Double Double: Chapter 3

Tim’s Tale: From hockey sticks to stir sticks In September 2011, I walked into a co-branded outlet of Cold Stone Creamery and Tim Hortons on West 42rd, just west of Times Square in midtown Manhattan, and ordered a medium coffee. The server surprised me by handing me a cup held in a sleeve, which you...

The Race to the New World: Excerpt

  On November 4, 1494, Nürnberg’s Jerome Münzer ascended the bell tower of Seville’s Cathedral of the Virgin Mary. It had been built in the late twelfth century as the minaret of Seville’s great mosque, when the city was the capital of the Muslim empire of the Maghreb, which included North African territories from present-day...

Rewriting History: Alwyn Ruddock and John Cabot

Alwyn Ruddock was a respected historian who had made what were widely believed to be breakthrough finds about the voyages of discovery to the New World by John Cabot in the late 15th century, and even voyages before him. But she died without publishing any of it, and destroyed her source notes. Historians have been on her factual trail ever since.