Jon Musgrave mines the history around him for dramatic stories for both fact and fiction. What else could be expected having grown up hearing stories of Charlie Birger and gangsters from his grandmother who lived less than a half mile away from Birger's Shady Rest. As a journalist he gravitated towards the historical features when not focusing on the hard news stories of the day to day variety. As a screenwriter he specializes in rewrites and finding ways to bring the stories of the past to the screens of today.

His latest novel, The Counterfeiter's Son, set at the infamous Cave-in-Rock, grew out of his first screenplay which in turn developed from taking part in the filming of the "River Pirates" episode of In Search of History for The History Channel. 

His non-fiction history, Slaves, Salt, Sex & Mr. Crenshaw, started with his news coverage of the closing of the Old Slave House outside Equality, Illinois. Though open 70 years as a local tourist attraction and museum the first actual proof that the stories were real wasn't found until four days after it closed. Musgrave joined the research team the following day. Today, it's the last station on the Reverse Underground Railroad still known to stand. His research on the site led him to edit the Handbook of Old Gallatin County and Southeastern Illinois, as well as edit and publish the second slave registry in Gallatin County that had been transcribed in the late 1940s, but subsequently lost, Gallatin County Slave and Emancipation Records, 1839-1849.

His 19th Century work also includes editing and publishing W. S. Blackman's Civil War autobiography, The Boy of Battle Ford, and Lincoln: Fresh from Abraham's Bosom, a collection of anecdotes, stories and tall tales told by the president during his first term in the White House that originally had been first collected and published during his re-election campaign in 1864.

Growing up in Southern Illinois' "Bloody Williamson" County he couldn't help but delve into the true crime stories with three books he's co-authored: The Bloody Vendetta of Southern Illinois, covering the outbreak of violence in the years following the Civil War; Secrets of the Herrin Gangs, covering the Klan War and Gang War a half century later in the mid 1920s; and Inside the Shelton Gang, he co-authored with Ruthie Shelton, a granddaughter of one of the notorious Shelton Brothers whom the Saturday Evening Post once memorialized as one of the deadliest gangs in American history. He's currently researching for a larger book on the Prohibition Era of the 1920s in Southern Illinois.

Musgrave publishes under his imprint IllinoisHistory.com which includes Bruce Cline's, History, Mystery and Hauntings of Southern Illinois, and Angela Mason's Tri-State Tornado book, Death Rides the Sky. He also distributes books by the late West Frankfort educator James T. Carrier; Illinois-based historical novels by retired Shelbyville educator Kevin Corley; and the Big Muddy Monster book by cryptozoologists and folktale hunters Chad Lewis, Kevin Lee Nelson, and Noah Voss.