Ronald E. Yates 
Late last month, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told an unprecedented gathering of generals, admirals, commanders, and senior NCOs that from this moment on, the only mission of the newly named Department of War is this: “warfighting, preparing for war, and preparing to win, [and being] unrelenting and uncompromising in …
For most of my professional life, I worked as a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. I feel privileged to have been a journalist during one of that newspaper’s golden eras—from about 1969 to 1997 when I left to teach journalism as a professor and dean at the …
When my maternal Great-grandparents immigrated from Denmark to Northeastern Kansas in the 1890s, they were ecstatic. For something like 200 years, their ancestors had endured a serf-like existence on a baronial estate on the Danish island of Langeland. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of like-minded Europeans immigrated …
President Trump finally did what other American presidents have failed to do: he opened a can of verbal whoop ass on the United Nations. He blasted the U.N. for funding illegal immigration to the United States and many European nations and took it to task for a litany of other …
For the past 13 years, Chicago has had the dubious distinction of being the murder capital of America. And here are a few more ominous facts about “That Toddlin’ Town:” For seven consecutive years, Chicago has had the highest murder rate among U.S. cities with more than one million people. …
During a recent “virtual book tour” with several book bloggers, I was asked what three things I learned while writing the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy. It was a good question because it prompted me to pause and reflect on the fiction-writing process in a way I had never done before. …
At a book signing during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books a while back, where I was promoting my Finding Billy Battles trilogy, I was asked several times about the research process for writing historical fiction novels. I explained that researching the first book …
I am often asked what the most significant challenges were for me as I wrote the Finding Billy Battles trilogy. The trilogy falls into the Historical Fiction genre, and believe me, the challenges when writing historical fiction are many. Addressing them all in one post would be problematic. So I …
Like hundreds of thousands of other Californians, I am about to lose representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. That will occur if voters decide this November 4 to accept Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “Election Rigging Response ” scheme to undermine California’s independent Citizens Redistricting Commission and gerrymander congressional district maps …
One early summer day in 1959, when I was about 14, I was working on my cousin’s farm in Kansas, loading hay bales. After maybe two hours of heaving 60-pound alfalfa bales onto a flatbed trailer as it was pulled along by a Farmall IH tractor, we took a break. …