The House Is On Fire. Rachel Beanland. Simon & Schuster, 2023. 384 pages.
On December 26, 1811, 600 people filled the Richmond Theater in Virginia to see a play followed by a children's pantomime. During the show, a lit chandelier and faulty stage equipment caused a fire which burned down the theater, killing 72, including the Governor, in the largest American disaster to that point.
Novelist Rachel Beanland used the fire as inspiration for her fictionalized account. She used three real-life characters and a fourth character inspired by a real person to tell the story from four unique but interconnected experiences. The three real people were Sally Campbell, the widowed daughter of Revolutionary Patrick Henry, Jack Gibson, the teenaged stage hand in the theatrical company, and Gilbert Hunt, an enslaved blacksmith who is credited with rescuing a dozen or so white women as they leapt from windows to escape the fire. The fourth character, Cecily Patterson, a young enslaved woman, was based on a name from the published list of victims, Nancy. Beside Nancy's name on the list appeared the notation "supposed to have died." This notation inspired Beanland to think that the enslaved Nancy was suspected of using the chaos and cover of the fire in order to make her escape, and that's exactly what Cecily does.
Beanland takes the characters and creates much of their stories, but the final result is a well-researched and really satisfying novel that delves into the time, place, and gender and racial truths of the period. It's a good read.
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis. Adam Hochschild. Mariner Books, 2022. 432 pages.
In 1917, the US was dragged into The Great War ravaging Europe, despite the 1916 campaign pledges by President Woodrow Wilson that American boys would not get involved and his campaign's chief slogan, "He kept us out of war." A month after his second inauguration, he asked Congress for a declaration of war, saying, "The world must be made safe for democracy." Ironic on two levels: only one of the major participants, France, was a constitutional republic, and the war led to an all-out assault and massacre of democracy's hallmarks, freedom of speech, press, and thought, in the US.
The Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to jail and deport thousands of Americans and resident aliens for criticizing the government's war efforts, even in private conversations. Newspapers and magazines were shut down, and editors were prosecuted. Mobs of self-appointed vigilantes assaulted suspected "traitors," beating, tarring and feathering, and lynching hundreds. Conscientious Objectors and pacifists were imprisoned and tortured, using brutal techniques learned in the recent Filipino War.
Government agents and super-patriotic citizens targeted militant labor unionists, especially the IWW, socialists, pacifists, Blacks, and immigrants. At war's end, returning Black veterans were lynched for daring to assert that they had rights, race massacres swept the country, the KKK rose in prominence, and the Palmer Raids swept up thousands in the first "Red Scare." The Immigration Act of 1924 slammed America's open doors shut.
It was a dark and disturbing period in US history, often ignored. Hochschild vividly, and painfully, brings it to light. History can't be one or the other; it must contain the light and the dark.
Founding Fathers: The Shaping of America. Gerry and Janet Souter. Seven Oaks, 2011. 64 pages.
I've always loved a good "Museum-in-a-book," those books that contain facsimiles of historical documents folded within their pages. As a kid, it was always a great day at a discount book store or clearance section to find one, rip off the plastic wrap, and discover the treasured artifacts inside. As a teacher, I incorporated them into my classroom.
Founding Fathers is a great example, with 15 documents included.
Eric Foner author talk
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. Eric Foner. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019. 256 pages.
Juneteenth is now a federally recognized holiday commemorating an event of June 19 1865 when enslaved people in Texas were officially informed of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery in the US, two months after the Confederate Army surrendered and its government was dismantled. Unfortunately, many Americans erroneously believe that the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves; it did not. It was a largely a master stroke of political propaganda on Lincoln's part, with little real legal authority. Slavery didn't officially end until the ratification of the 13th amendment, which was followed by the 14th, defining citizenship and extending it to the formerly enslaved, and the 15th, granting black males the right to vote.
These three amendments were the keystones of Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, during which America was transformed, as author Eric Foner puts it, into the world's first biracial democracy. It was definitely not easy. And struggles continue. Foner is the foremost American scholar on Reconstruction. In The Second Founding, he recounts the history of the amendments as major steps forward, but those steps were erased after Reconstruction by politicians and the Supreme Court and halted until the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movement put the march forward back on track, literally and figuratively. He traces all the steps and missteps on the way and draws comparisons to issues still facing us.
If the Allies Had Fallen: Sixty Alternate Scenarios of World War II. Dennis E. Showalter & Harold C. Deutsch, editors. MJF Books, 2010, originally published 1997. 358 pages.
"What if" is one of the greatest phrases ever used by historians and history buffs, and it's always been a major hook drawing people to love history. Speculation over how the course of history could have been altered if some seemingly minor event had or had not happened can take you down endless rabbit holes of debate and thought. Every movement and event involves countless possibilities for some alternate scenario to play out. There's a whole genre of alternate history fiction in which authors create new stories of what might have been. What if the USA and CSA had negotiated a peaceful split instead of fought the Civil War? What if Africans had colonized Europe? What if Columbus had been lost at sea on his first voyage? What if hippos had been brought to the American South as livestock (premise of an actual book series)? Even the questions are endless.
WWII is one of the most fertile fields for alternate history scenarios, and If the Allies Had Fallen brings together answers to 60 different WWII questions. However, this book is not for average readers of fiction or even average WWII buffs. The editors and writers are military and political historians, and their tone is very scholarly, too scholarly and military for me. I got bogged down. The points made are valid for the most part, but reading it was a slog. It's also very German-centric with relatively little mention of the Pacific war.
Still, those more military history minded of you might appreciate it.
Travels of William Bartram. Mark Van Doren, editor. Dover Publications, 1955. Reprint of 1928 edition.
This is one of those books that I had on a shelf for decades but never got around to reading until now. William Bartram was one of the first and most respected trained naturalists in America. In the 1770s and 1780s, he trekked across much of what was then the United States, usually alone, on foot, horseback, or in a boat, often through territory that few whites had seen before.
Bartram's Travels, published in 1791, details his travels in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida between 1773 and 1776. Along the way, he took detailed notes, made scientific illustrations, and collected specimens of plants, describing, naming, and classifying plants, often for the first time. He observed and documented the animals, including the predators which were numerous at the time: wolves, panthers, and alligators. In one scene, he described stumbling into the middle of an alligator feeding frenzy when he suddenly became aware of dozens of large alligators around him, gathered to take advantage of a huge fish run. He visited isolated plantations on the frontier, and he visited Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole villages, documenting the inhabitants' lives.
Bartram's book has been considered a milestone in scientific literature ever since, but it's also been considered great literature in general, inspiring Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau among others. Bartram continues to inspire today. It is a great work, but this edition would have been much better with notes to clarify and identify what he describes in layman's terms, not just scientific nomenclature.
Patrick Radden Keefe author talk
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream. Patrick Radden Keefe. Anchor, 2010. 414 pages.
A couple of years ago, I had never heard of Patrick Radden Keefe, but he has quickly become one of my favorite journalists/nonfiction authors. The Snakehead is a riveting look at Chinese illegal immigration into the US and the thriving Chinese criminal underworld that runs Chinatowns across the country.
The focus is on Cheng Chui Ping, known as Sister Ping, who ran a large human smuggling operation from 1984 to 2000 from New York's Chinatown on the Lower Eastside. On the surface, she worked 14-16 hour days running a notions store and restaurant catering to her fellow immigrants from Fujian Province, China, but she quickly became the most respected and loved snakehead, or human smuggler, in the business, and a multimillionaire. It is said that she emptied whole villages in China, bringing them to the US in arduous journeys of months or years. The US government finally caught up with her around 1990, but it took a decade to end her empire.
American immigration policy has always been complicated, flawed, even broken and corrupt. This book captures all that but still leaves the reader questioning what can be done. Leave it to politicians? Honestly, can you name a problem politicians have ever solved?
I highly recommend reading all of Keefe's books.
Brad Meltzer, CBS Sunday Morning
The Nazi Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill. Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch. Flatiron Books, 2023. 400 pages.
In November, 1943, the Big Three Allied leaders, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, met face to face for the first time in Tehran, Iran to discuss war strategies and goals moving forward. The conference was a long time coming, and planning it required much behind-the-scenes diplomacy, manipulation, and legwork. The sheer audacity of flying FDR, in seriously deteriorating health, around the world in the middle of a war, leaving the US for nearly a month, was daunting. Meanwhile, Stalin harbored tremendous mistrust of the other two, especially Churchill (mutual), and he grew angrier every day that a new Western front wasn't opened up to relieve the Soviet burden of the war. He felt ignored and lied to. FDR realized that the Allied war effort demanded a meeting to show the world that it truly was a united front, and he was determined to make it happen.
When the Germans learned of the planned meeting (within days of the arrangements being finalized), they allegedly hatched a plot to kill the Big Three, an act which would have quite possibly changed the war's outcome. Allegedly? Turns out, the plot's existence is still debated among historians today, and hard evidence doesn't seem to exist. After all, it was top secret, and assassination was still anathema to "civilized" states at war, so the men involved would have denied everything to avoid war crimes prosecution. Meltzer and Mensch examine the possible conspiracy, and they have created a very enjoyable book that lets the readers in on the war effort, the conference planning, and the leaders involved.
Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought On the Great Depression. Christopher Knowlton. Simon & Schuster, 2020. 432 pages.
Few states roared in the Roaring 20s as loudly as Florida. Seven thousand people a day moved into the still largely undeveloped and untamed state, hoping to carve out their personal plot of paradise. Radio, newspapers, magazines, and billboards bombarded northerners with ads touting great tracts of beautiful tropical land ( much of which was really underwater at the time it was purchased). Some states went so far as to outlaw Florida ads, including states that are still hemorrhaging residents a century later.
Florida developers, i.e. an assortment of swindlers, con men, criminals, and ne'er-do-wells (again, what's changed?) made millions selling Florida to both the super wealthy and the middle class. The boom caused land prices to soar 400 to 500 % in a few days. Flashy gaudy cities and mansions sprung up overnight. Celebrities, Gangsters, and socialites flocked to the state to be seen.
Alas, with every bubble, a bust must follow, and the bust hit hard. The slowing national economy, coupled with devastating hurricanes in 1926 and 1928, ruined many, many fortunes. Millionaire developers, members of the middle class, and the poor laborers who built and maintained the luxury all saw their fortunes and dreams dashed, even before the Crash of 1929.
Did Florida's economic collapse cause the Great Depression? Knowlton confesses that it was not the cause but writes "the Sunshine State did provide both the dynamite and the detonator." Bubble is an entertaining look at the boom and bust and a real lesson on how history repeats, or echoes at least.
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