James R. Coffey

Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas: A History of Organized Crime 

In truth, the Vegas of today resembles little the Vegas of yesteryear, on the surface, anyway. But one needs only stroll through the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas to remind them of “Sin City’s” not-too-distant past.  There the names Meyer Lansky, “Bugsy” Siegel, Gus Greenbaum, and Moe Sedway aren’t torn from newspaper headlines or the pages of True Crime magazine, they represent …

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The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Corn Flake King: John Harvey Kellogg

For well over a century now, Kellogg’s Toasted Cornflakes, featuring Cornelius “Corny” Rooster on the box, has been a mainstay of households across America.  Prototype for the hundreds of other dry breakfast cereals to follow, Toasted Cornflakes effectively put dry cereals on the breakfast menu—and Battle Creek, Michigan, on the map.  But few know the story of John Harvey …

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Did Pharaoh Akhenaten lay the foundation for Abrahamic Religion? 

The notion that Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten was the first to conceive the concept of the monotheistic ideology that underlies Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha’i is hardly original.  Renowned Father of Psychiatry Sigmund Freud presented this idea in his 1939 book, Moses and Monotheist, promoting the perspective that if the Biblical Exodus is to be taken literally, …

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Inside Eastern State Hospital: America’s first official mental hospital

Eastern State Hospital, founded in 1773 in Williamsburg, Virginia, has the unique distinction of being the first hospital built in America specifically for the confinement and treatment of the mentally ill.  Before the construction of this facility, individuals who suffered mental illness were not diagnosed by a physician knowledgeable in such conditions but judged by …

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The Milgram Experiment: Testing Blind Obedience to Authority

The 1950s and 1960s were the proverbial heydays for behavioral psychology experiments in the United States.  Harry Harlow’s Rhesus Monkey Experiments tested the effects of maternal separation and social isolation. The Solomon Asch Conformity Experiments tested the power of conformity in groups. Finally, the New York Child Development Center’s Child Development Twin Study examined the effects of twins raised apart.  These …

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