November 19, 2025 By Chris Serb On November 30, 1905, Walter Eckersall found himself, and his football team, in a tough spot. The University of Chicago quarterback was pinned on his own 7-yard-line, l...

Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in social media posts, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Dodge County, Incorporated (Bison Books, 2024) by Sonja Trom Eayrs. About the Book: In 2014 Sonja Trom Eayrs’s parents filed the first of three lawsuits against Dodge County officials and their neighbors, one of the few avenues available to them to challenge installation of a corporate factory farm near their intergenerational family farm in Dodge County, Minnesota.

Book Trailer for the newly released book on Paraguayan History from University of Nebraska Press: Parishioners of Sovereignty: A History of Nationhood and Wa...

Dean Marshall Tuck is a writer living in eastern North Carolina with his wife and daughters. His work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Epoch, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. Tuck serves on the advisory board for the North Carolina Literary Review and teaches writing at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina. His most recent book is…

Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El Tajín is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and n...

Meet Walter Eckersall, a man who did quite a bit in football history with this indepth interview with Eckersall biographer Chris Serb.

The Independent is an important voice in the community of readers and writers dedicated to book reviews and writing about the world of books.

Chris Serb is deputy district chief for the Chicago Fire Department. He is also a veteran Chicago freelance writer with almost thirty years of experience as a journalist. Serb’s articles, concentrated in sports and history, have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago History, Writer’s Digest, Chicago Athlete, and Men’s Fitness. He is the author of War Football: World War I and the Birth of the NFL 

Bigelow, an editor at Boiler House Press, debuts with an illuminating biography of Nebraskan writer and editor Virginia Faulkner...

Andrea Strongwater is an author and artist whose artwork has been shown worldwide, including in the collections of the University Medical Center of Princeton, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca, New York, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Or Hadash Synagogue in Atlanta, and the Georges Cziffra Foundation in Senlis, France. Some of her paintings have been sold, and their images have also been sold as prints, postcards, and notecards at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, and to private collectors.

Reviews Making Space Review in H-Diplo: "Byrnes’s study makes a critical intervention into the history and historiography of the postwar and postcolonial immigrant communities in France, exploring how and why municipalities such as Saint-Denis and others reacted to and created policies for and sometimes against the North Africans living in their midst." The Bower Atmosphere Review in Western Historical Quarterly…