I have a passion for Historical Fiction. It started when I was 12 years old. Before that, I never liked any kind of history. Then, in school, we started learning about King Tut, and I was fascinated. I started having frequent dreams that he would sit and tell me stories about our life together and he believed that I was his wife, Sunni. Into adulthood, I still had these dreams, so I decided to write about the stories that he would tell. Along with exhaustive research, I learned who Sunni (Anukshanamun) was. My book is based on facts mixed with my dreams.
Lu Ann Bell was a painter in the 1850s who became well known for painting servants. It was actually her housemaid that did the paintings. I liked how the story depicts a lawyer in 2004 that tries to help the housemaids' descendants get what is rightfully hers.
Our history is full of talented people that were taken advantage of because of their status or race. I loved the fact that there are still people today that are trying to right the wrongs of yesterday.
The House Girl, the historical fiction debut by Tara Conklin, is an unforgettable story of love, history, and a search for justice, set in modern-day New York and 1852 Virginia. Weaving together the story of an escaped slave in the pre-Civil War South and a determined junior lawyer, The House Girl follows Lina Sparrow as she looks for an appropriate lead plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking compensation for families of slaves. In her research, she learns about Lu Anne Bell, a renowned prewar artist whose famous works might have actually been painted by her slave, Josephine. Featuring two remarkable, unforgettable…
I am a social historian of the African Diaspora. I am passionate about writing stories that have never been told. The stories I uncover detail the lives, struggles, and resistance of enslaved people. I am interested in and have written about such overlooked topics as African resistance to the transatlantic slave trade; Maroons in the American South; the experience of African Muslims enslaved throughout the Americas; and the lives of the people deported on the Clotilda, the last slave ship to the US. Much still needs to be unearthed to help form a more comprehensive history of the people who, in countless and remarkable ways, fought against their subjugation.
I have been totally captivated by this book about Cuban palenques, Maroon settlements, from 1737 to 1850.
La Rosa Corzo gives a fascinating account of several communities, their organization, activities, and resistance. I particularly appreciate his use of slave hunters’ diaries and military dispatches, which provide a unique insight into the repression against the palenqueros.
The author's meticulous study confirms what I found when researching Maroons in the United States: whenever possible, they preferred flight to combat, an approach that enabled them to stay alive, return to their settlement once the danger had passed, or build a new one elsewhere.
In the case of Cuba, it was a winning strategy: several of these settlements have survived as small towns.
Combining archaeological and historical methods, Gabino La Rosa Corzo provides the most detailed and accurate available account of the runaway slave settlements ( palenques ) that formed in the inaccessible mountain chains of eastern Cuba from 1737 to 1850, decades before the end of slavery on the island. The traces that remain of these communities provide important clues to historical processes such as slave resistance and emancipation, anticolonial insurgency, and the emergence of a free peasantry. Some of the communities developed into thriving towns that still exist today. La Rosa challenges the claims of previous scholars and demonstrates how romanticized…
I wrote my first short story eleven years ago for a flash fiction class, found my character Zebadiah Creed, and kept writing. In January 2017, at the age of fifty-nine, Five Star Publishing released An Eye for an Eye, Book One of The Tales of Zebadiah Creed worldwide, winning the American Fiction Award for Best Historical/Adventure. The Great Texas Dance, Book Two, was released in April 2020. Blue Rivers of Heaven, Book Three will be released in September 2022. I'm a member of the Western Writers of America and was a Spur Award judge for Short Fiction, 2019, and Best Traditional Novel, 2020. I’m currently writing my first stand-alone book entitled Sisters of the Field.
This is what I wrote when, as a judge in 2020, I recommended All God’s Children win the prestigious Spur Award for Best Traditional Western:
“From the opening sentence, the opening paragraph, and page, Aaron Gwyn sweeps us into an early nineteenth-century America bursting at the seams. He tells the tale of two very different folks, a young man disowned by his family in Kentucky, and a young slave girl from Virginia who refuses to accept her lot in life. Both their paths lead them to Texas. For Duncan, to fight in the revolution and serve heroically with the Texas Rangers, yet can never have true love; for Cecelia, to know freedom and love on the frontier, only to have both brutally snatched away in an instant. Beautifully written in simple, classic prose, Gwyn offers us a fresh, yet timeless glimpse into two American lives that finally find, in themselves…
This sweeping novel set in the province of Texas is “a powerful depiction of the rough realities of frontier life [and] the vicious influence of racism” (The New York Times).
Finalist for the Reading the West Book Award for Fiction
In 1827, Duncan Lammons, a disgraced young man from Kentucky, sets out to join the American army in the province of Texas, hoping that here he may live—and love—as he pleases. That same year, Cecelia, a young slave in Virginia, runs away for the first time.
Soon infamous for her escape attempts, Cecelia continues to drift through the reality of…
At
first, I was hesitant to read this book because the set-up sounded preposterous
– a Black boy disguised as a girl called Onion travels with abolitionist John
Brown from Kansas to Harper’s Ferry. Yet, however improbable the protagonist
may be, author James McBride explores real history through Onion’s eyes.
The
story starts in Kansas when abolitionists and pro-slavery factions are battling
over the territory’s future. (Kansas is not yet a state.) It ends in Harper’s
Ferry with Brown’s raid on the armory, an event that helped spark the Civil
War.
Some of the action does feel exaggerated or even nonfactual in parts, but
the story also reflects much of what happened. I recently visited both Kansas
and Harper’s Ferry, and the book brought the places alive for me.
Now a Showtime limited series starring Ethan Hawke and Daveed Diggs
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
From the bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, Deacon King Kong (an Oprah Book Club pick) and The Color of Water comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive.
Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856--a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces--when legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives. When an argument between Brown and Henry's master turns…
I am a social historian of the African Diaspora. I am passionate about writing stories that have never been told. The stories I uncover detail the lives, struggles, and resistance of enslaved people. I am interested in and have written about such overlooked topics as African resistance to the transatlantic slave trade; Maroons in the American South; the experience of African Muslims enslaved throughout the Americas; and the lives of the people deported on the Clotilda, the last slave ship to the US. Much still needs to be unearthed to help form a more comprehensive history of the people who, in countless and remarkable ways, fought against their subjugation.
By placing the American runaways’ experience in a continental perspective, this well-researched book brings a fresh outlook to the increasingly popular topic of runaways.
Besides the North and Canada, the contributors examine the motivations, lives, and networks of the people who looked for freedom in all directions. Taking their lives into their own hands, they found refuge in Southern cities, the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Mexico, which abolished slavery in 1829, Indian Country, and the Caribbean.
For each destination, the contributors study and evaluate the degree of freedom, formal, semiformal, and informal, which these self-liberated men and women were able to achieve.
This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different "spaces of freedom" they inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. North and South, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Using newspapers, advertisements, and new demographic data, contributors show how events like the Revolutionary War and westward expansion shaped the slave experience. Contributors investigate sites of formal freedom, where slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free, to determine the extent to which fugitive slaves experienced…
I am a social historian of the African Diaspora. I am passionate about writing stories that have never been told. The stories I uncover detail the lives, struggles, and resistance of enslaved people. I am interested in and have written about such overlooked topics as African resistance to the transatlantic slave trade; Maroons in the American South; the experience of African Muslims enslaved throughout the Americas; and the lives of the people deported on the Clotilda, the last slave ship to the US. Much still needs to be unearthed to help form a more comprehensive history of the people who, in countless and remarkable ways, fought against their subjugation.
I first became acquainted with the continental magnitude of marronage with the 1979 edition of this classic book. Richard Price, the expert on Maroon communities in Surinam, presents 21 texts on marronage in Spanish America, the French Caribbean, the United States, Brazil, Jamaica, Surinam, and French Guiana.
Sixteen pioneering historical studies were written by various scholars between the 1960s and 1970s. Five texts or testimonies by contemporaries, including Maroons themselves, were produced in the 18th and 19th centuries. Taken together, these studies and testimonies are essential to understanding the reach and significance of the maroon phenomenon in the history of Black people in the Americas.
Now in its twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Maroon Societies is a systematic study of the communities formed by escaped slaves in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. These societies ranged from small bands that survived less than a year to powerful states encompassing thousands of members and surviving for generations and even centuries. The volume includes eyewitness accounts written by escaped slaves and their pursuers, as well as modern historical and anthropological studies of the maroon experience. From the recipient of the J. I. Staley Prize in Anthropology
I am a journalist and NYU professor whose primary field is American foreign policy. As a biographer, however, I am drawn to American history and, increasingly, to the history of liberalism. I am now writing a biography of that arch-liberal, Hubert Humphrey. My actual subject thus appears to be wars of ideas. I began reading in-depth about the 1850s, when the question of slavery divided the nation in half, while writing a short biography of Judah Benjamin, Secretary of State of the Confederacy. (Judah Benjamin: Counselor To The Confederacy will be published in October.) It was the decade in which the tectonic fault upon which the nation was built erupted to the surface. There's a book for me in there somewhere, but I haven't yet found it.
Even now we can't quite help thinking that America could have ended slavery without fighting a monstrous war. Delbanco argues that war was not only unavoidable--hardly, in fact, a controversial proposition--but that what made it so was not Kansas-Nebraska or Dred Scott but the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Once Congress agreed that slave-owners could pursue escaped slaves into free territory, and mobilize the federal government to track them down, Northerners got to see first-hand just what it meant to treat humans as chattel. Those sickening scenes helped bring the Republican Party into existence and made its cause that of the North.
This book tells the story of America's original sin-slavery-through politics, law, literature, and above all, through the eyes of enslavedblack people who risked their lives to flee from bondage, thereby forcing the nation to confront the truth about itself. The struggle over slavery divided not only the American nation but also the hearts and minds of individual citizens faced with the timeless problem…
I’m the author of ten books, including fiction, memoir, collected journalism, and criticism. My novels are historical fiction, hence my decision to make my recommendations within that genre, mostly. My own historical novels comprise a tetralogy beginning with The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin and ending with The Turner Erotica, so the series takes the reader roughly from 1648 to 1900. The second book chronologically in the series, Rebecca Wentworth’s Distraction, won the 2003 Langum Prize for historical fiction. Retired now, I was the founding director of the MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University.
This historical novel is set just before the American Civil War. What singles it out is not the theme—the struggle of an African American slave and mother, Rosetta, for her freedom. More unusual is White’s courageous depiction of the full yet flawed humanity of her slave (“soul”) catcher, Augustus Cain, as Rosetta flees her inhumane conditions in Virginia enroute to Boston. Cain is one of the best at what he does, but the journey both characters endure also brings both toward mutual compassion and redemption. Though published in 2007, the book fits perfectly into, and helps to amplify further, our current awakening to our historical racism and the vast suffering white Americans have inflicted on their Black brothers and sisters.
Augustus Cain is a man with his back against the wall. A war-scarred wanderer, he faces a past he wants to forget, a present without prospect or fortune, and an uncertain future marred by the loss of his most prized possession - his horse - which he has carelessly gambled away. But he is not without skill - he has an uncanny, if unwelcome, ability to track the most elusive runaway slaves. And to repay a debt and keep his horse, he must head north from Virginia and retrieve a runaway named Rosetta. When he eventually runs Rosetta to ground…
I may be only 27, but I’ve spent years researching the Cold War. Mostly because it’s very personal to me…my grandfather was a scientist at a top-secret hydrogen bomb plant in the 1960s. I began researching to understand his work and how it affected my family. I didn’t expect to become so consumed by the sixties. The more I learned about the nuclear arms race and the protests that were led, largely, by women, the more I felt convinced that there was a storyhere. I’m passionate about the often untold stories of resistance—resilience—endurance. Especially women’s stories. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I do!
I am including The Underground Railroad as it’s both historical fiction and magical realism—a beautiful surrealist imagining of Civil War history. This inventive novel follows Cora, who is enslaved on a plantation in Georgia. When Cora hears of the underground railroad, she plots her escape—but in this book, the railroad is more than a secret network. It is a real, physical, underground train. Cora must fight for her life and her freedom on a harrowing journey north, evading the slave hunter Ridgeway as he seeks to track her down. Cora’s strength and independence make her a character that will stick with you.
NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES BY BARRY JENKINS (COMING MAY 2021)
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2016
'Whitehead is on a roll: the reviews have been sublime' Guardian
'Luminous, furious, wildly inventive' Observer
'Hands down one of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year' Stylist
'Dazzling' New York Review of Books
Praised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016 and the…
I’m a historical novelist originally from Ohio. In Civil War lessons at school, we learned about battles and generals and read The Red Badge of Courage and other books centering on men’s experiences. With the exception of Florence Nightingale, women were largely absent from the discussions. I want to know about the women. As an adult, I lived in Roswell, Georgia, where I learned of the mill workers, mostly women and children, who, in 1864, were arrested and sent north by Federal forces for making Confederate cloth. Their fates largely remain a mystery, and I wrote my book in order to imagine what we may never know.
Set just prior to the Civil War, this novel is one I’ve often recommended since first reading it years ago. The novel’s four main characters, enslaved mistresses of Southern men, are well-rendered and complex and stayed with me long after I finished the book. I was drawn by the women’s distinct personalities and how they responded to the harsh realities of their lives.
The novel also introduced me to a piece of my home state’s history: Tawawa House was a summer resort in southwestern Ohio popular among southern planters who brought their enslaved mistresses despite Ohio being a free state. (The resort would later become the site of Wilberforce University, the nation’s oldest private, historically black university owned and operated by African Americans.)
Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is startling and original fiction that raises provocative questions of power and freedom, love and dependence. An enchanting and unforgettable novel based on little-known fact, Wench combines the narrative allure of Cane River by Lalita Tademy and the moral complexities of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World as it tells the story of four black enslaved women in the years preceding the Civil War. A stunning debut novel, Wench marks author Perkins-Valdez—previously a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Short Fiction Prize—as a writer destined for greatness.
