We usually associate the early 20th-century Italian immigrants in New York with the area known as Little Italy in Lower Manhattan. While many Italians did settle in Little Italy, there was a contingent of immigrants from Sicily as well as their rivals from Naples who settled in Harlem around East 107th Street. Obviously, most Italians…

Chapter 1 Louisa “On account of what the government considers improper activities in military and naval matters, this government has requested the immediate recall of Captain Boy-Ed and Captain Von Papen as they are no longer acceptable, or personae gratae, to this goverment.”  — U.S. State Department, December, 1915 The black motorcar chugged to a…

Do you remember the song, “Polk Salad Annie” by Tony Joe White? It was a big hit when I was a kid in Florida. We loved the line about the gator getting your granny. “Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!” Last summer my daughter and I were kayaking in a spring-fed river in North Florida. We had paddled into one of the…

When I was writing The Butterfly Cage, my dear old dog Grendel was in the process of dying. He was a big, sweet black lab who had once belonged to my ex. When my ex died in 2019, I took the dog and gave him a home. He was the most loving dog I ever knew —…

When I was a kid, my favorite TV show was “The Wild Wild West” with Robert Conrad and Ross Martin. I loved the way Artemus Gordon always had some cool invention to help James West get out of a jam. They even had their own train car that they traveled in. I can’t think of…

In order to do research for The Butterfly Cage, Joe and I took a trip to Wyoming. This was in the middle of a typical hellishly hot Florida summer so it was a revelation to wake up in the morning in a small Wyoming town and have to put on a sweater! Sheer bliss. We flew…

The 1910s are a fascinating period in women’s history. For upper class women, the Gilded Age was getting rusty, and many women gleefully discarded the societal rules which had previously governed every aspect of their lives. For lower class women, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 galvanzied action to unionize and organize. Remember how…

One of the huge challenges I faced when writing about the 1910s was figuring out how people got around New York. When I go to New York, I generally take the subway — or walk! I love to walk the streets of the city. I think all that walking around is the reason my 80-year-old brother is…

No Breakfast, but lots of Tiffany! I write a lot about New York even though I don’t live there. Fortunately, my brother has lived there for most of his life so I’ve had the luxury of experiencing the city over the years. Currently he lives just down the street from the New York Historical Society Museum and…

Since mid-2023 I’ve been researching the life of Theda Bara for a novel. A lot of information can be found on the Internet even if does require some serious digging, but most of the material I found  came from a documentary on Youtube called The Woman with the Hungry Eyes and two biographies: Vamp: The…