Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in October 2026

 Black Widow.  Randy Wayne White.  Putnam Adult, 2008.  352 pages.  Book 15 of 28 in Doc Ford series.

My return to "Florida Man" series reading with number 15 of 28 titles in the Doc Ford series. Marion Ford, known as "Doc" to his friends is a marine biologist living in a stilt house on Sanibel Island and collecting marine specimens and doing marine life studies for a living, but he has a past life as a highly trained secret government agent, and he can't help being dragged into dangerous situations that require him to use his particular set of skills and contacts in order to help friends out.  In this case, his goddaughter Shay is all set to marry into a very wealthy and connected family, and she and a few friends have a wild bachelorette party on a small Caribbean island.  Unfortunately, the shenanigans are secretly videotaped, and somebody is blackmailing Shay and her friends, threatening to derail their lives.  She enlists Doc's help to make the payoff.  Surprise, surprise, the trouble doesn't end there.  The blackmail web grows even stickier, and Doc has to make a return visit to set things right.  It's your standard Doc Ford adventure, a dependable thriller. 

BBC series based on the book, Episode 1

An African History of Africa:  From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence.  Zeinab Badawi.  Mariner Books, 2025.  544 pages.  

For far too long and for far too many people, African history has basically started with the Diaspora, Middle Passage, and slavery - a story  always framed  and told by Europeans.  Zeinab Badawi sets out to correct that oversight in this survey of African history, from our earliest human ancestors --- the origin of mankind --- to the present, and she succeeds.  She traveled through more than 30 countries and interviewed dozens of the continent's leading historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists.  The result is an extremely accessible, informative, and epic read.  She moves beyond familiar narratives of Egypt and European colonialism to explore Kush, Aksum, North African Islamic dynasties, the West African kingdoms, Benin, Kongo, Asante, and southern African societies, emphasizing the sophistication, diversity, and interconnectedness of African civilizations before European conquest.  Badawi also confronts the uncomfortable histories of African participation in slavery while addressing the vastly expanded scale and brutality of the Atlantic slave trade and later European imperialism. The final sections briefly examine the Scramble for Africa, colonial exploitation, African resistance, and the independence movements that transformed the continent.

1979 Movie Trailer        "Why Should You Read Flannery O'Connor?"

Wise Blood.  Flannery O'Connor.  Original publisher Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1952.  238 pages.  

Wise Blood was Flannery O'Connor's first novel, and it was actually a collection and reworking of several previously published O'Connor stories.  Who was Flannery O'Connor?  Only the Queen of Southern Gothic, the Queen of the Grotesque.  She stands alone in literature, because people don't know what to do with her:  a Catholic woman who was born in Savannah, Georgia and lived much of her adult life on a small farm near Milledgeville, Georgia.  Battling major health issues throughout her short life and possessing a mind that raced with deep questions about both the spiritual and the secular worlds that surrounded her, she wrote short stories primarily that dealt with race, gender, and religion in ways that no other author in mid-century America would dare.  Her work is simultaneously dark, brutal, gritty, funny, challenging - even threatening -  and provocative, and she is unsurpassed when it comes to characterization and establishing the setting.  In every way, her writing makes Stephen King's writing look like a middle schooler's amateurish notebook scrawls by comparison.

In Wise Blood, Hazel Motes returns to Tennessee following his World War II service, with no family connections and dealing with psychological demons, stemming from his service and from his troubled childhood.  He decides to move to the nearest city and resolves to spread the gospel of antireligion, aiming to found and lead the Church Without Christ.  In the city, he meets a strange and twisted set of characters, and his life is one frustration after another until he meets his tragic end.  The result is a strange, unsettling little book about faith, doubt, guilt, and the possibility that trying desperately to escape one’s beliefs may be another way of being trapped by them. O’Connor once described her work as “Christ-haunted,” and Wise Blood may be the quintessential example.  Weird, funny, disturbing, and unmistakably Southern. O’Connor doesn’t so much tell a story as throw you into the deep end of the American religious psyche and see what happens. (Note: Be sure to seek out the 1979 movie adaptation directed by John Huston and produced by longtime friends and associates of the author, who died in 1964 at the age of 39.)

Richard Kurin and Annette Gordon-Reed in conversation

History by a Hair:  Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery.  Richard Kurin.  Crown, 2026.  432 pages.

Being a historian is very much like being a detective, both relying on gathering clues, following dead ends, evaluating evidence, and piecing together a whole story from incomplete bits.  If you like detective stories, if you like CSI, if you like history, this is a great book for you about one of the oldest mysteries in American history. For over two hundred years, it's been alleged that Thomas Jefferson, the founder who so eloquently described freedom and equality as American ideals while enslaving over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, had a decades-long relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings, fathering several of her children.  Hemings family lore over the decades had maintained that  the relationship, first discussed in print in the early 1800s by Jefferson's political opponents, was factual.  Many diehard Jefferson apologists and direct descendants of Jefferson, via his wife Martha, vehemently denied the charge.  In the late 1990s, DNA tests proved that a Jefferson male (perhaps Jefferson or his brother or nephews) had fathered at least one of the Hemings children, but couldn't prove any stronger connection, and deniers were still unmoved.  A major breakthrough occurred in 2011 when a few strands of hair were found in the so-called "Jefferson Bible,"  the collection of New Testament passages from various Bibles that Jefferson personally cut and pasted together for his own use.  Richard Kurin, Smithsonian historian and museum official, had a brainstorm:  Could these be Jefferson's hairs and could they be used, with today's more advanced DNA techniques, to prove, once and for all, the paternity truth?  For the next 15 years, Kurin and a top team of genealogists, historians, archaeologists, curators, and DNA specialists worked to find and identify samples of living and dead Jefferson and Hemings descendants in order to build and to compare genomes to settle the matter once and for all.  All were determined  to "follow truth wherever it may lead," as Jefferson himself wrote. Spoiler alert:  the mystery is resolved, and the book is a fascinating account of all the work that went into the solution.

Trailer for Netflix adaptation - 2021

Passing.  Nella Larsen.  Knopf, 1929.  215 pages.

Think about how many stories you've read or movies and tv shows you've seen in which the plot hinges on someone pretending to be who or what they aren't, taking on a false identity.  It's a very popular theme in storytelling.  Racial "passing," the act of concealing one's own racial identity and adopting another, is  a very American version of that idea, and it has been prevalent throughout our history, with mostly black Americans living as whites in order to escape racism and to build better lives for themselves and for their families.  (There have been a few instances in the other direction; see the book Passing Strange about Clarence King, a white man who lived a double life as a black railroad porter.)  In 1929, Nella Larsen published Passing, a novel inspired by her own mixed race background.  Although little known today, Larsen and her two novels struck a popular chord and became a celebrated element of the Harlem Renaissance.  It's being rediscovered today as a gripping,  psychologically tense novel about race, gender, and identity in 1920s New York.  It focuses on two women, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry Bellew, who were friends in childhood, drifted apart, and then unexpectedly meet up again as adults.  Both women are light-skinned, but Irene identifies firmly as black and is actively involved in the middle and upper class culture of black Harlem in the 1920s, and Clare started passing as white in her teens and married a white racist, abandoning her black life and associations.  Irene's world view is "shook" by the meeting, simultaneously fascinated and disturbed.  Meanwhile, Clare is fascinated by Irene's life and longs to reconnect with her own blackness; she begins visiting Harlem and developing relationships with Irene's friends. The relationship, along with Irene's feelings, becomes complicated, with Irene eventually becoming increasingly jealous and suspicious of Clare's intentions toward and growing closeness with her husband.  When Clare's husband discovers her secret, there's a shocking and intentionally ambiguous climax.  The novel really holds up well a hundred years later and stacks up very favorably to any of the big bestselling novels of today.  (There is a 2021 movie adaptation on Netflix.) 

Author interview

The Facemaker:  A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I.  Lindsey Fitzharris.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.  336 pages.

This is one of the best and most unique books about World War I that I have ever read, hands down.  World War I was a war like no other war that had been fought before.  Despite the optimistic predictions on both sides that hostilities will be over within a few weeks, or a couple of months at most, it became obvious rather quickly that industrialization and invention expanded humanity's capacity for unleashing total destruction and death, and that capacity wildly surpassed its medical capabilities.  Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured, and medicine struggled to keep pace.   Here, medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris explores the particular story of  the surgeon Harold Gillies.  Gillies saw that there was a huge need for facial reconstruction, and he assembled a dedicated and extremely talented of surgeons, nurses, dentists, artists, and prosthetic makers that revolutionized the relatively new field of plastic surgery.  They developed techniques that made life possible for men whose faces were destroyed.  Not only did they pioneer the fields of plastic surgery and prosthetics, but their work also greatly impacted the fields of psychiatry and anesthesiology, as well as many specific treatments and procedures like blood transfusions.  It's a fantastic story about human ingenuity, empathy, strength, determination, and perseverance in both the medical figures and the wounded men.  It also makes the absolute horrors of the trenches vivid and unforgettable.  Don't worry about getting lost in military history or deep medical jargon; it is extremely accessible and a fast read.  Highly recommended for anyone interested in WWI, medical or scientific history, or just for anyone looking for a great story.  

Author Interview

The Lost Cities of El Norte:  Coronado's Quest, the Unconquered West, and the Birth of American Indian Resistance.  Peter Stark.  Mariner Books, 2026.  432 pages.

In 1540, Spanish conquistador Francisco Coronado led the largest overland expeditionary force to ever march in the Americas, consisting of about 375 Europeans, up to 1,300 Indian allies, several hundred servants, and 1,500 horses.  They set out from Mexico City, formerly the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, and moved north into "El Norte Misterioso,"  The Mysterious North, determined to find the fabled golden cities of Cibola to enrich and to glorify both their King and themselves.  Coronado and his people traversed 2,500 miles of unmapped terrain, ranging across the present-day U.S. states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and finally Kansas. They were the first Europeans to gaze upon the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains; made first contact with the Puebloan peoples; crossed the Sonoran Desert and the Great Plains, where they encountered endless herds of bison and the nomadic tribes who followed them.  Unfortunately, they discovered no cities of gold, meeting only with hardships and resistance.  Two years later, Coronado led a bedraggled and beaten group of 100 hangers-on, some clad only in animal skins and many with permanently damaged bodies, as they hobbled back into Mexico City.  Coronado himself was reduced to being carried in a litter, having suffered serious injuries, perhaps some brain damage.  On his return, he was promptly arrested and charged with abusing the Indians that he encountered - breaking the relatively new orders from the King demanding more humane treatment, failures in leadership, and ultimately the failure to push on to complete his mission to find wealth. Peter Stark has written a riveting account of the expedition and its impact on the American West.  

We Chase Shadows.  Richard Osman.  Pamela Dorman Books, 2026.  352 pages.  Book 2 of 2 in We Solve Murders.  

Richard Osman's second "We Solve Murders" novel takes the reader into the deeply shady world of fraudulent medical treatments and supplements as the crew takes on their first real case.  High in the Italian hills, the bodyguard of a British expat is found murdered, and the owner of the villa calls our heroes to figure things out quietly.  He's one of six bosses in the illegal medical world who had previously come together to peacefully divide up their territories, but now they're being murdered, one by one.  Is one of the six eliminating his competition?  Amy, the experienced and highly competent professional bodyguard, Steve, her father-in-law the ex-cop, pub quiz enthusiast, and rock afficionado, and Rosie, the jet-setting, fast-living, crime thriller author jump at the chance to solve their first real case as We Solve Murders, Inc.  Soon, more bodies, and more mysteries, pile up.  The characters are great, and the book is full of humor and pop culture references.  

Night Vision.  Randy Wayne White.  G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2011.  368 pages.  Book 18 of 28 in Doc Ford series.

Marion Ford, "Doc" to his friends, the marine biologist and former highly trained secret government agent from Sanibel Island, Florida is once again dragged in to an explosive mess by his friends.  This time, the action is all pretty much local, with no trips to troubled Caribbean countries, no huge criminal organizations, and no need to bring in associates with "particular sets of skills" to assist.  In this case, Ford and his best buddy Tomlinson are out to save an endangered 13-year old Guatemalan girl who came to Florida looking for her family and found herself mired in the incredibly perilous world of migrant workers and human trafficking.  This Doc Ford just didn't make much of a mark with me.  Maybe I've just about run the Doc Ford course.  It may be the weakest that I've read.  

Author Talk

The Rush:  California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World.  Nathaniel Philbrick.  Viking, 2026.  464 pages.

In The Rush, Nathaniel Philbrick tells the story of the California Gold Rush, when the discovery of gold in 1848 sent thousands of people chasing the promise of instant riches. It’s a story of wild ambition, bad decisions, hard luck, and the occasional spectacular success, but Philbrick doesn’t get caught up in the romance of the forty-niners. He also looks at the violence, exploitation, and upheaval that accompanied the rush, particularly for California’s Indigenous and Mexican communities already living there, as well as the racism that awaited black and Chinese migrants. As Philbrick makes clear, the Gold Rush was about much more than gold. It helped transform the American West, it positioned California to become a major theater of the tumult and turmoil that gripped the US in the 1850s as the nation rushed headlong toward the Civil War, and its legacy was considerably darker than the familiar stories of adventure and fortune would suggest.  Nathaniel Philbrick is one of my favorite authors.  He has the gift of being able to bring history to life by telling the stories of people and events that don't necessarily make the history books and weaving them together to make a great story.  This book is a must-read  for anyone who loves American history.  

Author Interview

The Museum of Lost Things:  True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History.  Sam Kean.  National Geographic, 2026.  400 pages.  

History is full of things we’ve lost, things we’ve destroyed, and things we’re still looking for. Some disappeared by accident, others through war, greed, or sheer human stupidity. In The Museum of Lost Things, Sam Kean explores this historical junk drawer, taking readers from vanished treasures and forgotten knowledge to the mysteries that continue to frustrate historians and archaeologists. Along the way, we meet the people who have searched for what’s missing, sometimes uncovering something remarkable and sometimes adding a little more confusion to the story. Kean has a knack for finding the odd, entertaining detail that makes history worth reading in the first place. Topics range from the city of Troy, the tomb of Genghis Khan, the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan writing, the extinction of the dodo, and more.  The result is a reminder that the past isn't a neat collection of facts waiting to be cataloged. It's full of holes, unanswered questions, and tantalizing clues to things we may never recover.  If you're a fan of Sam Kean's previous books and his Disappearing Spoon  podcast, as I am, a few of the stories may be familiar, but it's still a fun read.  

"The Great War"?

 

 It can be said that the twentieth century didn’t begin in 1900. In many ways, it began in 1914, when a gunshot in Sarajevo set off a chain reaction that would bring down empires, redraw continents, unleash revolutions, and leave millions of people struggling to make sense of a world that no longer seemed to follow the old rules. The Great War was at once a catastrophe and a turning point—not simply a contest of armies, but a collision of ambitions, ideologies, technologies, and societies whose consequences extended far beyond the battlefield.

Inspired by a recent read, I've compiled a list of books about World War I that are worthy of note and worth sharing.  The books collected here explore World War I from the margins as well as the center: the rivalries and miscalculations that made war possible, the lives it disrupted, the social transformations it accelerated, and the cultural and political wreckage it left behind. Fiction and nonfiction alike remind us that history isn’t just what happened in the trenches. It’s also what happened to the people who went to war, those who stayed home, and the generations who inherited the world it made.

(Italics indicate that the text is a publisher's blurb.  Otherwise, these are my original Histocrats reviews.)

First the  spark that lit the powderkeg:

The Trigger:  Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War.  Tim Butcher.  Grove Books, 2015, 352 pages.

            Journalist Tim Butcher’s book, The Trigger:  Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War traces the life of Gavril Princip, the nineteen year old who assassinated the Archduke.  I wrote about Butcher’s last book, Blood River, his book following Stanley’s expedition on the Congo River to find Livingstone in an earlier blog. The Trigger  follows a similar template.  Butcher travels to rural Bosnia to begin the story of Princip, a boy from a poor subsistence farming family  whose descendants still live in the tiny village, much as they have for generations and follows his path from there to Sarajevo, then Belgrade, then back to Sarajevo for the fateful act.  Butcher is a great storyteller and a consummate old-school journalist, and it comes through in his work.  First, he immerses himself in research and then he talks to people and faithfully tells their stories.  However, the book is not just about the assassination.  Butcher himself was a war correspondent who covered the Balkans in the 1990s.  He manages to weave the story of the assassination into the intricate fabric of the Balkans, a region shaped by hundreds of years of conflict.  It’s a fascinating read.

Now, about those long-term causes:

 

Dreadnought:  Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War.  Robert K. Massie.  Vintage Books, 2007.  1040 pages.  

Militarism and imperialism are two of those long-term causes.  The Europeans, especially the British and the Germans, raced against each other to build and to equip their armies and navies with the latest, and deadliest, technology made possible by industrialization.  Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Robert K. Massie has written a richly textured and gripping chronicle of the personal and national rivalries that led to the twentieth century's first great arms race. Massie brings to vivid life, such historical figures as the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz, the young, ambitious, Winston Churchill, the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow, and many others. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in his powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, DREADNOUGHT is history at its most riveting.

The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel:  Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I.  Douglas Brunt.  Atria Books, 2023. 384 pages.

(This one is kind of a tangent, but the development of diesel engines had an unmistakable impact on militarism and WWI, and the mystery of Diesel's death is incredibly interesting.)

Like the author, Douglas Brunt, I initially knew next to nothing about Rudolf Diesel, what a diesel engine actually is, or how the invention of the engine was really one of the greatest technological advances in human development.  I also had no idea that Diesel's body was fished out of the North Sea in 1913.  He was on a steamship headed from Belgium to the UK when he mysteriously disappeared.  Was it an accident, suicide, or murder?  

Diesel's engine was absolutely revolutionary. It was powerful and efficient. It cut down on noxious fumes and smoke created by burning coal and traditional petroleum products. It could power factories and vehicles. It allowed for immediate starts.  It could be fueled by nut or vegetable oils. It transformed military and commercial navies, provided more power and speed, saved space once taken up by tons of coal, eliminated the need for many refueling stops and for the dozens of crewmen who were normally required to shovel coal, and making submarines more feasible.  All of these factors made Rudolf Diesel the leading engineering superstar of the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Did his engine also make him the target of a murder plot?

The chief suspects were very powerful men.  John D. Rockefeller saw the diesel engine as an existential threat to his business and to his fortune.  Kaiser Wilhelm II was determined to make Germany a world superpower, taking over the UK's supremacy.  Although his ancestral home and home for much of his life was Germany, Diesel preferred to think of himself as a "citizen of the world" rather than a German.  He worked to make his technology accessible in every country.  He was on his way to the UK to offer support to that country's growing submarine development program.  Did Rockefeller of Wilhelm decide to eliminate the engineer ?

Douglas Brunt's book is an excellent biography of Diesel, and it tells the story of the engine's development, both the science and the business, without bogging down into too much technical detail.  He explains the significance of the engine and expertly puts it into the context of the age, the eve of WWI, with great insights into the lives and personalities of Rockefeller and Wilhelm, with sketches of Edison, Ford, Marconi and others along the way.  Finally, he puts forward his own theory as to what happened.  I highly recommend this book.

Three classics, which would be great starting points for a WWI deep dive:

The Proud Tower:  A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914.  Barbara W. Tuchman.  Macmillan, 1966.  

The classic account of the lead-up to World War I, told with “a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish” (The New York Times)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August

During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.” In The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaurès on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close. 

The Guns of August.  Barbara W. Tuchman.  Macmillan, 1962.  511 pages.

In this Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I.

This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of kings and kaisers and czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed—and how horrible it became.

Tuchman masterfully portrays this transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, focusing on the turning point in the year 1914, the month leading up to the war, and the first month of the war. With fine attention to detail, she reveals how and why the war started and why it could have been stopped but wasn't, managing to make the story utterly suspenseful even when we already know the outcome.

A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, The Guns of August will not be forgotten.

The First World War.  John Keegan.  Knopf, 1999.  

The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation.

Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent.

But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts history has not recorded--"the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable."

By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant, panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take its place among the classics of world history.

A few individuals and units representing the foot soldiers' non-fiction stories:

 

The Harlem Hellfighters.  Max Brooks and Caanan White.  Del Rey, 2014. 272 pages.

From bestselling author Max Brooks, the riveting story of the highly decorated, barrier-breaking, historic black regiment—the Harlem Hellfighters

In 1919, the 369th infantry regiment marched home triumphantly from World War I. They had spent more time in combat than any other American unit, never losing a foot of ground to the enemy, or a man to capture, and winning countless decorations. Though they returned as heroes, this African American unit faced tremendous discrimination, even from their own government. The Harlem Hellfighters, as the Germans called them, fought courageously on—and off—the battlefield to make Europe, and America, safe for democracy.  

In THE HARLEM HELLFIGHTERS, bestselling author Max Brooks and acclaimed illustrator Caanan White bring this history to life. From the enlistment lines in Harlem to the training camp at Spartanburg, South Carolina, to the trenches in France, they tell the heroic story of the 369th in an action-packed and powerful tale of honor and heart.

All Blood Runs Red:  The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard --- Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy.Phil Keith and Tom Clavin.  Hanover Square press, 2019.  399 pages.

The incredible story of the first African American military pilot, who became a spy in the French Resistance and an American civil rights pioneer.
Winner of the Gold Medal for Memoir/Biography from the Military Writers Society of America
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of eleven to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African American fighter pilot in history.
After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun.
All Blood Runs Red is the inspiring untold story of an American hero, a thought-provoking chronicle of the twentieth century and a portrait of a man who came from nothing and by his own courage, determination, gumption, intelligence and luck forged a legendary life.

Great-Uncle Harry:  A Tale of War and Empire.  Michael Palin.  Random House Canada, 2023.  336 pages.

You might know Michael Palin as a member of the great Monty Python comedy troupe or maybe from one or more of his excellent television travel series, but Great-Uncle Harry is a bit of a departure for Palin because it's a very personal family history, a quest in a way, decades in the making.  During the height of the Monty Python days, Palin's family inherited a collection of diaries, photos, and letters, a treasure trove of family documents.  Many of the items had to do with his Great-Uncle Harry, the brother of his grandfather.  Harry had never really been spoken of in the family before.  In fact, Palin had not known he had a Great-Uncle Harry, but he discovered that Harry had been one of thousands of young British men killed in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme.  Palin was intrigued, but life intervened.  Only in recent years did he decide to really dig deep and try to discover who Harry was.  This book is the result.  The finished product is an engrossing story, told of course with Palin's wit, not just of one victim of the Great War, but of the British Empire, as the subtitle foreshadows.  The reader is drawn in for glimpses of British education, class system, and society as a whole through Harry's eyes, and Harry comes across as an ordinary, average bloke kind of flailing around and trying to find his place and fit in a rapidly changing world. Palin makes a real connection, not complete but at least a connection, to a family member he never knew and makes him accessible to the rest of us as well.

And now, the fictional side:

All Quiet on the Western Front.  Erich Maria Remarque.  Little, brown, and Company, 1929.  250 pages.

THE classic anti-war novel, written by a veteran and unique for American readers because it's from the German point of view, and so anti-war that it was banned and burned by the NAzis when they came to power.  Set in the throes of The Great War's terrifying trenches, All Quiet on the Western Front casts the reader in the shoes of the Patriotic soldier Paul Bäumer. His naïve allusions of war's nobility and sense of adventure are demolished in the face of indifferent industrial warfare. Though unfolding more than a century ago, Erich Maria Remarque crafts a timeless exploration of the impact of war on the human spirit and the ugly truth of survival. Acclaimed in its own time, the story obliges itself to be read by each new generation, lest we forget its lessons and find ourselves in our own "War to End All Wars."  Truly a classic read for all.

Johnny Got His Gun.  Dalton Trumbo.  J.B. Lippincott, 1939.  309 pages.

THE American anti-war novel?  Definitely ranking with The Red Badge of Courage, MASH, and Catch-22.  Written by Trumbo in order to persuade Americans to stay out of World War II, but set in WWI.  This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered - not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives. This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless, and gruesome...but so is war.  Johnny Got His Gun holds a place as one of the classic antiwar novels. First published in 1939, Dalton Trumbo's story of a young American soldier terribly maimed in World War I - he "survives" armless, legless, and faceless, but with his mind intact - was an immediate best seller. This fiercely moving novel was a rallying point for many Americans who came of age during World War II, and it became perhaps the most popular novel of protest during the Vietnam era.

Fall of Giants.  Ken Follett.  Viking, 2010.  1008 pages.  Book 1 of the Century Trilogy.

Ken Follett’s magnificent historical epic begins as five interrelated families move through the momentous dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage. A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the mining pits. . . . An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. . . . A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy. . . . And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families—and into a century that we thought we knew, but that now will never seem the same again. .

The recent read that prompted me to do another WWI books blog:

The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I. Lindsey Fitzharris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. 336 pages.

This is one of the best and most unique books about World War I that I have ever read, hands down. World War I was a war like no other war that had been fought before. Despite the optimistic predictions on both sides that hostilities will be over within a few weeks, or a couple of months at most, it became obvious rather quickly that industrialization and invention expanded humanity's capacity for unleashing total destruction and death, and that capacity wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured, and medicine struggled to keep pace. Here, medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris explores the particular story of the surgeon Harold Gillies. Gillies saw that there was a huge need for facial reconstruction, and he assembled a dedicated and extremely talented of surgeons, nurses, dentists, artists, and prosthetic makers that revolutionized the relatively new field of plastic surgery. They developed techniques that made life possible for men whose faces were destroyed. Not only did they pioneer the fields of plastic surgery and prosthetics, but their work also greatly impacted the fields of psychiatry and anesthesiology, as well as many specific treatments and procedures like blood transfusions. It's a fantastic story about human ingenuity, empathy, strength, determination, and perseverance in both the medical figures and the wounded men. It also makes the absolute horrors of the trenches vivid and unforgettable. Don't worry about getting lost in military history or deep medical jargon; it is extremely accessible and a fast read. Highly recommended for anyone interested in WWI, medical or scientific history, or just for anyone looking for a great story.

The impact of World War I on the homefront during and immediately after the war:

American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis. Adam Hochschild. Mariner Books, 2022. 432 pages.

    American Midnight was published in October 2022 by Adam Hochschild. I admire Hoschschild's writing, but he tends to write about dark topics. King Leopold's Ghost is about the atrocities committed by the Belgians in the Congo, and Spain In Our Hearts is about the Spanish Civil War. American Midnight is about America during World War I into the early 1920s, specifically about the anti-war, pro-civil rights, and pro-labor union movements active during the time, and the all-out war waged against them by local, state, and federal governments and by citizen-vigilantes.

    From Amazon: "From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a "masterly" (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor

    The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.  

    This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator—who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now."

    Hoschschild tells stories that I had never heard, stories that are never told. I learned a lot from this book, and it will probably end up being one of my best reads of 2023. I was a little disappointed when Hoschschild's political bias was made abundantly clear in the epilogue. To be fair, there were hints of his leaning throughout the book, but it was blatant in the epilogue, and he even makes a couple of intentionally misleading statements. I would still recommend the book to those looking for truth.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. Isabel Wilkerson. Random House, 2010. 640 pages.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S FIVE BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY • LOS ANGELES TIMES’S #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE LAST 30 YEARS • AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE PAST TWO DECADES

“A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”—John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal

“What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.”—Lynell George, Los Angeles Times

WINNER: The Mark Lynton History Prize • The Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction • The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize • The Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction • The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism • NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut • Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize

FINALIST: The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • Dayton Literary Peace Prize

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, Salon, Newsday, The Daily Beast

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Economist, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, The Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Christian Science Monitor

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970.

Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.

And, finally, a decade after the war, there was a major shift in international diplomacy, inspired by the horrible destruction of "The War to End All Wars," and there was actually hope that that epithet might prove true.

The Internationalists:  How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.  Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro.  Simon & Schuster, 2017.  608 pages.

A bold and provocative history of the men who fought to outlaw war and how an often overlooked treaty signed in 1928 was among the most transformative events in modern history.

On a hot summer afternoon in 1928, the leaders of the world assembled in Paris to outlaw war. Within the year, the treaty signed that day, known as the Peace Pact, had been ratified by nearly every state in the world. War, for the first time in history, had become illegal the world over. But the promise of that summer day was fleeting. Within a decade of its signing, each state that had gathered in Paris to renounce war was at war. And in the century that followed, the Peace Pact was dismissed as an act of folly and an unmistakable failure. This book argues that that understanding is inaccurate, and that the Peace Pact ushered in a sustained march toward peace that lasts to this day.

The Internationalists tells the story of the Peace Pact by placing it in the long history of international law from the seventeenth century through the present, tracing this rich history through a fascinating and diverse array of lawyers, politicians and intellectuals—Hugo Grotius, Nishi Amane, Salmon Levinson, James Shotwell, Sumner Welles, Carl Schmitt, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Sayyid Qutb. It tells of a centuries-long struggle of ideas over the role of war in a just world order. It details the brutal world of conflict the Peace Pact helped extinguish, and the subsequent era where tariffs and sanctions take the place of tanks and gunships.

The Internationalists examines with renewed appreciation an international system that has outlawed wars of aggression and brought unprecedented stability to the world map. Accessible and gripping, this book will change the way we view the history of the twentieth century—and how we must work together to protect the global order the internationalists fought to make possible.

"Just Passing Through"

 

Slavery was practiced in ancient Greece and Rome, throughout Africa and the Middle East, in Asia, and across the Americas long before the United States existed. The institution varied enormously across time and place. What distinguished slavery in the United States was not that it was the only cruel or hereditary form of slavery, but the particular combination of racial ideology, permanent hereditary status, commercial agriculture, legal exclusion, and political power that developed around it.

American slavery was not necessarily more brutal in every respect than every other form of slavery. Enslaved people in the Caribbean, Brazil, the ancient world, and elsewhere could experience extraordinary violence, exploitation, family separation, and premature death. In some settings, mortality was even higher than in the American South.

The distinctive American combination was the development of a society in which racial ancestry, inherited lifetime bondage, property law, plantation capitalism, and political power reinforced one another. Its consequences did not end with emancipation: the racial hierarchy built around slavery continued to shape segregation, citizenship, wealth, and civil rights.

Few things expose the absurdity and power of American racial categories quite like the phenomenon of passing: a black person, often of mixed ancestry, living as white in a society that classified people by race and attached vastly different rights, opportunities, and dangers to those classifications. In a country where slavery made blackness synonymous with bondage, and where generations of laws and customs sought to police the boundary between black and white, the ability to cross that boundary could mean access to education, employment, safety, and social standing otherwise denied. But passing was rarely as simple as changing one's identity. It could mean concealing family history, abandoning loved ones, and living with the constant possibility of exposure. What appeared to be an individual choice was inseparable from a larger system that made racial identity both a deeply personal matter and a public verdict.

The subject has inspired a remarkable body of American literature, from nineteenth-century narratives shaped by slavery and emancipation to modern novels and contemporary nonfiction exploring identity, family, and belonging. Some stories portray passing as an escape from an oppressive racial order; others examine its emotional costs, its ethical ambiguities, and the fragile assumptions on which racial classifications rest. Together, these books ask unsettling questions: What makes someone Black or white? Who gets to decide? And what does it mean to gain freedom by concealing a part of oneself? The answers reveal as much about the society that demanded passing as they do about the people who chose—or were compelled—to do it.

Inspired by a couple of recent reads, I've compiled a list of books that I have read that deal with passing. (Italics means that I'm sharing the publisher's blurb, not a Histocrats Bookshelf review.)

The relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved half-sister-in-law Sally Hemings has been the fodder of public comment and speculation since the early 1800s.  Many of the descendants of their relationship have made the decision to "pass" over the years.

History by a Hair:  Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery.  Richard Kurin.  Crown, 2026.  432 pages.

    Being a historian is very much like being a detective, both relying on gathering clues, following dead ends, evaluating evidence, and piecing together a whole story from incomplete bits.  If you like detective stories, if you like CSI, if you like history, this is a great book for you about one of the oldest mysteries in American history. For over two hundred years, it's been alleged that Thomas Jefferson, the founder who so eloquently described freedom and equality as American ideals while enslaving over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, had a decades-long relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings, fathering several of her children.  Hemings family lore over the decades had maintained that  the relationship, first discussed in print in the early 1800s by Jefferson's political opponents, was factual.  Many diehard Jefferson apologists and direct descendants of Jefferson, via his wife Martha, vehemently denied the charge.  In the late 1990s, DNA tests proved that a Jefferson male (perhaps Jefferson or his brother or nephews) had fathered at least one of the Hemings children, but couldn't prove any stronger connection, and deniers were still unmoved.  A major breakthrough occurred in 2011 when a few strands of hair were found in the so-called "Jefferson Bible,"  the collection of New Testament passages from various Bibles that Jefferson personally cut and pasted together for his own use.  Richard Kurin, Smithsonian historian and museum official, had a brainstorm:  Could these be Jefferson's hairs and could they be used, with today's more advanced DNA techniques, to prove, once and for all, the paternity truth?  For the next 15 years, Kurin and a top team of genealogists, historians, archaeologists, curators, and DNA specialists worked to find and identify samples of living and dead Jefferson and Hemings descendants in order to build and to compare genomes to settle the matter once and for all.  All were determined  to "follow truth wherever it may lead," as Jefferson himself wrote. Spoiler alert:  the mystery is resolved, and the book is a fascinating account of all the work that went into the solution.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Annette Gordon-Reed. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. 800 pages.

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826.

It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. The Hemingses of Monticello sets the family's compelling saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello. Much anticipated, this book promises to be the most important history of an American slave family ever written.

Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy. Gayle Jessup White. Amistad, 2021. 288 pages.

Gayle Jessup White grew up in a black middle class family in Washington DC. She became a journalist and news anchor. ( I remember her at Savannah's WTOC in the 90s.) As a young teen, she had overheard talk that her father was descended from Thomas Jefferson, but he knew next to nothing about his family. She was intrigued and became enamored with Jefferson and his home Monticello, visiting numerous times, but she went on with her life and career. It wasn't until decades later that a Monticello historian and genealogist helped her discover the true story. What she discovered was that she was not descended from one of the Jefferson and Hemings children, but that she was, in fact, related to both Jefferson and Hemings separately. She also achieved her dream of landing a job at Monticello as Director of Community Relations, becoming, as she puts it, the first descendant of Monticello's enslavers and the enslaved to get paid to work there. The book is an interesting genealogical and historical mystery and, at the same time, a memoir of a black woman in America learning about herself, her family, and their place in America.

Two classics of passing fiction:

 

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.  James Weldon Johnson.  Sherman, French, & Co., 1912.  236 pages. Reprinted in 1927 by Alfred A. Knopf.

    My latest classic read or re-read, one of the first books ever published in the US that presented a frank and honest portrayal of black life in the country, without offensive over-the-top stereotypes and broad comic characterizations.  It is a fictional memoir that Johnson first published anonymously, but many readers  assumed it was more factual than fiction.  It's a frame story, with the unnamed narrator revealing his life story and the secret that overshadowed his life. Born in Georgia just after the Civil War, he is the child of a formerly enslaved woman and a wealthy white man.  Knowing that they couldn't be together in Georgia, the father sent mother and child to Connecticut so that the boy could get an education and have a better life.  Because he had a very light complexion, race and color, and all that those constructs entailed, were of no concern to the boy for his first few years in school, but then realizations hit him head-on, and he begins his life-long struggle with racial identity.  He develops an extraordinary musical talent which opens up many opportunities for him, and he also realizes that he can operate within both worlds, black and white.  He decides to dedicate his life to spotlighting black music and to introduce it to the world, elevating it to the attention it deserves - "glorifying" his race and their achievement.  In the process, he has many experiences that remind him constantly of the overemphasis on race in America.  Finally, on a return visit to Georgia, he witnesses a lynching, and that leads him to make a final decision.  He gives up his race, his talent, and his "birthright" in exchange for security and safety, choosing to "pass" as white for the rest of his life, thereby becoming an "ex-colored man." The book is a brilliant depiction of race relations in America, colorism within a race, and the idea of "passing," forsaking one's true identity for expediency. 

Passing. Nella Larsen. Knopf, 1929. 215 pages.

Think about how many stories you've read or movies and tv shows you've seen in which the plot hinges on someone pretending to be who or what they aren't, taking on a false identity. It's a very popular theme in storytelling. Racial "passing," the act of concealing one's own racial identity and adopting another, is a very American version of that idea, and it has been prevalent throughout our history, with mostly black Americans living as whites in order to escape racism and to build better lives for themselves and for their families. (There have been a few instances in the other direction; see the book Passing Strange about Clarence King, a white man who lived a double life as a black railroad porter.) In 1929, Nella Larsen published Passing, a novel inspired by her own mixed race background. Although little known today, Larsen and her two novels struck a popular chord and became a celebrated element of the Harlem Renaissance. It's being rediscovered today as a gripping, psychologically tense novel about race, gender, and identity in 1920s New York. It focuses on two women, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry Bellew, who were friends in childhood, drifted apart, and then unexpectedly meet up again as adults. Both women are light-skinned, but Irene identifies firmly as black and is actively involved in the middle and upper class culture of black Harlem in the 1920s, and Clare started passing as white in her teens and married a white racist, abandoning her black life and associations. Irene's world view is "shook" by the meeting, simultaneously fascinated and disturbed. Meanwhile, Clare is fascinated by Irene's life and longs to reconnect with her own blackness; she begins visiting Harlem and developing relationships with Irene's friends. The relationship, along with Irene's feelings, becomes complicated, with Irene eventually becoming increasingly jealous and suspicious of Clare's intentions toward and growing closeness with her husband. When Clare's husband discovers her secret, there's a shocking and intentionally ambiguous climax. The novel really holds up well a hundred years later and stacks up very favorably to any of the big bestselling novels of today.

The story of Ellen and William Craft, the couple that escaped slavery because of Ellen's ability to pass, has always been one of the most fascinating stories of Georgia history for me.

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom. Ilyon Woo. 37Ink, 2023. 416 pages.

“A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class, and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters.” —The Pulitzer Prizes

Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, and Oprah Daily

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.

With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.

Walter White survived the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 and became a powerful figure in the NAACP and the civil rights movement. Most notably, he frequently risked his life by using his ability to pass to investigate lynchings throughout the United States, surreptitiously interviewing and collecting evidence from lynch mob participants who assumed he was white.

White Lies:  The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret.  A.J. Baime.  Mariner Books, 2022.  400 pages.  

    At the turn of the 20th century, Walter White's childhood in Atlanta was perhaps more comfortable than that of many black children across the South.  His father was a mail carrier.  His mother shopped at Rich's Department Store, where clerks politely called her "Mrs. White," but she wasn't allowed to try on clothes, return clothes that didn't fit.  (The tea room wasn't an option; it did not exist until the 1920s.) Black customers had to trace their feet onto paper in order to shop for shoes, instead of trying them on. There was only one high school for black students, the costly private one operated by Atlanta University.  Public schools for black students only went through 8th grade.  Annual state and local spending per black student averaged about $2, one-tenth of the amount spent per white student.  Black teachers were paid less than half of what white teachers were paid.   Still, Atlanta race relations were relatively calm, until late September 1906 when white mobs murdered dozens of black Atlantans and burned many homes in a multi-day killing frenzy called the Atlanta Race Riot.  According to White, it was at that moment, when an armed white mob besieged the family home and threatened to kill him and his entire family, that 13 year old Walter decided that he was black.  Yes, you read that correctly --- decided.  Walter White had straight blond hair, blue eyes, and fairer skin than some of the white men who killed blacks during the riot.  Throughout his life, those that came into contact with White, black and white, without knowing him assumed he was white.  He could have easily chosen to "pass" and live a much safer life.  Instead, he resolved to "be black" and to devote his life to fighting for civil rights. As a student at Atlanta University, he attracted the attention of James Weldon Johnson who persuaded him to move to New York and to join the staff of the NAACP.  Soon, he volunteered to risk his life multiple times to investigate lynchings across the country.  Because of his appearance, murderers assumed he was a good "patriotic and Christian American" like themselves, and they proudly told him all the details of their horrible crimes, including naming leaders and active participants.  White gathered information and prepared reports for publication and for government officials, often fleeing town just before his deception was discovered.  If caught, he would have been just another victim.  He did this many times as he worked his way up the ladder of NAACP leadership, becoming one of the most effective and respected civil rights advocates of the time.  Things began to change, however, when squabbles with W.E.B. DuBois destabilized the organization, and his extramarital affair with a white woman came to light, White fell from grace, and his legacy was tarnished and largely forgotten.  This excellent biography attempts to give his story the fullness and light that it deserves.

Incognegro: Renaissance. Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece. Dark Horse Comics, 2018. Book 1 of 5 in graphic novel series.

    Obviously inspired by the life of Walter White, this is the first volume of a 5 volume graphic novel series. After a black writer is found dead at a scandalous interracial party in 1920s New York, Harlem's cub reporter Zane Pinchback is the only one determined to solve the murder. Zane must go 'incognegro' for the first time-using his light appearance to pass as a white man-to find the true killer, in this prequel miniseries to the critically acclaimed Vertigo graphic novel, now available in a special new 10th Anniversary Edition. With a cryptic manuscript as his only clue, and a mysterious and beautiful woman as the murder's only witness, Zane finds himself on the hunt through the dark and dangerous streets of 'roaring twenties' Harlem in search for justice. A page-turning thriller of racial divide, Renaissance explores segregation, secrets, and self-image as our race-bending protagonist penetrates a world where he feels stranger than ever before.

    While it was always much more common for a black person to pass as white, there have been a few instances of going in the other direction.  

    Passing Strange:  A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line.  Martha A. Sandweiss.  Penguin Press, 2009.  384 pages.

    Clarence King was one of the most accomplished and famous scientists in America in the late 19th century, the first director of the United States Geological Survey. He also traveled in very exclusive circles:  academics like historian Henry Adams, politicians like Theodore Roosevelt, and historical figures like Secretary of State John Hay.  Among his friends and reporters, he was known as an adventurer, a raconteur, and a lifelong bachelor, who was at home in the field or hobnobbing with the members of high society, a luminary of the Gilded Age.  What none of them knew was that King was Passing Strange (Martha Sandweiss, author).  King pretended to be a black man, married a woman who was born a slave in Georgia, and set up her and their children in a fairly comfortable, if unorthodox, existence, explaining his long absences as work-related. Only as he was dying of tuberculosis did he confess the whole deception to his best friend and his wife.  It is an incredibly fascinating story that ultimately leaves the reader with as many questions as answers.  Sandweiss also educates the reader about the truths and perceptions of race at the time.

Black Like Me. John Howard Griffin. Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Black Like Me, first published in 1961, is a nonfiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin recounting his journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African Americans lived under the Jim Crow laws. Griffin was a native of Mansfield, Texas, who had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. He traveled for six weeks throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Missiissippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia to explore life from the other side of the color line. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles.

Griffin kept a journal of his experiences; the 188-page diary was the genesis of the book. When he started his project in 1959, race relations in America were particularly strained. The title of the book is taken from the last line of the Langston Hughes poem "Dream Variations". (Wikipedia)

Several feature films have also been made exploring the theme of racial passing.

Passing (2021)  Director: Rebecca Hall | Based on Nella Larsen's 1929 novella

Two childhood friends reconnect in 1920s Harlem. Clare has chosen to live as a white woman, while Irene lives as Black; their renewed relationship unsettles both women's carefully constructed lives. Probably the essential contemporary film for your post.

 

Imitation of Life (1934)   Director: John M. Stahl | Based on Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel

Peola, the light-skinned daughter of a Black woman, attempts to pass as white and escape the racial restrictions of her time. Fredi Washington's performance makes this a particularly important film for examining the era's racial attitudes.

   

Imitation of Life (1959)   Director: Douglas Sirk

The celebrated melodramatic remake features Sarah Jane, played by Susan Kohner, who rejects her Black identity and mother in pursuit of a life as a white woman. Compare it with the 1934 version to explore changing Hollywood representations of race and identity.

 

Pinky (1949)  Director: Elia Kazan | Based on Cid Ricketts Sumner's novel Quality

A light-skinned Black woman who has been passing as white while training as a nurse returns to her Southern hometown. Her return forces her to confront segregation, family ties, and the limits of racial privilege.

 

Lost Boundaries (1949)    Director: Alfred L. Werker | Based on a true story

A Black physician and his family live as white in a New England community. Their carefully maintained identity comes under pressure when the doctor enters the Navy. Based on the experiences of Dr. Albert C. Johnston and his family.

  

Show Boat (1936; also 1951)   Adapted from the musical based on Edna Ferber's novel

Julie, a performer on a Mississippi showboat, is revealed to have Black ancestry despite being perceived as white. The resulting crisis illustrates the reach of racial classification and the threat posed by laws policing racial boundaries.

 

The Human Stain (2003)   Director: Robert Benton | Based on Philip Roth's 2000 novel

A college professor whose life unravels over an alleged racial slight has concealed his Black ancestry and lived as white for decades. The story connects passing to shame, secrecy, reinvention, and the personal costs of a hidden identity.