I am not a historian. I am a retired entomologist with a love for history. My first real experience with history was as a child, reading about Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic adventure on the Endurance—a story I must have re-read 50 times. I have come to recognize that much of the history I learned growing up was either incomplete or was just plain wrong. I am drawn to the arcane aspects of historical events, or that illustrate history from a different angle—which is shown in my list of books. The Silken Thread tells about the history that occurred because of, or was impacted by, just five insects.
Yellow fever, like many feared diseases, conjures up an image of faraway, steamy rain forests. At one time, yellow fever really was found there. But the disease—and the mosquito that carries it—didn't stay there. I was surprised to learn how prominent and feared yellow fever was in early Colonial America and that it persisted in the United States through the early 20th Century. Crosby provides background on the disease from Africa, its path to the Americas, and routine epidemics in New Orleans, but the book's primary focus is the account of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 that decimated Memphis, Tennessee, and other towns along the Mississippi River. I liked this book for filling in the blanks in my awareness and understanding of this American plague.
In this account, a journalist traces the course of the infectious disease known as yellow fever, “vividly [evoking] the Faulkner-meets-Dawn of the Dead horrors” (The New York Times Book Review) of this killer virus.
Over the course of history, yellow fever has paralyzed governments, halted commerce, quarantined cities, moved the U.S. capital, and altered the outcome of wars. During a single summer in Memphis alone, it cost more lives than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Johnstown flood combined.
In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they…
To me, it seemed the ancient mounds were fertile ground for literary exploration, a living metaphor – evidence of what was likely the first places of spiritual practice in our country, ancient, unknown, and buried, what a symbol to form the basis of a novel! When I began my research, I soon came into contact with the Natchez. I attended their annual gathering and eventually became close friends with the Principal Chief of the Natchez Nation, who vetted Sacred Mounds and wrote its foreword. The book includes historical figures like the Great Sun, descended from the Sun Itself, and his war chief, the Tattooed Serpent. They are part of the tapestry of history woven in Sacred Mounds.
This is another classic, chock full of archaeological descriptions, along with prints of early mounds and artifacts. It’s prime source material, with first-person accounts of those who first discovered and excavated the mounds. Originally published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1848 it remains an important reference on the mounds, a veritable time capsule of maps, illustrations, and accounts of early explorers.
The fact of the existence, within the valley of the Mississippi river and its tributaries, of many ancient monuments of human labor and skill, seems to have escaped the notice of the adventurers who first made known to the world the extent and fertility of that vast region. Except some incidental allusions by La Vega, and the Portuguese chronicler of De Soto's unfortunate expedition, to structures bearing some analogy to those of the West, (and which seem to have been occupied, if they were not built, by the Indians of Florida,) we find no mention made of these monuments by…
By chance, I was entrusted with rare historical documents about the immigrant generations in our family, which inspired this novel and grounded it in reality. Who wouldn’t wonder why they came? Besides, I have always been fascinated by pre-modern times and how steam power changed everything and dragged us along, kicking and screaming. And, even though they arrived in America in 1836, I grew up on the farm where they lived, so I heard tales of their amazing journey. It may be 186 years on, but it’s time to tell their story, which, it turns out, is a story for us all.
Winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, Shaman immerses readers in post-Revolution America of the 1830s, when Illinois was on a frontier defined by the Mississippi River. The characters include a doctor who fled from political turmoil in Scotland, members of the Sauk Indian tribe, runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad, and xenophobic Know-Nothings, a stew of intensifying forces that will lead to Civil War. The novel’s historical accuracy enhances it, and intertwined stories of two doctors, father and son, shine a light on a fascinating era.
Robert Jeremy Cole, the legendary doctor and hero of THE PHYSICIAN, left an enduring legacy. From the eleventh century on, the eldest son in each generation of the Cole family has borne the same first name and middle initial and many of these men have followed the medical profession. A few have been blessed with their ancestor's diagnostic skill and the 'sixth sense' they call The Gift, the ability to know instinctively when death is impending. The tragedy of Rob J.'s life is the deafness of his son, Robert Jefferson Cole, who is called Shaman by everyone who knows him.…
Jason has written over twenty historical novels on topics ranging from the Roman Empire to the Islamic invasion of Spain and to the spread of the Viking Age into North America. His latest series, The Long Fuse, follows a young man as he navigates the deadly conflicts of the French & Indian War and the Revolutionary War in Eighteenth-Century America.
When the deities dedicated to the history of the French and Indian War got together to recommend their own list of the best books on the war that made America, they made Francis Parkman’s multi-volume work required reading. And the good news is that even if they had not, it is worth diving into headfirst.
The French and Indian War is often overshadowed by the American and then French Revolutions that followed on its heels. Yet, neither of them would have ever happened without the completely lopsided British victory in the first. Parkman, writing in the Nineteenth Century, was among the first scholars to shed light on the immense impact wrought by the fight for control over North America in the 1750s. His work is massive as it digs into the very origins of both countries’ humble beginnings and rapid growth in the New World. But fear not! If his…
This Library of America volume, along with its companion, presents, for the first time in compact form, all seven titles of Francis Parkman’s monumental account of France and England’s imperial struggle for dominance on the North American continent. Deservedly compared as a literary achievement to Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Parkman’s accomplishment is hardly less awesome than the explorations and adventures he so vividly describes.
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) begins with the early and tragic settlement of the French Huguenots in Florida, then shifts to the northern reaches of the continent and…
I’ve written ten books, four of them prize-winning best sellers, but this is my first book on the Civil War. Fortunately, it’s been generously received. The Wall Street Journal declared it “an epic story” and “rattling good history,” while Pulitzer Prize-winning James M. McPherson declared it “the fullest and best history of the Vicksburg campaign.“ Another Pulitzer receipient, David Blight, praised it for its “sizzling and persuasive prose. Miller has found the way,” he said, “to write both military and emancipation history in one profound package.”
The war’s greatest military historian takes on its greatest military figure in Bruce Catton’s spirited two-volume classic: Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command. Written decades ago, these paired volumes remain the finest historical account of Grant’s triumphant Civil War career. In the opening volume, we meet the recently minted brigadier in September 1861 as he prepares to join his army at desolate Cairo, Illinois, having just recovered from a succession of crushing personal failures. In the concluding volume, we leave him at Petersburg Virginia in April 1865, after he demolishes R. E. Lee’s army in the climactic battle of the war. Wannabe revisionists think Catton is outdated. Don’t believe them.
This is the first part of the military biography of Ulysses S. Grant and follows Grant from the summer of 1861 when he takes on his first Civil War command through battles at Belmont, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth and Vicksburg to the summer of 1863. The author has used letters, diaries and despatches in order to provide a rounded picture of this general's personality. "Grant Takes Command" forms the second part of this biography.
I grew up on the Delaware River and took my first canoe trip around 12. Later, in my teens, I worked for a canoe outfitter. During college, I took several longer trips with friends. When a father, I would bring my kids and family along, often with a dog. Later, I would paddle the whole stretch of it, 200 miles from the headwaters to my boyhood home, which I wrote about in my book. To write it, I reread many of these books, including Powell and Graves, who also paddled with his dog. Mine, Sully, joined me on my 9-day trip.
Traveling down the length of the river, Harris describes his journey less as an external vacation and more as a process of getting to know himself better and better. Harris, from St. Louis, had little to no canoeing experience, but as he gains confidence, he comes to believe he is capable of almost anything.
He also begins to understand what it means to be a Black American on the historic river, but it becomes clear that “people will see I’m Black only moments after they see my canoe is green.” He travels “from where there ain’t no Black folks to where they don’t like us much.” Pair with James, by Percival Everett. Based on Huck Finn, it stays close to the original, yet tells Jim/James's side and takes more seriously his quest for freedom and to reunite with his family.
Since the publication of his first book, Mississippi Solo, Eddy L. Harris has been praised for his travel writing. In this exciting reissue of his classic travelogue, readers will come to treasure the rich insightful prose that is as textured as the Mississippi River itself. They will be taken by the hand by an adventurer whose lifelong dream is to canoe the length of this mighty river, from Minnesota to New Orleans. The trip's dangers were legion for a Black man traveling alone, paddling from "where there ain't no black folks to where they still don't like us much." Barge…
I’m a historian of science fascinated by how scientists cope with uncertainty. I’m drawn to books that identify and try to explain the gaps in scientific knowledge and describe ways of knowing that might not be called scientific. I love to read stories about how ordinary people discover extraordinary things about their environments. I’m always curious about what happens when savvy locals are visited by scientific experts. Will they join forces? Admit what they don’t know? Or is a struggle brewing?
Amazingly, the seismic disasters that this book documents, which took place in the middle of the United States in the nineteenth century, have been almost entirely forgotten by scientists and planners.
How can earthquakes remake an entire region, physically and socially—and yet to be erased from history within two generations? This is a mind-boggling story about the short attention span of those entrusted to protect against environmental destruction.
From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the flow of the continent's mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to recover from the Civil War, the New Madrid earthquakes had been essentially forgotten. In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Conevery Bolton Valencius remembers this major environmental disaster, demonstrating how events that have been long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were in fact enormously important at…
I’m a lover of the sea, ships, seamen, and their histories, particularly of navies in the Civil War. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy (1967) with a history major, I served twenty years as a surface warfare officer (ship driver) on most oceans in ships ranging from destroyer to aircraft carrier and with river forces in Vietnam. I earned an M.A. in Political Science and an M.S. in Information Systems Management. Now as a historian, author, and speaker, I’m committed to communicating our naval heritage in an educational and entertaining manner for old hands and new generations. Writing about ships is the next best thing to driving them.
“The cruise of a ship is a biography,” wrote Raphael Semmes about his ocean-straddling tall ship, CSS Alabama. “The ship becomes a personification. She not only, ‘walks the waters like a thing of life,’ but she speaks in moving accents to those capable of interpreting her.” In this excellent biography of Carondelet’s career, a squat, ugly, ironclad gunboat also becomes a major character along with the men who designed and built the revolutionary vessel, stoked her engines, and fired her big guns. In tactics and technology, riverine warfare was invented from scratch and indispensable to victory. This work (and Smith’s entire series on brown water war vessels) provides fresh and enlightening perspectives on every major battle down the Mississippi from Forts Henry and Donelson through Vicksburg to Red River.
The USS Carondelet had a revolutionary ship design and was the most active of all the Union's Civil War river ironclads. From Fort Henry through the siege of Vicksburg and from the Red River campaign through the Battle of Nashville, the gunboat was prominent in war legend and literature. This history draws on the letters of Ensign Scott Dyer Jordan and Rear Adm. It falls in the category of Henry Walke's memoirs.
I was a computer programmer (BA and MA in math) for several organizations, including NASA and the Savannah River Ecology Lab before retirement, went to the Clarion and Tulane SF&F Workshops, and read the slush pile for Amazing/Fantastic. I’ve done a lot of theatre as actor and lighting tech, have always liked to hike in the woods, have written 11 novels (including 3 published SF novels), had 5 plays given full production, and have 2 CDs of my original songs. In my copious spare time, I sleep.
Tully was a best-selling author in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Beggars of Life, his first book, is based on his experiences riding the freights as a young man. These are the kind of people I like to write about, though usually not as far down as Tully’s.
Jim Tully left his hometown of St. Marys, Ohio, in 1901, spending most of his teenage years in the company of hoboes. Drifting across the country as a “road kid,” he spent those years scrambling into boxcars, sleeping in hobo jungles, avoiding railroad cops, begging meals from back doors, and haunting public libraries. Tully crafted these memories into a dark and astonishing chronicle of the American underclass—especially in his second book, Beggars of Life, an autobiographical novel published in 1924. Tully saw it all, from a church baptism in the Mississippi River to election day in Chicago. And in Beggars…
I am saddened and frustrated by polarization in American life today, and I believe that the Civil War has lessons to teach us about how we can avoid deeper divisions in our country. I grew up in Maryland, a border state, and have relatives that fought for the North, as well as relatives who fought for the South. In addition, I have Quaker ancestors who hated slavery and supported the Union, but who would not fight because they were pacifists. I am passionate about understanding the tensions that have always run through American life, and want to explore the topic deeply in my reading and writing.
I thought I knew my United States history, but I did not know the siege of Vicksburg, one of the most horrifying and significant military actions of the Civil War.
This book opened my eyes to the intense pain of the engagement through the stories of soldiers and civilians, men and women. The author does a masterful job of humanizing an account that could easily become a textbook story of a military engagement. He left me understanding the scar this siege left on Vicksburg for 100 years.
Continuing the series that began with A Blaze of Glory, Jeff Shaara returns to chronicle another decisive chapter in America’s long and bloody Civil War. In A Chain of Thunder, the action shifts to the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. There, in the vaunted “Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” a siege for the ages will cement the reputation of one Union general—and all but seal the fate of the rebel cause.
In May 1863, after months of hard and bitter combat, Union troops under the command of Major General Ulysses S. Grant at long last successfully cross…
