Germany’s lower Neckar Valley is Mark Twain country. This stretch of river, the locals will fondly tell you, inspired Huckleberry Finn. The author came to Germany in 1878 with writer’s block and Huck Finn half finished. Twain’s raft trip down the...
Black Elk was a Ripper suspect? My jaw dropped when I first read about it. How did a Sioux medicine man end up on the suspect list? Native Americans must be among the most exotic – and ridiculous – explanations for the series of murders and...
Did women enlist in the Mexican-American War? Last week I blogged about Eliza Allen Billings. She wrote a bestselling book about fighting in the war disguised as a man. Most historians, however, dismiss her story as fictional. But that doesn’t mean...
What could induce a woman in 1846 to trade her needlepoint for a rifle? The Mexican-American War began and several women, disguised as men, enlisted. Women’s places in society were restrictive back then. The gentle sex played supporting roles and...
June 13, 2016 marks the 130th anniversary of Bavaria’s greatest unsolved mystery: the baffling death of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. How did the fairy tale king – the builder of Neuschwanstein and the patron of Richard Wagner – die? Many Bavarians say...
An Interview with Author Karen Odden Law and medicine have had an uneasy marriage. Sometimes jurisprudence, with a red rose in its teeth, drops on its knees before its lady, asking her to provide crucial expert testimony upon which the outcome of a...
Law changes history. There are plenty examples of that: The Magna Carta, the Napoleonic Code, the United States Constitution. So do criminal trials. In 1985, Fritjof Haft, criminal law professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany, published a...
An Interview with Ron Franscell, Coauthor of the New Book, “Morgue: A Life in Death” Vincent van Gogh’s death is one of greatest mysteries of the art world. Historians can tell you this much for sure: The Dutch artist was staying in...
Did the church usher mistake him for a duke? And did Mark Twain mistake the empress for someone else? Mark Twain’s account of an encounter with Empress Augusta of Germany counts among his most hilarious sketches of Baden-Baden. It appears in A Tramp...
The thing that scares me most about the Jack the Ripper case is not the murders. Oh, no. It’s the number of suspects! The list of men accused of the world’s most famous serial killing spree now far outstrips the number of victims, and fresh suspects...
Recent Comments