Good Writing. Serious e-Reading.

A founding editor of The Chicagoan, Josh Schollmeyer works by day as the Executive Editor and Director of Digital Content at Playboy, where he is overseeing the summer relaunch of the magazine’s smart phone app and ebook series.

Previously, he served as deputy editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. After helping the Bulletin win a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2007, he spearheaded the editorial effort to transition it from a print publication to a digital ...

Richard B. Schwartz is Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  The author or editor of eighteen books, including Samuel Johnson and the New Science and Daily Life in Johnson’s London, he is now at work on a study of American higher education.  Mr. Schwartz was educated at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois, and has taught at the United States Military Academy; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Georgetown University; and the University of ...

William Tecumseh Sherman was born in Ohio in 1820 and named Tecumseh (Shooting Star) after the Shawnee leader killed in the 1813 battle of the Thames. In 1836 he entered West Point, and in the years before the Civil War he spent much time in the Old South and the new West. In 1861 he resigned his position as superintendent of a Louisiana military academy and went north to join the Union forces. After defeat at Bull Run, he gained ...

Robert Shogan (1930-2013) was the author of Harry Truman and the Struggle for Racial Justice (University Press of Kansas, 2013), for more than thirty years covered politics from Washington for Newsweek and for the Los Angeles Times as national political correspondent. He has written fifteen books on national and political affairs, including Prelude to Catastrophe: FDR’s Jews and the Menace of Nazism; No Sense of Decency: The Army McCarthy Hearings; Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal; and The Battle ...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton became a leading champion of women’s rights and the intellectual powerhouse of the woman’s movement in the United States in the 19th century.

Paul Strathern studied philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, then served in the Merchant Marine for two years. His book Mendeleyev’s Dream was short-listed for the Aventis Science Prize. He wrote some twenty-five titles in the Philosophers in 90 Minutes series, which have been translated into more than two dozen languages. He has also written five novels, one of which, A Season in Abyssinia, received a Somerset Maugham Award. His more recent works include Napoleon in Egypt and The Artist, The ...

Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) began his career as an architect in Philadelphia, then moved to Chicago in 1873 when the city was rebuilding after the Great Fire. At the time “tall buildings” were at most about sixteen stories high and were supported by heavy masonry walls. Between Burnham and Root’s seventeen-story Monadnock building and the twenty-six-story towers of Mies van der Rohe in the 1950s, there was only Sullivan. He took the concept of the metal-frame structure and saw in it ...

Ida Tarbell (1857–1944) was born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the western region of the state where oil fields were discovered in 1860. Her father’s small oil-producing business in Titusville was destroyed by the monopolizing schemes of the Standard Oil Company. She studied at Allegheny College, then became a teacher; but she soon turned to writing and after working in the United States and in France was offered the editorship of McClure’s Magazine. Tarbell began her reporting ...