I am a professor at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where I teach Early American, Native American, and British history. My books include Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 and Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier. As a historian, I've long been fascinated by stories of imposters, charlatans, and con artists. I like fictional and factual picaresque tales about people set adrift in strange lands and I have a soft spot for unreliable narrators. Historians are a skeptical breed, so slippery characters like those featured in the books listed here represent a welcome challenge: can you trust them as far as you can throw them?
I wrote
Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain
Herman Melville is a lot like black jelly beans: you either love him or you hate him. I fall into the former camp, and his genius is evident in this book, the last novel he published during his lifetime. Set on a steamboat traveling the Mississippi River, it uses a series of vignettes to tell the stories of its passengers as they encounter the mysterious titular character. Everyone is on the make, and no one seems to be truthful about who they are and what they do. The Confidence-Man holds up a mirror to Melvilleās America, and it looks a lot like our own.
On April Fool's Day in 1856, a shape-shifting grifter boards a Mississippi riverboat to expose the pretenses, hypocrisies, and self-delusions of his fellow passengers. The con artist assumes numerous identities ā a disabled beggar, a charity fundraiser, a successful businessman, an urbane gentleman ā to win over his not-entirely-innocent dupes. The central character's shifting identities, as fluid as the river itself, reflect broader aspects of human identity even as his impudent hoaxes form a meditation on illusion and trust. This comic allegory addresses themes of sincerity, character, and morality in its challenge to the optimism and materialism of mid-19th-century America.ā¦
This account of a marital deception in sixteenth-century France has always fascinated me: how could a wife not know that the man claiming to be her husband was a stranger? Martin Guerre was an unhappily married peasant who went off to war to escape family and small-town life. When he returned a few years later, he was a changed man...literally. Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the story of Arnaud du Tilh, an imposter who took Guerreās place until neighbors grew suspicious and fatal consequences ensued.
The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer's day in 1560, a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400 years ago.
Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new Frenchā¦
In this spine-tingling, atmospheric ānail-biter of a novelā (Shelf Awareness), a woman returns to her hometown after her childhood friend attempts suicide at an alleged haunted houseāthe same place where a traumatic incident shattered their lives twenty years ago.
Few in sleepy Sumnerās Mills have stumbled across the Octagon Houseā¦
Mulan meets the American Revolution in this biography of Deborah Sampson, a Massachusetts woman who used a male alias to enlist in the Continental Army, serving undetected until a wound revealed her secret. Alfred Young uncovers the early modern tradition of gender impersonation, used by plebian women to escape difficult home lives and travel about the wider world, and explains how Sampson continued to capitalize on her military service long after she left the army.
In Masquerade, Alfred F. Young scrapes through layers of fiction and myth to uncover the story of Deborah Sampson, a Massachusetts woman who passed as a man and fought as a soldier for seventeen months toward the end of the American Revolution.
Deborah Sampson was not the only woman to pose as a male and fight in the war, but she was certainly one of the most successful and celebrated. She managed to fight in combat and earn the respect of her officers and peers, and in later years she toured the country lecturing about her experiences and was partiallyā¦
Joe Gould first came to the worldās attention when Joseph Mitchell published two articles about him in the New Yorker in the mid-twentieth century. A self-described bohemian, he was an eccentric denizen of Greenwich Village who claimed to be writing āThe Oral History of Our Time,ā a massive, revolutionary book that Gould said would be read by generations yet to come. Or, was he really just a heavy drinking raconteur who ingratiated himself among some of the leading artists, poets, and writers of his day? Jill Lepore pushes Gouldās story beyond Mitchellās original version, finding darker truths behind it.
From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the missing longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called āThe Oral History of Our Time.ā
Joe Gouldās Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that āThe Oral History of Our Timeā did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gouldās own diaries and notebooksāincluding volumes of his lost manuscriptāLepore argues that Joe Gouldās real secret had to do with sex and the color line, withā¦
The first and only full-length biography of Hazel Ying Lee, an unrecognized pioneer and unsung World War II hero who fought for a country that actively discriminated against her gender, race, and ambition.
This unique hidden figure defied countless stereotypes to become the first Asian American woman in United Statesā¦
It may seem unfair to group Benjamin Franklin among con artists and impersonators, but he certainly had a talent for self-invention. Most biographies of Franklin take it as a given that he was the āfirst American,ā who set the mold for what we call the American dream. In this highly readable and comparatively brief biography of the great man, Wood breaks from that tradition and tells the story of a provincial striver whose many public personas were motivated by a desire to fit in among aristocratic Europeans. If you think you know what made Franklin tick, this biography will make you think again.
"I cannot remember ever reading a work of history and biography that is quite so fluent, so perfectly composed and balanced . . ." -The New York Sun
"Exceptionally rich perspective on one of the most accomplished, complex, and unpredictable Americans of his own time or any other." -The Washington Post Book World
From the most respected chronicler of the early days of the Republic-and winner of both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes-comes a landmark work that rescues Benjamin Franklin from a mythology that has blinded generations of Americans to the man he really was and makes sense of aspectsā¦
Peter Williamson was the most famous colonial American you have never heard of. He claimed that he was kidnapped from Aberdeen, Scotland in 1743 and sold into indentured servitude in Pennsylvania, where he lived as a laborer, Indian captive, and soldier for thirteen years. After returning to Britain, he made his living by peddling a narrative of his American adventures and performing his story in taverns and coffeehouses while dressed as an Indian. After finally making it back to Aberdeen, he ended up embroiled in two lawsuits to prove his identity and exact vengeance from the merchants who had kidnapped him.
Indian Captive, Indian King uses archival sources on both sides of the Atlantic to untangle the truth from fiction in Williamsonās remarkable life story. It won the 2019 Frank Watson Book Prize for best book in Scottish history.
David Fletcher needs a surgeon, stat! But when he captures a British merchantman in the Caribbean, what he gets is Charley Alcott, an apprentice physician barely old enough to shave. Needs must, and Captain Fletcher takes the prisoner back aboard his ship with orders to do his best or heāllā¦
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan. The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run theā¦