The Vietnam Women's Memorial (02/24)
In Kristin Hannah's The Women, nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath joins the Army Nurse Corps and is shipped overseas to serve as a combat nurse in the Vietnam War. Upon returning home, Frankie spends years running from her trauma until she eventually finds a way to share her experiences. At the end of the novel, she ...
The Camp Logan Mutiny (01/24)
Before he was hanged for his alleged role in the Camp Logan Mutiny, Army Pfc. Thomas Hawkins wrote a letter to his mother and father. It was both poignant and simple. 'When this letter reaches you, I will be beyond the veil of sorrow. I will be in heaven with the angels…I am not guilty of the crime that I am accused of but Mother it...
Iran Air Flight 655 (01/24)
On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, a Navy missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, saw on its radar an Iranian aircraft. This aircraft was a passenger airplane, flying from Tehran to Dubai with 290 civilians on board, including 66 children. But the crew of the USS Vincennes identified the airplane as a fighter jet and fired two ...
Phoolan Devi: The Real-Life "Bandit Queen" (01/24)
In Parini Shroff's The Bandit Queens, Phoolan Devi (pronounced POOH-lann DAY-vee) is a feminist symbol of strength, poise and honor to abused women, her portrait hung high in main character Geeta's home. Devi, known as India's 'Bandit Queen,' is the only real-world figure highlighted throughout the novel. So who exactly was she?
Devi ...
Operation Long Jump (01/24)
The Nazi Conspiracy by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch centers on an alleged plot by the Germans during World War II to kill or kidnap the three major world leaders representing the Allied powers: American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill and premier of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin.
The plan, ...
The Legacy of Sappho (01/24)
Selby Wynn Schwartz's debut novel After Sappho reimagines the lives of early 20th century lesbian authors and artists. The novel tells the story of how these women ignited a radical feminist movement inspired by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, broke free from conventions to pursue their own desires and creativity, and flourished within...
Black Jockeys: The Foundation of American Horse Racing (01/24)
On its face, the end of the Civil War should have marked a time in which African Americans would be afforded freedom. But the end of slavery did not mean the end of Black oppression. Many white Americans built their fortunes on, and were heavily entrenched in, slavery's infrastructure. These individuals, as well as others, bore great ...
Protesting Operation Alert (01/24)
Alice McDermott's novel about the humanitarian efforts of American corporate wives living in Vietnam in the early '60s, Absolution, takes a detour to New York City in the previous decade, where Tricia, the protagonist, and her radicalized friend Stella participate in sit-ins against the compulsory Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
In ...
Traian Popovici: The Man Who Saved Jews in Czernowitz (01/24)
The Blood Years by Elana K. Arnold tells the story of Frederieke 'Rieke' Teitler, a young Jewish girl trying to survive the atrocities of Nazi-controlled Romania. Throughout the war, many of Rieke's friends are deported to Transnistria, a small country to the east where Jews were sent to live in camps and ghettos. Rieke and her family, ...
American Involvement in Korea During and After the Korean War (01/24)
The novel Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl is divided between the experiences of the character Big Uncle during the Korean War in 1950 and his nephew Insu's adolescence in the 1970s. It shows how alliances and protections formed during the war gave rise to familial ties and cultural integrations in the postwar era. Insu's identity as the ...
Chivalry and the Black Prince (01/24)
In Dan Jones' novel Essex Dogs, readers see fictionalized portrayals of royalty and knights from the point of view of the foot soldiers under their command in the early years of the Hundred Years' War (a series of wars interspersed with truces between the French and English that began in 1337 and lasted for 116 years). Far from the ...
East Germany's Secret Police: The Stasi (01/24)
The main character in Dan Fesperman's spy thriller Winter Work is a colonel in East Germany's HVA, a unit of the infamous East German security service commonly referred to as the Stasi.
After World War II, the United States and the USSR vied for influence over Europe, with most countries in the western half of the continent joining ...
The Freedom Swimmers (01/24)
May Chen, the main character in Joanna Ho's The Silence That Binds Us, explores her identity through her family heritage, including the experiences of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Hong Kong as a young refugee from mainland China. Faced with formidable hardships during the Cultural Revolution, she left everything behind and ...
The C.R. Patterson & Sons Company (01/24)
Krystal Marquis mentions in a brief author's note that her debut novel The Davenports was 'inspired by the story of the C.R. Patterson & Sons carriage company, founded by a proud patriarch who escaped enslavement to become a wealthy and respected entrepreneur.'
Charles Richard Patterson was born into slavery on a plantation in Virginia...
Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Project (01/24)
Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves was inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Project, a World War II archive compiled and hidden by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Established and run by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive contained a wide variety of documents recording daily life in the Ghetto.
Ringelblum was born in ...
The Fires of 1970s New York City (12/23)
In her novel Remember Us, author Jacqueline Woodson draws from her own experiences growing up in 1970s New York. Her protagonist's hometown of Bushwick is plagued by housefires, landing it the callous nickname 'The Matchbox.'
Bushwick wasn't the only community affected by numerous fires at the time. Records show that by mid-1974, the ...
Sun Yat-sen (12/23)
In the novel The House of Doors, Lesley Hamlyn volunteers as a translator for Sun Yat-sen's political movement in Penang, Malaysia. Sun Yat-sen is one of the foremost figures in Chinese political history. By leading China from an empire to a republic, he also became an important inspiration to other independence movements of twentieth-...
Free People of Color and Their Roles in the American Slave Trade (12/23)
In Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend, one of Annis's enslavers is a woman. Typically, when people think about enslavers and those perpetuating slavery as a system, they often think about white men. Some may find it surprising that women played a significant role in the slave trade, too. Furthermore, white people were not the only ones who ...
Conditions for People with Disabilities in 1930s America (12/23)
James McBride's novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store follows a community as they work together to save a young deaf Black boy, Dodo, from unjust institutionalization in 1930s America. Though Dodo's disability is physical, the state authorities are determined to place him in a mental institution called Pennhurst. In the context of ...
A Brief Overview of the Good Friday Agreement (11/23)
Francesca McDonnell Capossela's novel Trouble the Living is in part set in Northern Ireland during the waning days of the Troubles, a 30-year period of violence brought mostly to an end by the signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998.
In 1921, at the end of the Irish War of Independence, Ireland was partitioned into ...
American Entertainers Visiting the Vietnam Warfront (11/23)
In California Golden, Mindy has a transformative experience touring Vietnam during the war that makes her question her chosen career in show business. The Vietnam War was a transformative experience for America in the 1960s, impacting virtually everyone in some way. While the involvement of the United States in Vietnam was a profoundly ...
Jeanne Lanvin (1867-1946) (11/23)
Noelle Salazar's The Roaring Days of Zora Lily follows a fictional aspiring fashion designer living in Seattle in the 1920s. But who were the real fashion designers of the day? In Salazar's novel, Zora wants to have a career like Coco Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin. While most American readers have likely heard of the Chanel brand and its ...
The Jane Collective (10/23)
Kerri Maher's novel All You Have to Do Is Call fictionalizes the story of the real-life Jane Collective, an underground abortion network that operated in Chicago during the late 1960s and early '70s before abortion was legalized with the passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973. The organization was founded by Heather Booth, who as a college ...
General James Oglethorpe (10/23)
In The Kingdoms of Savannah, author George Dawes Green describes General James Oglethorpe as a 'jewel of a man, a rare nonmonster in Savannah history.' Indeed, Oglethorpe was unique in the context of 1700s British imperialism: a champion of the oppressed who fought against the powerful in issues ranging from prison abuse to slavery to the...
Enslavement in Canada (10/23)
The nonfiction book Flee North recounts how activist and writer Thomas Smallwood encouraged the enslaved individuals he helped escape to relocate to Canada, where slavery was illegal, rather than remaining in the United States, where they might be returned to captivity if caught. Smallwood himself settled in Toronto with his family in ...
The United Fruit Company: The Scourge of Central and South America (10/23)
In Where There Was Fire, the neighborhood that is the central setting in the 1968 timeline is home to a banana plantation run by a fictional corporation called American Fruit Company, based loosely on the real-life United Fruit Company (UFC). United Fruit (which has since become Chiquita) had plantations in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, ...
The Execution of Charles I (10/23)
When it comes to the execution of English royalty, perhaps the most famous are the two wives of Henry VIII who met their ends at the Tower of London — Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. The double execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette by guillotine in France is equally if not more famous, and countless other royals have ...
The French East India Companies (09/23)
In David Diop's novel
Beyond the Door of No Return, French botanist Michel Adanson journeys across 18
th-century Senegal to discover the fate of a woman who was kidnapped. At the time of the story, much of the area was either directly or indirectly under the control of the French East India Company, a less-known competitor to
the ...
1940 U.S. Presidential Candidate Wendell Willkie (09/23)
The Golden Gate by Amy Chua begins with the murder of Walter Wilkinson, who is a fictionalized version of Wendell Willkie, a Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkinson and Willkie both died in 1944, but their cause of death was vastly different — Willkie died of a heart attack instead of ...
A'isha bint Abu Bakr (09/23)
In Jamila Ahmed's Every Rising Sun, Shaherazade remembers a story from the life of A'isha, third wife of the Prophet Muhammad. While traveling with her husband, she was separated from the group and became lost in the desert. Another man found her and helped her back to Medina, but she was unjustly accused of adultery as a ...
The Erasure of Eileen Blair from Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (09/23)
Readers might be forgiven if, in reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, they miss the fact that his first wife, Eileen Blair, was in Spain with him, working for the Republican resistance against Franco's fascist forces. As Anna Funder points out in Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, when George does refer to her, he does not ...
White Rose (09/23)
In Ian McEwan's
Lessons, Roland Baines, a member of the English baby boomer generation, who 'as they turned adult' began 'to wonder at the dangers they never had to face,' contrasts his own achievements disparagingly with his German father-in-law's association with the White Rose anti-Nazi movement during World War II. This nonviolent...
The Santo Tomas POW camp (09/23)
In Valiant Women, author Lena S. Andrews features the true stories of women serving in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II. Among the women profiled is Navy nurse Dorothy Still, who was working in the Philippines when World War II broke out. She was taken prisoner by the Japanese and sent to Santo Tomas internment camp, where she ...
The 2009 Urumqi Riots and Mass Detention of Uyghurs (08/23)
As Tahir Hamut Izgil recounts in his memoir, Waiting to be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide, treatment of Uyghurs in China has changed dramatically in the last decade. In earlier years, ethnic-minority Uyghurs were no strangers to persecution by Han Chinese, as Izgil himself experienced with an arbitrary ...
Vietnamese Refugees in Orange County (08/23)
After the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to North Vietnamese military forces in April 1975, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese escaped to American ships off the coast, either by boat or helicopter. In Alan Drew's
The Recruit, the character Bao Phan is one of these refugees. The
International Rescue Committee (IRC) ...
The Civil Rights Movement in Maine (08/23)
Rachel Eliza Griffiths' debut novel Promise is set in Maine at a time when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was spreading to that state. Racial tensions were rising as white folks who resented calls for equality began viewing the presence of Blacks, no matter how few, as a threat to their existence.
Although racism...
Guerrilla Groups in the Ethiopian Civil War (08/23)
In The History of a Difficult Child, the Asmelash family turns to the radio for news about Ethiopia's revolutionary government, the Derg, which formed in 1974: they listen to reports about the famine in northern Ethiopia, charges by Human Rights International of human rights abuses by Chairman Mengistu, and, as the years pass, updates ...
The Abolition of Slavery in the Caribbean (08/23)
The Slavery Abolition Act, also known as the Emancipation Act, was an act of Parliament that legally abolished slavery in most British colonies. The act received Royal Assent on August 28, 1833, and took effect the following year on August 1. In Eleanor Shearer's debut novel, River Sing Me Home, this event serves as a catalyst for the ...
The Great Spokane Falls Fire of 1889 (08/23)
Fire Season is set in the late 1880s and features a historical backdrop of immense changes — both metaphorical and literal — in Spokane Falls, Washington. It was a time when Washington was seeking statehood and the legitimacy that came along with this designation, and the Great Spokane Falls Fire could have put the territory's...
The Este Dynasty of Ferrara, Italy (08/23)
In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell captures the dark personality of Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara (a region in northern Italy), who lived from 1533 to 1597. Alfonso was the last in his family lineage, which stretched back to the 13th century. As monarchs around the world have experienced throughout history, a lack of male ...
Anglo-Saxon Law (08/23)
In Dark Earth, sisters Isla and Blue attempt to claim protection from a warlord under the laws of sixth century England, while also hiding the fact that they've broken those laws. This part of British history was a time of transition, and the laws of the land were no exception to that. Starting in the fifth century, Germanic peoples ...
Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone Energy Accumulator (08/23)
In Edan Lepucki's novel Time's Mouth, one of the time travelers enhances their power using an obscure invention by a Viennese psychologist, Wilhelm Reich.
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was born in what is now Ukraine to Jewish parents, both of whom died when Reich was a child. After enlisting in the Austrian army during World War I, he ...
The Nazis and the German Auto Industry (08/23)
In Paul Murray's novel The Bee Sting, Dickie Barnes is the reluctant owner of a failing Volkswagen dealership. One character provokes Dickie's teenage daughter Cass by telling her that Volkswagen was started by the Nazis, so it's no great loss if the dealership shuts down. And it's true that even though these days Volkswagen might be best...
Lem Billings and the Kennedys (07/23)
Jackie & Me, Louis Bayard's historical novel about the early days of courtship between John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy (née Bouvier) is narrated by JFK's real-life best friend, Lem Billings. The two men met as boys while attending prep school at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut.
Kirk LeMoyne 'Lem' Billings was ...
The Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) (07/23)
In Anthony Marra's novel
Mercury Pictures Presents, the main characters struggle to ensure their movies adhere to the Motion Picture Production Code.
In the early years of the 20th century, as motion pictures were becoming increasingly available to the American public, some segments of the population expressed the opinion they ...
Archibald McIndoe (06/23)
The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris tells the story of Harold Gillies, a brilliant surgeon and visionary who helped pioneer the field of facial reconstruction during World War I. Through his dedication and innovation, Gillies not only restored the faces of countless soldiers, he also laid the foundation for future reconstructive work and ...
Søren Kierkegaard (06/23)
Born in 1813 in Copenhagen, Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and theologian best known for his critical discourse on the Christian faith, which solicited both critics and admirers while he was alive. Known today as the 'father of existentialism,' he was one of the first philosophers to delve into themes that would be ...
Sidi Mubarak Bombay (06/23)
Candice Millard's River of the Gods recounts the harrowing expeditions of Richard Burton and John Speke, two British explorers sent to find the source of the Nile River. Burton's name was well known before these ventures, but Speke became famous for being the first to discover the Nile's headwaters, and both men subsequently gained infamy...
The Handover of Hong Kong (06/23)
Ghost Girl, Banana takes place partly in Hong Kong in the summer of 1997, a setting intentionally chosen by the author for symbolic reasons, representing the inner conflict of the main character who is of Hong Kong descent but grew up in the UK, raised by her English father. This was the summer Hong Kong was 'returned' to the rule of the ...
Nicolae Ceauşescu (1918-1989) (06/23)
Ruta Sepetys's young adult novel I Must Betray You tells the story of Cristian Florescu, a Romanian teenager living at the pinnacle of the country's communist era in 1989. Cristian is blackmailed into being an informant for the Securitate, the government's secret police, forcing him to grapple with his guilt at betraying those he cares ...
.gif)
.png)
