They were never on the earth at the same time, but they belonged to the same family and they mirrored one another. One was a boy during the Great Depression, living on a farm with no electricity or indoor plumbing, the other was born into a modern twenty-first century world. ...

“Have me decently buried, but do not let my body be put into a vault in less than two days after I am dead.”   George Washington The horror of being buried alive is relegated to scary movies in our modern society, but there was a time before advanced medical procedure ...

It started with a golden-colored cantaloupe purchased on a sultry summer day in 1943 in a Midwestern city. A woman named Mary, a Bacteriologist at the local agricultural lab, selected the ripe fruit for the mold growing greenish-blue on its navel. Along with her colleagues,  she was in search of ...

It was known as the “captain of death” for centuries, but Tuberculosis had a deceptive air of beauty on the surface. A Victorian woman was considered beautiful when her lips were ruby-colored, her skin translucent and pale, and her eyes bright and sparkling. But it was the look of a ...

Midwestern newspapers described the summer of 1873 as a season when “tropical weariness drooped over all.”  Heaviness hung like the sweat dripping   from trousers, woolen skirts, and long-sleeved shirts, as people performed their daily tasks. That stifling heat would be blamed for everything under the blazing sun— rampant spread of ...