The author tracks the Anderson family, starting with the patriarch, Richard Clough Anderson, through the next two generations. This was made easier by two things – there is a lot of correspondence between the family members, and a few other individuals, that is still extant, and this family was acquainted with, or was distantly related Read More
Category: Nonfiction
The Cause, by Joseph J Ellis
The subtitle is “The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783”. This book is somewhat of an overview of some of the people involved in the Revolution, without going into too much detail about specific battles. This author discusses the major players in the time period instead. He spends much of the book, understandably, on George Read More
The Santa Claus Man, by Alex Palmer
The title makes this sound like a cheerful Yuletide story, but the holiday is not the focus of this book. The focus is a man called John Duval Gluck, who started out trying to make sure poor New York City children had at least one gift for Christmas, but at some point, his goals shifted. Read More
Home Fires, by Sean Patrick Adams
The subtitle of this “How Things Worked” book is How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century. The author starts by discussing how even before the American Revolution, in the larger East Coast cities, wintertime could bring a shortage of fire wood. The heating method, and cooking method, at the time was a hearth using Read More
A Square Meal, by Jane Ziegelman & Andrew Coe
The subtitle of this book is “A Culinary History of the Great Depression”, which is what tempted me to read it. I was assuming that there would be recipes. Well, you know what they say about the word “assume”. There are a several recipes from that era, very few of which I would want to Read More
Middling Folk, by Linda H Matthews
This book tells the saga of one family, the Hammills, through several generations. Matthews starts her story in Scotland, moves to Ireland, and then brings her ancestors into the American colonies, before the Revolution. The title refers to the fact that the people she writes about were neither very rich and at the top of Read More
The Poisoner’s Handbook, by Deborah Blum
The subtitle is “Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York”. What I did not expect was for a book with that subtitle to begin with a discussion of the Periodic Table of Elements. But it all fits together as you go through the book. In the early Twentieth Century, scientists Read More
The Edge of Anarchy, by Jack Kelly
It’s amazing to me all of the things that were so impactful to people, and our county, when they happened, that we have forgotten about today. This is a book about one of those things – the railroad strike in 1894. Also, as I was reading it, I kept wondering if this was something I Read More
The Divorce Colony, by April White
While divorce is somewhat unremarkable these days, in the not-so-distant past, it was remarked upon quite a bit. We forget how relatively recent that attitude shift happened. Divorces were not always easy to obtain. In the early days of this country, it literally took an act of the legislature to grant someone a divorce. While Read More
The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902, by Scott D Seligman
This book tells the story of Orthodox Jewish women finding their voices in New York in the early 1900’s. The subtitle is “Immigrant Housewives and the Riots that shook New York City”. In the spring of 1902, the price of kosher beef had risen 50% in a few short weeks. It had gone from 12 Read More