I am fascinated by historical figures who were deemed marginal, outcast, or eccentric and also by experiences (like sleep or madness) that usually fall beneath historical scrutiny. I am drawn to nineteenth-century literature and history because I find such a rich store of strange and poignant optimism and cultural experimentation dwelling alongside suffering, terror, and despair. As a writer, I feel a sense of responsibility when a great story falls into my hands. I try to be as respectful as I can to the life behind it, while seeking how it fits into a larger historical pattern. I am always on the lookout for books that do the same!
The sack in question, currently exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, bears a haunting embroidered inscription that one scholar has called “the shortest slave narrative in history”:
My great grandmother Rose mother of Ashley gave her this sack when she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair.Told her It be filled with Love always she never saw her again Ashley is my grandmother.
Who were Rose and Ashley? Why did Ashley give Rose this sack? What were the meanings of the items it held? And why did Ashley’s granddaughter memorialize them? Miles’ loving research conveys what can be passed down from generation to generation, even surviving the horrors of slavery.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE
'A remarkable book' - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times 'A brilliant exercise in historical excavation and recovery' - Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello 'A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness' - Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was…
If you think the 1960s tops the list of eras that experimented with counter-cultural protest movements, utopian societies, and radical social experimentation, think again.
There are more free love advocates, anti-racist rebels, anti-capitalist communes, oversexed vegans, and messianic prophets in this book than you could shake a staff at. Jackson tells their stories with verve, wit, and a perfectly measured assessment of their contributions and failures.
A dynamic, timely history of nineteenth-century activists—free-lovers and socialists, abolitionists and vigilantes—and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War era
“In the tradition of Howard Zinn’s people’s histories, American Radicals reveals a forgotten yet inspiring past.”—Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SMITHSONIAN
On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s fiftieth birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. They would leave behind a groundbreaking…
Not technically a “nineteenth-century” book, this 1902 novel is the most surprising work of fiction from the period that you’ll ever read.
Written by a Black woman from Boston who had achieved success first as an actress and then as a magazine editor, this wild fantasy reads like a cross between the film The Black Panther and a Verdi opera. It concerns a Black physician who passes for white (until he can’t), then joins an archeological expedition to discover the remains of an ancient civilization in Ethiopia.
The plot unfolds at breakneck speed, and there are so many twists you might get whiplash. But if you slow down and focus on the details of the story you’ll find an extraordinarily complex picture of politics, spirituality, psychology, music, history, and science.
“Mysticism, horror, and racial identity merge fluidly in this thrilling tale of love, obsession, and power” (Publishers Weekly) written by one of the lesser-known literary figures of the much-lauded Harlem Renaissance.
Pauline Hopkins is considered by some to be the most prolific African-American woman writer and the most influential literary editor of the first decade of the twentieth century, and Of One Blood is the last of four novels she wrote.
Mixed-race medical student Reuel Briggs doesn't give a damn about being Black and cares less for African history. When he arrives in Ethiopia on an archeological trip, his only…
This 1834 novel written by a physician/writer from Philadelphia holds its own with anything Poe or Melville ever wrote in terms of weirdness, psychological complexity, and sheer literary panache.
It tells the story of a singularly unambitious young man who accidentally kills himself and then discovers that he has the power to reanimate the corpses of others who have just died. And so our hero finds himself living the lives of a rich man with terrible gout, a playboy, a misguided Quaker philanthropist, and – most shockingly – a rebel slave.
Through it all, Sheppard Lee still maintains a sense of his own identity, even as his spirit becomes something of a puppet for its new physical manifestations. Both philosophical and darkly comic, this recently rediscovered work should be a classic.
Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself is a work of dark satire from the early years of the American Republic. Published as an autobiography and praised by Edgar Allan Poe, this is the story of a young idler who goes in search of buried treasure and finds instead the power to transfer his soul into other men's bodies. What follows is one increasingly practiced body snatcher's picaresque journey through early American pursuits of happiness, as each new form Sheppard Lee assumes disappoints him anew while making him want more and more. When Lee's metempsychosis draws him into…
Marshall is my favorite working biographer, and this book had me hooked from page 1.
Fuller’s life almost demands Hollywood treatment. This early feminist thinker was a great friend, intellectual sparring partner, and collaborator of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the first editor to publish Henry David Thoreau.
Less well known is her second career as a pioneering newspaper reporter, who eventually became the first female foreign correspondent in US history. Her dispatches on the cultural scene in Europe and then her eyewitness accounts of the revolutions of 1848 were riveting. Traveling with her Italian aristocrat-turned-revolutionary lover and their young child, she returned to the US with a draft of a history of the Roman republic.
But the ship sank off Fire Island; Fuller, her lover, their child, and the manuscript were lost. But thanks to Marshall, we at least have her story!
The award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters takes a fresh look at the trailblazing life of a great American heroine. Whether detailing her front-page New-York Tribune editorials against poor conditions in the city's prisons and mental hospitals, or illuminating her late-in-life hunger for passionate experience - including a secret affair with a young officer in the Roman Guard - Marshall's biography gives the most thorough and compassionate view of an extraordinary woman. No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
In this compelling story about one of the nineteenth century's most famous Americans, Benjamin Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act—and especially her death—into one of the first media spectacles in American history.
In piecing together the fragmentary and conflicting evidence of the event, Reiss paints a picture of people looking at history, at the human body, at social class, at slavery, at performance, at death, and always—if obliquely—at themselves.
Riley Masterson has moved to Greenbrier, SC, anxious to escape the chaos that has overwhelmed her life.
Questioned in a murder in Alabama, she has spent eighteen months under suspicion by a sheriff’s office, unable to make an arrest. But things in gentrifying Greenbrier are not as they seem. As Riley struggles to forge a new life, forces are gathering in the tension-plagued neighborhood where glitzy new homes rise alongside crumbling mill houses, and everyone, it seems, can peer into a neighbor’s window.
When murder explodes, someone unexpected is caught in the crossfire. Detectives are left to ponder: Are the…
After being questioned in a murder investigation, Riley Masterson has spent eighteen months under suspicion by the sheriff’s office. Anxious to escape accusing eyes, she finally decides to leave Alabama and move to South Carolina.
But Greenbrier isn’t the stabilizing influence she hopes for, as her neighborhood is slowly being gentrified, with homeless people living in the shadows of mansions. As Riley struggles to forge a new life, forces are gathering in the tension-plagued neighborhood as glitzy new homes rise beside crumbling mill houses, and everyone is able and willing to peer into a neighbor’s window.
