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Symonds, Craig L. The Battle of Midway. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2011. Craig Symonds’s book The Battle of Midway tells the story of a major battle that changed Image of the cover of the book comes from Amazon and is available on Audible. the course of the Pacific Theater in World War II. Symonds makes it clear that his main point is that the Battle of Midway was “less incredible and less miraculous than it has often been portrayed” (Symonds 6). He believes this does n

The image of the cover comes from ThriftBooks. There many different images for the book cover. David W. Bebbington’s Patterns in History is one of those academic books that wears its ambition lightly. In fewer than 250 pages, it manages to cover what feels like thousands of years of historical thought without feeling like a rushed tour. The objective for Bebbington? To trace the different ways people have made sense of history—from ancient myth to modern postmodernism—and sh

The Great Depression was not just another downturn; it was a defining economic catastrophe of the twentieth century. Scholars still debate its causes, offering explanations that range from monetary contraction to structural weaknesses in banking and trade. Monetary economists stress the Federal Reserve’s contraction of the money supply in the early 1930s. Keynesians point to weak aggregate demand and call for government spending as the remedy. Still others highlight agricultu

Photograph taken by Moffett Studio. There is no year of when the photograph was taken but it is currently in the repository of the...

Grain built LaSalle County and the American Midwest. After the Civil War, the fields near the Illinois and Michigan Canal didn’t just grow corn, wheat, and other crops; they grew small towns into busy waypoints on the road to Chicago. But here’s the thing: getting that grain to market wasn’t easy. As the Illinois Department of Conservation put it, “prior to the development of grain elevators and the canal, area farmers had to load and transport their own grain to market by ho

"In the month of September, The order came through, To abandon the Line, That was west of Depue." 1 — Ted Swanson The Interurban electric...

Presidential Portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1797 from the White House Historical Association George Washington, the first...