Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone Energy Accumulator (09/24)
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 ...
1940 U.S. Presidential Candidate Wendell Willkie (09/24)
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 ...
The Civil Rights Movement in Maine (09/24)
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...
The Santo Tomas POW camp (09/24)
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 ...
Slate Mining in America (09/24)
What does one name a fictional small town that once served as a hub for slate mining before its inevitable decline? Well, Slater, of course. In her novel The Dark We Know, Wen-yi Lee describes it as 'an old mining town sunk in a crater at the end of the road with nowhere to go beyond it but down.' Isadora Chang dreads returning there for ...
The Mary McLeod Bethune Statue at the U.S. Capitol (08/24)
As Noliwe Rooks rightly asserts in her book A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune was a woman of many 'firsts.' Even though she died in 1955, Bethune made another historic first on July 13, 2022, when she became the first Black person to have a state-commissioned statue in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary ...
The Launch of Sputnik 2 (08/24)
Though the story unfolds largely through flashbacks, the present-day events of The Most occur on November 3, 1957, which is the day the Soviet Union launched its satellite Sputnik 2 into space. This date was chosen at the behest of Premier Nikita Krushchev to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Occurring at the...
A'isha bint Abu Bakr (08/24)
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 ...
Advertising for Brides in the 19th-Century American West (07/24)
The Californian Gold Rush, the American Civil War, and the lure of land expansion filled the 19th-century American West with men like Tom Rourke, the protagonist of Kevin Barry's
The Heart in Winter. These men came to work as miners, farmers, or ranchers—but they often lacked companions to help with farm work, ensure the continuity ...
The 1926 Bingham, Utah Avalanche (07/24)
The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates is written as a series of vignettes based on twelve days in the life of the main character, which include personal moments and historical events, both famous and lesser-known. One of these happenings is an avalanche that Isaac survives at the age of eight with his sister in the ...
The Heist of the Century: The Antwerp Diamond Heist (07/24)
It's been called the heist of the century, despite happening only three years after the turn of the millennium. At the start of the business day on February 17, 2003, police were called to the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) by frantic jewel traders claiming their highly secure vault had been breached. Investigators found the ...
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (07/24)
One of the characters in Kate Quinn's The Briar Club played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which existed from 1943 to 1954.
In 1942, owners of professional baseball teams and stadiums were in a panic. Young men who played ball were being drafted to fight in World War II, and several minor league ...
The Women of the Ku Klux Klan (07/24)
Timothy Egan's book A Fever in the Heartland mentions the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, a group of women who were actively aligned with the mission of the KKK during its 1920s resurgence. In 1923, the WKKK formed in Little Rock, Arkansas. The WKKK had chapters in every state and at least 500,000 members over the course of its existence. ...
Germany's War Children (07/24)
In Fatherland, New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger chronicles his quest to understand his maternal grandfather's Nazi past—a past shrouded in mystery despite the fact that Bilger's mother, born in 1935, was old enough at the time to have memories of World War II and her father's role in it.
She remembered her father wearing ...
Women's Influence in the British Abolition Movement (07/24)
In The Fraud, Eliza's lover Frances is a passionate abolitionist whose commitment to the cause infects Eliza with a similar sense of urgency. Britain's Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, freeing at least 800,000 people from bondage in the Caribbean, South America, and Canada. The act followed decades of campaigns from abolitionist ...
The Mysterious Life of Pirate Captain Jacquotte Delahaye (06/24)
Briony Cameron's debut novel,
The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye, is an imagined look at the life of a female pirate captain sailing the Caribbean in the 17th century. While some of her contemporaries, like
Anne Bonny and Mary Read, have become well known, Delahaye has been largely lost to history due to a lack of reliable records. Cameron ...
Desegregation Activist Daisy Bates (06/24)
In We Refuse, Kellie Carter Jackson recalls the courageous and tireless efforts of civil rights activist Daisy Bates and her husband, L.C., to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Bates home became a place of refuge for the students known as the 'Little Rock Nine' — the first group of Black children to attend the ...
A Shooting Star of American Astronomy: Maria Mitchell (06/24)
The central mystery of Sarah Perry's Enlightenment concerns an astronomer, Maria Văduva, and Thomas's uncovering of her hidden scientific contributions. Many real-life historical women partook in exploration of the night sky and space only for their discoveries to be similarly buried or forgotten. One such woman was the nineteenth-...
Is Separate Equal? The Sarah Roberts Case (06/24)
At the age of four, when Sarah Roberts was ready for school, her father Benjamin was insistent that she have the best education. It was the late 1840s in Boston. Benjamin Roberts had been traumatized by educational segregation. It incubated shame within him as a young black boy to attend inferior schools with inadequate resources. He didn...
The Bond Dance Hall Explosion (06/24)
Michelle Collins Anderson's historical novel The Flower Sisters draws inspiration from a tragic event that occurred in the author's hometown of West Plains, Missouri: the explosion of a dance hall packed with young dancers, the cause of which was never determined.
It was Friday, April 13, 1928. The Bond Dance Hall was located on the ...
V-E Day (06/24)
Patrick deWitt's The Librarianist depicts main character Bob Comet's childhood experience of being driven home by a sheriff, after having run away, on the day that officially marked the end of World War II.
May 8, 1945 is the day when German troops throughout Europe surrendered to the Allies, and is known as V-E Day (Victory in Europe...
The Collapse of Reconstruction (06/24)
In His Name Is George Floyd, authors Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa explain how Floyd's ancestors were dispossessed of their lucrative North Carolina farmlands via shady financial documents and restrictions on their literacy rendering them unable to read those very documents. This is just one example of the reassertion of white ...
The Poor Clares of Sant'Orsola Convent (06/24)
In Natasha Solomons' novel Fair Rosaline, the eponymous heroine is destined for life in a convent – specifically Sant'Orsola in Mantua, Italy. Margherita Gonzaga d'Este, a wealthy widow, commissioned the convent in the early 17th century, sparing no expense; she hired architect and artist Antonio Maria Viani to design the building, ...
Marie Antoinette, Fashion Icon (05/24)
In 1783, Marie Antoinette made a terrible faux pas—she dressed like a commoner. Painted by her favorite portraitist, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, the queen was depicted in a loose cotton dress, comfortably tied at the waist with no corset. Although one may think this would have endeared her to the citizenry, it only ...
Evacuating Children from London During World War II (05/24)
During World War II, the constant threat of German bombs falling on London and other key cities forced many English families to make an incredibly painful choice: whether to keep their children with them in this dangerous area or to separate from them, sending them away to places where they could hopefully live more safely and normally. ...
Women Homesteaders of the West (05/24)
Where Coyotes Howl is set in the young and growing town of Wallace, Wyoming in 1916, following a couple named Ellen and Charlie's path as they set out to build a ranch on the High Plains. Author Sandra Dallas provides a slice-of-life picture of homesteading and ranching in Wyoming through the various characters. Many of Ellen's friends ...
Sojourner Truth Was Invisible — Or Was She? (05/24)
It was May of 1851 when 54-year-old Sojourner Truth took the stage. Truth, who would become one of the most famous women of any race of the nineteenth century, spoke her personal testimony to the mostly white audience at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. She was the only speaker who had been enslaved and the room was ...
Fashion Designer Lucy Duff-Gordon (05/24)
In the introduction to her biography of Elinor Glyn, author Hilary A. Hallett acknowledges that one of the biggest challenges she faced in writing the book 'was not to let [Glyn's] many fascinating friends—and the many places they traveled—carry away the narrative for too long.' Among the most intriguing of the secondary ...
The Crimean War and Disease (04/24)
The Crimean War of 1853–1856 pitted the Russian Empire against an alliance of British, French, Turkish and Sardinian troops on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. Britain entered the war in March 1854 to protect its trading interests with Turkey, while France saw an opportunity for revenge against the Russians after Napoleon'...
Tea's Role in World History (04/24)
Few plants have impacted world history as profoundly as Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. Jessica J. Lee, in her book Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, describes how tea is integral to both seemingly disparate halves of her family tree—her Welsh paternal grandparents and her Taiwanese maternal family all loved tea and ...
The Founding of the ACLU (04/24)
In Max Wallace's absorbing biography of Helen Keller, After the Miracle, the author illuminates Keller's often overlooked dedication to the fight for civil rights. Through her lifetime, she was involved with a wide number of causes and organizations, from joining the Socialist Party to campaigning against U.S. involvement in World War I, ...
Olivia de Havilland and the Studio System (04/24)
In the novella "Eve in Hollywood," in Amor Towles's Table for Two, Eve Ross becomes close friends with the actress Olivia de Havilland. It is 1938, and de Havilland's popular new film The Adventures of Robin Hood has just been released. All is not well in paradise, however, for the young star falls prey to blackmailers, ...
The Kyshtym Nuclear Disaster (04/24)
While Chernobyl may be the first incident that comes to mind when someone thinks about nuclear disasters in the 20th century, this event actually had a precursor in the USSR: the 'Kyshtym disaster' of 1957. Basing her novel
The Half Life of Valery K on this event, author Natasha Pulley's fictional 'City 40' is modeled on Chelyabinsk-40, ...
Emma Goldman (04/24)
In Biography of X, author Catherine Lacey imagines a world in which Russian-born anarchist and progressive activist Emma Goldman had a legitimate political career in the United States, serving as governor of Illinois and then chief of staff to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this capacity, Goldman ushered in profound systemic ...
British Women in the Second World War (04/24)
Jacquelin Winspear's heroine, Elinor White, was a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) during the Second World War, one of several British organizations in which women enlisted to aid the war effort.
When war broke out in 1939, millions of men left the workforce in Great Britain to enlist, leaving behind their wives, sisters...
The Real-Life Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (03/24)
Joel H. Morris's novel All Our Yesterdays imagines the lives of Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, before the events that unfold in Shakespeare's tragedy. Many are familiar with the tale but may not realize the couple are based on individuals who really did live in what is now Scotland during the eleventh century.
Scotland was...
The Pendle Witches (03/24)
'Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes. A word that builds gallows and, turns breathing women into corpses...
The Goiania Accident (03/24)
In the title story of You Glow in the Dark, scrap metal scavengers uncover a strange glowing capsule in the ruins of an abandoned hospital. Dazzled by the beautiful blue particles that glow in the dark, they spread radioactive poison throughout their community, leaving illness and death everywhere they go. When the accident is finally ...
Infamous Prison Insurrections (02/24)
In The Ascent, Adam Plantinga imagines what it would be like to climb through six levels of a prison in utter chaos: cell doors opening, guards hiding or dead, inmates murdering each other and so much worse. It does not require fiction, however, to imagine these hellscapes: history has many examples of such mayhem. Below are two of ...
The Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011 (02/24)
In Muriel Barbery's novel One Hour of Fervor, her characters watch the television in horror as news breaks of a huge earthquake in Japan's Tohoku region and its resulting tsunami. Though they are safely on high ground far from the impacted area, they are immediately fearful for loved ones, and reminded all too starkly of just how quickly ...
The Summerland Disaster on the Isle of Man (02/24)
In the novel Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli, photographer Quentin Morrow was scheduled to go on a photography retreat on the Isle of Man before his death. In the middle of the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is an island with its own parliament, customs, history and a population of over 80,000. While technically a Crown Dependency (owned by ...
Margaret Cavendish and Vitalist Materialism (02/24)
In her biography of 17th-century author Margaret Cavendish, Pure Wit, Francesca Peacock shines light on often-overlooked aspects of Cavendish's life and work, including her contributions to Western philosophy. From the beginning of her philosophical career, she believed in materialism. Simply put, this is the theory that everything that ...
The Freedom Summer Murders (02/24)
In Nyani Nkrumah's novel Wade in the Water, set in the early 1980s, one character's father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan who participated in the (real-life) murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner on June 21, 1964.
The 15th Amendment, passed in 1870, purportedly guaranteed Blacks the right to vote. The ...
Little Vienna, a Jewish Haven in Shanghai (02/24)
In Aleksandar Hemon's novel The World and All That It Holds, Rafael Pinto is a Sephardic Jew in Sarajevo at the beginning of the 20th century. When World War I erupts, he's flung east—first to Galicia, in what is now Ukraine and Poland, to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire; then to Tashkent, in what is now Uzbekistan, into a ...
The Life, Work and Trial of Oscar Wilde (02/24)
Born in 1854 Dublin to a pair of writers — a father who was a well-known surgeon but also published works on architecture and Irish folklore, and a mother who wrote poetry under a pseudonym — Oscar Wilde went on to himself become an acclaimed poet, playwright and novelist, though his tragic fate overshadowed his literary and ...
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 ...
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...
