Hough, however, was not an ordinary man. A true New Englander, Hough loved writing as much... Read More

Most people know of Henry VIII. The notorious King of England married annulled and/or had executed six wives. His obsessive search for the perfect woman (and the perfect heir) highlighted the Tudor era’s preoccupation with the control... Read More

The author was twenty-one years old when she set out to see the world. After a spur-of-the-moment wedding at a Berkeley tea shop in 1971, Schur and her new husband embarked on an eighteen-month-long honeymoon through five continents and... Read More