I came to Civil War studies fairly late in life but still relatively callow, by a route too roundabout to explain. But after reading James McPherson’s, Battle Cry of Freedom(there’s a bonus book!), I found I had a love of every facet of the era. The only thing I’d ever wanted to be was a writer and, as I delved deeper into the vast body of literature on the American Civil War, I finally felt as if I’d found thesubject I could pour all my passion into (that and my enduring love of dogs). My novel Wilderness, along with a few novels published in French, was the result.
Part of the enduring popularity of the Battle of Gettysburg studies, is that the battle offers a true microcosm of the American Civil War—from politics to personalities. A meeting engagement, a desperate struggle, a turning point, and human tragedy on a scale the continent had never seen before, the events of those three days in July still resonant down the years. Guelzo’s book, besides being one of the most recent, offers wonderful descriptions of every facet of the battle with finely-crafted prose and a pacing that will keep readers invested from start to finish.
Winner of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
The Battle of Gettysburg has been written about at length and thoroughly dissected in terms of strategic importance, but never before has a book taken readers so close to the experience of the individual soldier.
Two-time Lincoln Prize winner Allen C. Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and the sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett’s Charge; the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it…
I grew up an avid reader of children’s and YA fantasy, which is how I discovered the subgenre of Regency fantasy. When I stumbled across Wrede and Stevermer’s work in libraries and used bookstores, I absolutely loved it. As an adult, I enjoyed exploring the Regency romances of older authors like Georgette Heyer and Marion Chesney as well as more recent Regency writers. But when I began writing romance myself, I went back to the fantasies that were my first introduction to the Regency era. My Regency novels are primarily romance, with just a pinch of magic, but I hope both romantasy fans and historical romance readers can enjoy them.
Fans of monster romance should check out this low-heat novella, which begins when protagonist Mary Clegg runs away from home to escape an unwanted marriage.
A detour through the forest gets her thoroughly lost, but not to worry: she conveniently encounters a handsome young centaur. He’s supposed to be surveying the land, but he’s just as lost as Mary, and the forest seems to be working magic of some sort to keep them together overnight. In addition to the forced proximity trope, there’s a bit of class difference at play, because centaurs are not considered genteel.
Quenby Olson’s gift for a witty turn-of-phrase is on point here, and I loved that the book was short enough to enjoy in a single setting.
No, correction: Miss Mary Clegg does not want to marry someone who lacks such important features as wit, intelligence, and a fine jawline. So what other option is there for her but to run away from home?
It's a simple enough plan, to begin with. But a shortcut through a magic forest (well, she didn't know it was magic at the time) and a chance meeting with an exasperating centaur provide a plethora of complications.
And what about love? Well, that might be the most challenging complication of all.
I'm a former novelist who now writes historical narrative nonfiction, mainly about American cities and the people who give them life. Each book focuses on an important turning point in the history of a specific metropolis (I've written about Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), often when the city goes from being a minor backwater to being someplace of significance. And I try to tell this story through the lives of real individuals who help to make that transformation happen. My goal is to use the skills I developed as a fiction writer to create historical narratives that maintain strict standards of scholarship while being as compelling and compulsively readable as novels.
As any objective historian can tell you, there are very few spotless heroes in history, and very few villains whose wrongdoing isn't firmly rooted in the psychological and sociological forces that shaped them.
So I really admire writers who, like Kali Nicole Gross, take pains to put the bad actions of their subjects in the context of their time and circumstances. In this measured and nuanced account of a sensational 19th-century murder, Gross carefully examines Gilded Age attitudes toward race and gender, tracing their influence on the crime, its investigation, and its punishment.
The result is a book both scholarly and absorbing – not an easy feat for any author to pull off.
Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working-class, black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor whom Tabbs implicated after her arrest.
As details surrounding the shocking case emerged, both the crime and ensuing trial-which spanned several months-were featured in the national press. The trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the black community to public attention. At the same time, the mixed race of the victim and one of his assailants exacerbated anxieties over…
I am an author whose works have spanned several genres, from mysteries (I won an Edgar for Strike Three You’re Dead), to psychology (I coined the word “psychobabble” and wrote a book about it), to humor (Bad Cat andBad Dog were both bestsellers), and, more lately to nonfiction, including Such Good Girls, true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust. I have worked in television as a comedian, writer, and producer, and as a senior editor in the publishing industry, but my first and enduring love is the magic of writing.
The little-known story of promoter Eddie Gottlieb’s South Philadelphia Hebrew Association team begins in the 1920s when professional basketball in this country was often played in a cage-encircled court to protect the athletes from the rabid fans in Philly and other cities in the hard-scrabble Eastern League. The unathletic Gottlieb kept the SPHAs at the top of the pack, along with Harlem’s all-Black Renaissance team. The story ends in the 1940s when helped organize the whites-only Basketball Association of American, the forerunner to the NBA. Gottlieb, who coached the original Philadelphia Warriors, spent the last 30 years of his life preparing each NBA season’s schedule by hand with a pencil and a legal pad.
Writing this book brought back memories from my childhood—of watching Perry pitch in the late 1960s and, more deeply, of relations with my parents. My father (a math prof at UC Berkeley) and mother cared little for sports, but by the time I turned seven, an identity uniquely my own emerged from my infatuation with the San Francisco Giants. By age ten, I regularly sneaked off to Candlestick Park, which required two long bus rides and a hike through one of the city’s worst neighborhoods. I knew exactly when I had to leave to retrace my journey to get home in time for dinner. Baseball was, and remains, in my blood.
Nathanson (like me) faced the dilemma of writing biography when the subject declines to be interviewed. His approach showed me the way. The availability of digital newspaper databases has opened up enormous possibilities for research, and Nathanson took advantage of them to provide color, detail, and analysis on a grand scale. The many dozens of reporters and newspaper writers who covered Dick Allen wrote game accounts, opinion columns, and feature stories that informed, inspired, and entertained contemporary readers. They watched the games from the vantage point of the press box, peppered the players and managers with questions in the clubhouse afterward, and often rode the buses and planes with the teams. They had a level of access that is the envy of historians, and Nathanson greatly profited from their work.
When the Philadelphia Phillies signed Dick Allen in 1960, fans of the franchise envisioned bearing witness to feats never before accomplished by a Phillies player. A half-century later, they're still trying to make sense of what they saw.
Carrying to the plate baseball's heaviest and loudest bat as well as the burden of being the club's first African American superstar, Allen found both hits and controversy with ease and regularity as he established himself as the premier individualist in a game that prided itself on conformity. As one of his managers observed, "I believe God Almighty hisself would have trouble…
I was not trained in African American history, but first developed a passion for it during my first teaching job in Pittsburgh, where a number of my colleagues were interested in locating the origins of Black Nationalism and began researching the life of a local black physician, Martin R. Delany. That led me to a wider exploration of nineteenth-century African American history.
A child of slavery, Still became a major figure in the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia which worked to undermine slavery by aiding the enslaved to reach freedom.
Wish I had this book when I was writing my book. There is no better book on the movement in eastern Pennsylvania and Still’s roll in it.
The remarkable and inspiring story of William Still, an unknown abolitionist who dedicated his life to managing a critical section of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia—the free state directly north of the Mason-Dixon Line—helping hundreds of people escape from slavery.
Born free in 1821 to two parents who had been enslaved, William Still was drawn to antislavery work from a young age. Hired as a clerk at the Anti-Slavery office in Philadelphia after teaching himself to read and write, he began directly assisting enslaved people who were crossing over from the South into freedom. Andrew Diemer captures the full range…
I grew up during the Second World War and had many relatives serving in Canada’s Armed Forces. I developed a deep interest in the military, which my High School history teacher – a veteran himself – encouraged. I made a zillion models of soldiers, aircraft, vessels, and tanks; then, when I reached the proper age, I began collecting military firearms. Long story short, I eventually took up military reenacting, and because the American bicentennial was imminent, I chose to recreate a United Empire Loyalist regiment, which had fought from Canadian bases. Our enthusiastic, very competitive group of men and women grew to be one of the largest and best drilled in the hobby.
This superb book provides deep insights into the relationship between Indigenous peoples and encroaching European settlers and convincingly emphasizes that the striving of land developers, such as George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Patrick Henry, was a major cause of the American rebellion. He describes in detail the Native societies, their customs, interactions, and political alliances. The early chapters provide accounts of settlers of both sexes who were captured, adopted, nurtured, and trained by the Natives. In the case of the Girty brothers, their seizures led to their wartime careers as accomplished, multi-lingual interpreters and as fighting partisans in the British Indian Department. In addition to an amazing array of Native tribes, two companies of Butler’s Rangers operated out of Detroit assisted by the Girtys.
Simon Girty Turncoat Hero: The Most Hated Man on the Early American Frontier by Phillip W. Hoffman
The subject of this panoramic biography is one of the most mysterious, misunderstood icons of early American history. Simon Girty was a sharp-witted, rascally, many-tongued frontiersman whose epic adventures span the French and Indian War, Dunmore's War, the American War for Independence, the Indian Wars, and the War of 1812.
After defecting from the Patriot cause to serve the British in March 1778, Girty achieved instant infamy. To understand his motivation one must discover, as he did, that the real, underlying cause of…
I became a historian of the American Revolution back in the early 1970s and have been working on that subject ever since. Most of my writings pivot on national politics, the origins of the Constitution, and James Madison. But explaining why the Revolution occurred and why it took the course it did remain subjects that still fascinate me.
The story of how the Continental Army suffered bitterly through the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge has been the subject of many books and the inspiration for many a patriotic myth. In this well-researched history, Bodle dispels many of those myths and carefully explains why the army had to stay so close to Philadelphia, when normally it would have moved further to the interior of Pennsylvania and sent many of its troops home for the winter. He provides a sophisticated account of the relationship between military needs and civilian politics, one that broadens our understanding of the Revolution.
Of the many dramatic episodes of the American Revolution, perhaps none is more steeped in legend than the Valley Forge winter. Paintings show Continentals huddled around campfires and Washington kneeling in the frozen woods, praying for his army's deliverance. To this day schoolchildren are taught that Valley Forge was the "turning point of the Revolution"-the event that transformed a ragged group of soldiers into a fighting army. But was Valley Forge really the "crucible of victory" it has come to represent in American history? Now, two hundred and twenty-five years later, Wayne Bodle has written…
My passion for this theme comes from my own long marriage and my passion for it. Having heard the phrase “I wouldn’t put up with that” so many times, it’s a relief to me to read that yes, many people do. Instead of giving up on something as important to them as a life partnership, they don’t give up until all hope is gone. Marriage resurrected is all about hope.
This is written by one of my favorite authors of Amish stories.
There is much heartache in this story, but that goes along with the marriage resurrected theme; regardless of what happens, the story of a marriage disintegrating is painful.
While there is never doubt that Judith and Isaac’s relationship will survive, the story of how is captivating.
As an Amish wife and mother struggles to hold her family together, a story from the past teaches her how to face her daily challenges with strength and love in the second Keepers of the Promise novel.
In modern day central Pennsylvania, Judith Wegler tries to heal the growing rift between her husband, Isaac, and his teenage brother Joseph—whom Judith and Isaac have raised as their own ever since both brothers lost their parents and siblings in a horrific fire. Meanwhile, Isaac’s hurtful silence about this tragic past has robbed Judith of any certainty of her husband’s love. But when…
I’ve always loved birds, especially the red-winged black birds; their song was the first I learned to recognize as a kid. My first field guide was written by Roger Tory Peterson, and through that book and many others I’ve learned about the amazing world around us. Now, as a children’s nonfiction author, I get to share similar stories with young readers through my books and at school presentations. And as a writing instructor, I collect well-crafted and well-researched nonfiction, and use them to encourage budding children’s writers at workshops, in blog posts for the Nonfiction Ninjas, and as co-host of the annual Nonfiction Fest that celebrates true stories for children.
Before Roger Tory Peterson, there was Louis. Before Louis, there
was John James Audubon – another amazing wildlife artist. But what makes this
picture book biography different is that the author Jacqueline Davies shows how
John J. solved a century’s old mystery – Where do birds go in winter?
Intensely curious, John J. decided to tie a tiny piece of wire around
a bird’s leg. You’ll have to read the book to find out what happened next, but
I think you’ll agree that John’s simple experiment was one of the biggest
innovations in ornithology. Beautifully
written and illustrated, this book is one to add to your life list.
John James Audubon was a boy who loved the out-of-doors more than the in. He was a boy who believed in studying birds in nature, not just from books. And, in the fall of 1804, he was a boy determined to learn if the small birds nesting near his Pennsylvania home really would return the following spring. This book reveals how the youthful Audubon pioneered a technique essential to our understanding of birds. Capturing the early passion of America's greatest painter of birds, this story will leave young readers listening intently for the call of birds large and small near…
