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I’m both a history buff and a criminal defense attorney. I grew up in a small North Carolina town, as the son of two educators who encouraged me to read anything I could get my hands on. My favorite stories were adventures and mysteries, especially courtroom dramas. Clarence Darrow was my historical hero, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that I would attend law school and try my hand at legal practice. I practiced criminal law for about 15 years, long enough to get a feel for how investigations and trials really work. That experience had a major impact on my own writing, and how to pick out a really fascinating true story.
This book tells of the shocking axe murder of a white woman in rural Virginia in 1895, and the trials of three Black women who were accused of the crime. Given the time and place, you would not expect things to go well for those Black defendants. But as with the murder drama that I describe in my book, many things about this case defy expectations. A surprising group of people, Black and white, worked together to achieve some measure of justice. This book definitely served as a model for me as I was writing my own. And the author’s attention to detail, with every fact carefully documented, truly makes it a marvel of historical research.
It's 1895 in Virginia, and a white woman lies in her farmyard, murdered with an ax. Suspicion soon falls on a young black sawmill hand, who tries to flee the county. Captured, he implicates three women, accusing them of plotting the murder and wielding the ax. In vivid courtroom scenes, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Suzanne Lebsock recounts their dramatic trials and brings us close to women we would never otherwise know: a devout (and pregnant) mother of nine; another hard-working mother (also of nine); and her plucky, quick-tempered daughter. All claim to be innocent. With the danger of lynching high, can…
I’m both a history buff and a criminal defense attorney. I grew up in a small North Carolina town, as the son of two educators who encouraged me to read anything I could get my hands on. My favorite stories were adventures and mysteries, especially courtroom dramas. Clarence Darrow was my historical hero, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that I would attend law school and try my hand at legal practice. I practiced criminal law for about 15 years, long enough to get a feel for how investigations and trials really work. That experience had a major impact on my own writing, and how to pick out a really fascinating true story.
The story of a horrific miscarriage of justice in rural Canada in 1959. Fourteen-year-old Steven Truscott was charged with the rape and murder of a 12-year-old schoolmate, mostly because he was the last person seen with the victim, riding a bike along a country road. Today, modern crime analysts would look at this case and see immediately that the likely perpetrator was an adult pedophile, not an adolescent boy. But at the time, local law enforcement jumped to the wrong conclusion. Steven was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging, and although the sentence was commuted on humanitarian grounds, he spent ten years in prison. It took more than four decades of work by attorneys, and a few diligent journalists, to clear Steven’s name. This book tells the whole tale.
National Bestseller Winner of the Canadian Authors Association Birks Family Foundation Award for Biography Finalist for the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
The investigation that helped Truscott get a new appeal.
In 1959, a popular schoolboy, just 14 years old, was convicted and sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of his 12-year-old classmate. That summer, Canada lost its innocence and the shocking story of Steven Truscott became imprinted on the nation’s memory. First published in 2001, “Until You Are Dead” revealed new witnesses, leads and evidence never presented to the courts.…
I’m both a history buff and a criminal defense attorney. I grew up in a small North Carolina town, as the son of two educators who encouraged me to read anything I could get my hands on. My favorite stories were adventures and mysteries, especially courtroom dramas. Clarence Darrow was my historical hero, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that I would attend law school and try my hand at legal practice. I practiced criminal law for about 15 years, long enough to get a feel for how investigations and trials really work. That experience had a major impact on my own writing, and how to pick out a really fascinating true story.
Frank Lloyd Wright is undoubtedly America’s most famous architect. Everyone knows his name, and those who study the field know how his distinctive styles changed the face of architecture in the early 1900s. But few realize the impact that a brutal mass murder had upon Wright’s life and work. It happened at his Taliesin estate in rural Wisconsin in 1914. One of Wright’s house servants, Julian Carlton, went on a rampage with an axe, hacking to death Wright’s lover Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her two children. Four others also were killed when Carlton set the house on fire. Of course the tragedy was personally devastating for Wright, and it also changed the creative course of his life. After Taliesin was destroyed, he moved away from the Prairie House style of organic architecture, for which he had originally become famous.
The most pivotal and yet least understood event of Frank Lloyd Wright's celebrated life involves the brutal murders in 1914 of seven adults and children dear to the architect and the destruction by fire of Taliesin, his landmark residence, near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Supplying both a gripping mystery story and a portrait of the artist in his prime, William Drennan wades through the myths surrounding Wright and the massacre, casting fresh light on the formulation of Wright's architectural ideology and the cataclysmic effects that the Taliesin murders exerted on the fabled architect and on his subsequent designs.
I’m both a history buff and a criminal defense attorney. I grew up in a small North Carolina town, as the son of two educators who encouraged me to read anything I could get my hands on. My favorite stories were adventures and mysteries, especially courtroom dramas. Clarence Darrow was my historical hero, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that I would attend law school and try my hand at legal practice. I practiced criminal law for about 15 years, long enough to get a feel for how investigations and trials really work. That experience had a major impact on my own writing, and how to pick out a really fascinating true story.
A story of a brutal crime, of a long hunt for justice, and of small-town corruption at its worst. In June 1970, Nancy Morgan was murdered in a remote mountain cove in Madison County, North Carolina. The case lay dormant until 1984, when one of Nancy’s friends was unexpectedly charged with the crime. But the prosecution’s case fell apart at trial, and the author lays out a persuasive theory that the county sheriff—long known for his family’s style of local machine politics—instigated the charges against an innocent man in order to boost his re-election bid, when he knew full well that the real murderer was the son of one of his political supporters. For anyone who has ever posed the question—how bad can politics get?—this story provides a very disturbing answer.
In June of 1970, the body of 24-year-old Nancy Morgan was found inside a government-owned car in Madison County, North Carolina. It had been four days since anyone had heard from the bubbly, hard-working brunette who had moved to the Appalachian community less than a year prior as an organizer for Volunteers in Service to America. At the time of her death, her tenure in the Tar Heel State was just weeks from ending, her intentions set on New York and nursing school and a new life that she would never see. The initial investigation was thwarted by inept police…
For most of my life, I have dedicated myself to confronting, combatting, or deconstructing white supremacy. It impacts everyone. Much of my work is about highlighting the ways Black people have refused and resisted racial discrimination, violence, and harm. We can never have too many tools, and equally important for me was being able to have tools that achieved their purpose. I wrote We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance to remind readers that there has never been a time in the history of this country when Black people have not fought back against their oppression.
Ok, when this book debuted, there was some controversy, the cover centers one large crowbar! But when a reader really takes the time to sit with the arguments Osterweil is making, she cannot be denied.
Her book is more than a pitch to loot or even burn it all down, Osterweil wants us to understand why people loot and furthermore, she wants us to be more disturbed by the reasons for looting than the act itself.
If the truth sets us free, then we should all be willing to ask the hard questions. This book does that.
A fresh argument for rioting and looting as our most powerful tools for dismantling white supremacy.
Looting -- a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly seizing goods -- is one of the more extreme actions that can take place in the midst of social unrest. Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement.
But Vicky Osterweil argues that stealing goods and destroying property are direct, pragmatic strategies of wealth redistribution and improving life for the working class -- not to mention the brazen messages these methods send to the police…
Much of the Britain that's exported to the world is fed by the monochromatic myth of nobility and royalty, but the heart of Britain is multifaceted and multicultural. I didn’t grow up in London, but grew up visiting family here and ‘The Big Smoke’ had an allure for me. The people were all different colours and ethnicities and it truly felt like the most exciting place in the world. I moved here the week I turned 18, and I haven’t left. It's a harsh, expensive city, and it's much too busy to provide anyone with any lasting sanity, but here I found a version of Black Britain that I was missing in my hometown.
This is a modern classic – one that provides a slice of a very pivotal time in Black British history.
The 1980s saw a lot of civil unrest in Britain, from workers’ strikes to uprisings fuelled by racial tensions and police brutality. East of Acre Lane is set in Brixton – a neighbourhood in London that saw its fair share of uprisings – amongst the young Black Caribbean community.
It is such an authentic portrait, down to the musicality of the slang and dialects used. It’s immersive, it’s got action, it’s moving, it’s everything!
'Alex Wheatle writes from a place of honesty and passion' Steve McQueen, director of Small Axe
East of Acre Lane is the fast-paced and razor sharp story of a young man trying to do the right thing from celebrated author Alex Wheatle, one of the figures who inspired Steve McQueen's Small Axe
It is 1981, and Brixton is on the verge of exploding. Biscuit lives with his mother, brother and sister, trapped hustling on the frontline for the South London badman Nunchucks. As the patience of the community breaks and the riots erupt, Biscuit must make a choice that could…
I go by the title AmericanStudier in my public scholarship and take that name very seriously. I believe nothing is more important for our future than better remembering our past and that pushing the nation toward its most inspiring ideals requires grappling with our hardest and most painful histories. On my AmericanStudies blog, in my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, and in all my other scholarly, public, and social media content, I am committed to sharing our histories and stories, figures and works, voices, and writing in all forms and for all audiences. I hope you’ll join me in this work by reading and sharing these great books!
My favorite American novel is at once the most righteously angry and the most beautifully optimistic book I’ve ever read.
Historical fiction urgently responding to the present, an intimate family saga that creates an entire community—Chesnutt’s masterpiece is a book I’ve taught almost every year of my career, and I find something new in it each time I read it.
No book reminds me more potently of the worst of our history, and no book inspires me to fight for our best more passionately.
Based on a historically accurate account of the Wilmington, North Carolina, "race riot" of 1898, African-American author Charles W. Chesnutt's innovative novel is a passionate portrait of the betrayal of black culture in America.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning…
I developed a strong interest in current events, especially politics, in high school. What the government does, or does not do, struck me as a vital piece of the puzzle in trying to explain why things are the way they are. That soon led, however, to seeing how the past continues to influence the present. No decade is more important than the 1960s for understanding our current political climate.
On May 8, 1970, just days after the killing of four college students at Kent State University, construction workers in New York City violently attacked a group that had gathered to protest the Vietnam War.
Kuhn offers a riveting account of the events (dubbed the “Hardhat Riot” by some and “Workers’ Woodstock” by others), but he also situates them into a broader story of how the war and other developments of the 1960s exacerbated divisions within the Democratic Party between white, heavily unionized blue-collar workers in the urban North and an emerging class of college-educated professionals.
Nixon successfully courted many of the blue-collar workers on the way to his landslide victory in 1972. Kuhn is no apologist for the workers, but he also avoids facile stereotypes about the white working class, some of which persist to this day.
In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protestors bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was happening; Democrats were at war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story-how chaotic it was, when it began, when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was forever changed. It was unthinkable one generation before: FDR's "forgotten man" siding with the party of Big Business and, ultimately, paving the way for presidencies…
I’m a philosopher, writer, and illustrator from Wales, UK. I grew up on ’70s sci-fi—Star Wars (the original trilogy!), Battlestar Galactica (the original series!), The Black Hole (Remember that?! No? Oh well…). Space travel, flying cars, sassy computers you could banter with, cute robots who would be your best friend—it was a time when the future seemed just around the corner. But now, as these things finally start to arrive, I feel I’ve been mis-sold. Data theft? Mass surveillance? Killer drones? Election manipulation? Social media bot farms? This isn’t the future I signed up for! Or maybe I should have read the terms and conditions…
But canyou fight the future? Isn’t it inevitable? This is often how tech companies try to make us think, and that anyone who opposes “progress” is a Luddite. But, as Patrick Sale makes clear in this excellent and heartbreaking historical study, the original Luddites—a protest movement that swept the industrial heartland of 19th Century England—were not anti-technology; they merely thought technology should serve people, not profit. Faced with the destruction of their livelihoods and their traditional way of life, they destroyed machines and burnt factories because that was the only outlet they had for their rage and desperation. And when the “inevitable march of progress” comes to trample you too, you may see that they had a point.
Kirkpatrick Sale is at the tumultuous centre of a technology backlash, actively challenging Bill Gates on the one hand and the Unabomber on the other. The subject of bets, barbs, and grudging praise in the pages of WIRED, The New York Times, Newsweek, and The New Yorker, Rebels Against the Future takes us back to the first technology backlash, the short-lived and fierce Luddite rebellion of 1811. Sale tells the compelling story of the Luddites'struggle to preserve their jobs and way of life by destroying the machines that threatened to replace them he then invokes a new-Luddite spirit in response…
I am fortunate not to have witnessed any major riots myself; the worst I’ve endured was a 1993 street fight in Moscow between parading Communists and the police, with bricks on one side and clubs and water cannon on the other. But even a relatively gentle protest march that draws a police response can be an astonishing spectacle, transforming a familiar, modern city into a medieval battlefield of massed crowds confronting armored men on horseback. And I am fascinated by the place of crowd actions in democratic societies. The right to assemble is embedded in our constitution, but there’s a fine line between public expression and mob rule.
The four days of deadly fighting that shook New York City in July 1863 are best known as the Civil War Draft Riots, but they combined multiple, overlapping grievances. While some men rioted in outrage that poor men must fight while rich men could buy an exemption, others seized the chance to lynch African Americans, settle old political scores, loot shops, or smash the grain elevators and street-sweeping machines they blamed for their unemployment. Schecter connects the intimate, block-by-block events of a riot with the largest debates facing the nation, helping to explain the ultimate disappointment of Reconstruction.
This lively best-selling story - now in its third edition - will appeal to youngsters diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. Otto is a high-octane young car whose motor is always running in overdrive. He also has trouble paying attention in school, is easily distracted, and acts without thinking. Otto and his parents visit a special mechanic, who prescribes medication to slow down Otto's racing motor and who shows him many ways to be more focused and organized and better able to get along with others. Reflecting a multiple-treatment approach to ADHD, Otto's experience includes counseling and other non-medical supports in…
