There is a possibly apocryphal story about Loretta Lynn’s classic “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Supposedly, Lynn’s original version of the song included ten (or eight or twelve) verses. Hearing it, her […]
Category: biography
Happy Women’s Equality Day
Today, the enlightened everywhere celebrate Women’s Equality Day, commemorating not only the Nineteenth Amendment giving half of American humanity the right to vote outside of Wyoming, but recognizing all of […]
Happy Birthday to video and film innovator C. Francis Jenkins
Born on August 22, 1867, inventor C. Francis Jenkins was an innovator of early film and television technology. One of Jenkins’s inventions, the Phantoscope projector, led to today’s large-screen movies. However, […]
Ray Bradbury and the Twilight Zone
Ray Bradbury had made his name fusing science fiction with an abiding concern for humanity. What he had done in print, Rod Serling brought to early television. The anthology series The […]
Q&A with Locomotive to Aeromotive author Simine Short
Simine Short is an aviation historian who has researched and written extensively on the history of motorless flight. Her first book, Glider Mail: An Aerophilatelic Handbook, received numerous research awards worldwide and is […]
New in paperback: a pioneer, a president and a King
Three UIP titles are available in paperback editions today. Locomotive to Aeromotive: Octave Chanute and the Transportation Revolution Earth, water, air—Octave Chanute grappled with the very elements themselves. He built the massive […]
The Other Hawthorne’s Weird Tales
Julian Hawthorne hustled. An independent contractor par excellence, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne reported on foreign wars and domestic politics, published novels, penned short stories, dreamt up theosophist blarney, raked […]
Illegal author José Ángel N.’s open letter to President Obama
José Ángel N. is an undocumented immigrant who lives in Chicago. In his memoir Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant, José Ángel writes of his own journey from Mexico to […]
Sci Fi Friday: Ray Bradbury makes an impact on the Moon
On July 26, 1971 the Apollo 15 mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Center with a mission to explore Earth’s moon. Four days later, on July 30, 1971 Lunar Module […]
Sci Fi Friday: meet Gregory Benford
The Modern Masters of Science Fiction series is devoted to books that survey the work of individual authors who continue to inspire and advance science fiction. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote […]
Sci Fi Friday: meet John Brunner
The Modern Masters of Science Fiction series is devoted to books that survey the work of individual authors who continue to inspire and advance science fiction. Under his own name and […]
Return of the kind mother
The pre-restoration Alma Mater. Today the famed statue makes its long-awaited return to the University of Illinois campus after a ten-month restoration treatment. Though completed in 1929, the Alma Mater […]