During the six years that Theodore Roosevelt served as civil service commissioner (1889?1895), civil service reform was the most divisive issue of its time, says the author, who is an award-winning professor of public administration at... Read More

Before there was Lucy Liu there was Anna May Wong, a pioneering Asian American who defied cultural prejudices to become one of the most famous women in the world. In a time when Asian film roles generally went to European Americans in... Read More

While eating dinner with Herbert Woodward Martin, the author was surprised to see the renowned poet squirreling away packets of restaurant sugar. Certainly the bard of Dayton made enough money to buy his own sweetener! In the ensuing... Read More

By the early 1940s, studio executives making B Westerns featuring entertainer Roy Rogers realized that they needed to jazz up their movies with a little romance. “Half of the viewers going to the movies were females and they wanted to... Read More

“Next to Harry Truman, Stuart Symington was the man from Missouri,” says the author, president emeritus of the University of Missouri, in this scholarly yet accessible biography of one of the Senate’s most respected members. During... Read More

Although the title of this book may sound like a gossip-filled episode of True Hollywood Story, it’s actually a thoughtful look at the conflicted life of one of the world’s least respected, most talented tenors. The author, a... Read More

This brilliantly developed biography depicts the life of a virtually forgotten scientist who exemplified practical solutions in an age of philosophical diversions. He was responsible for insights and practices that made him famous and... Read More

On April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans turned out to celebrate and pay respect to the environment. Earth Day grew from the vision of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who devoted more than forty years as the “conservation... Read More