J.Michael Martinez

Harold LeClair Ickes was a progressive Midwestern Republican politician who became the United States secretary of the interior during...

Frances Coralie Perkins was a trailblazer, the first woman to serve in an American president’s cabinet. She was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s...

For this blog, I dip back into the archives. This entry, dated September 8, 2011, summarizes my harrowing experience delivering a paper...

I started writing my blog in July 2011. Sometimes I look back at the archives and reprint my “greatest hits” from the vault. This...

Charles Gates Dawes is not well known in the twenty-first century, but in his time, he was an influential figure in the Republican Party...

Beginning with this post, I will outline key figures from my work-in-progress, Public Service Exemplars: “A Finer Spirit of Hope and...

In August 2021, I signed a book contract with Routledge, an academic publisher from Great Britain and an imprint of the Taylor & Francis...

To conclude this series on writing a book—and to conclude 2021, for that matter—I offer final thoughts on the subject. Many folks have...

Let us talk of talent, you and I--of writing talent. It’s a touchy subject, I know, but we must speak of it as part of this series. This...

This is my fifth post in a series on writing a non-fiction book. I have discussed selecting a topic, searching for a publisher,...

This is my fourth posting on the writing process. I have discussed how to select a book topic (Part I), the steps in searching for a...

This is my third post on the writing process. In the first posting, I discussed how to select a book topic. In the second posting, I...

This is my second posting on the writing process. The first post, from August 31, 2021, concerned selecting a topic. Next up: the...

When I began writing my blog in July 2011, I promised that I would devote space to the writing life, and so I have. Yet most postings...

Every summer since 2011, when I started writing my blog, I have provided an update on my writing projects. Here is my 2021 update. I have...

As I discuss in my forthcoming book Scoundrels: Political Scandals in American History, Jack Abramoff was a lobbyist whose name became...

The most recent scandal covered in my forthcoming book, Scoundrels: Political Scandals in American History, involves the 2016...

As I discuss in my forthcoming book Scoundrels: Political Scandals in American History, the Iran-Contra scandal occurred during President...

As I discuss in my forthcoming book Scoundrels: Political Scandals in American History, the savings and loan (S&L) crisis has been almost...

It sounded like something out of a poorly written crime novel. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an...