What Marc Antony said about Julius Caesar in his famous play about the Roman dictator, “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones,” is also true about Long Island City’s legendary Irish mayor Paddy Battle Axe Gleason. A deeply polarizing figure, Gleason was attacked by his enemies for his alleged corruption, buffoonery,…

An Irish visitor to Northern California’s grandiose  Filoli Mansion, nestled at the edge of the towering oak and redwood-forests in the coastal foothills just 30 miles south of San Francisco, might be gob smacked by the amazing similarities the stately residence has to Killarney’s famed Muckross House, and he or she would not be wide of the mark. The…

The life and accomplishments of John Quinn are so improbable that if they were fiction no one would believe them. The son of a baker from a small town in Ohio, Quinn, by the time of his untimely death in 1924 at the age of 54, had not only amassed the greatest collection of…

December 22nd, 2020, marked the 121st birthday of heroic women’s rights fighter Lucy Burns. Today, few remember Burns and take a woman’s right to vote for granted, forgetting that a century ago women were denied this basic American freedom. They also forget that women like Burns were imprisoned…