Nasser's Expulsion of the Jews from Egypt (11/24)
Throughout Roman Year, André Aciman repeatedly and explicitly references the political policies of President Gamal Abdel Nasser as responsible for his Jewish family's refugee status in Rome for the period of the memoir's titular year. The number of Jews in Egypt is estimated to have been 75,000 to 80,000 at its height in 1948. From ...
The 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis (11/24)
Patriot by Alexei Navalny covers the Russian opposition leader's life from his childhood in the USSR in the 1980s to his final days in an Arctic penal colony in 2024. One important moment in the development of his political consciousness that he outlines in his memoir is the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, an event which eventually ...
Midwifery in Colonial America (11/24)
Martha Ballard, the heroine of Ariel Lawhon's
The Frozen River and a real-life 18th-century midwife, left behind a diary that remains one of history's best sources on midwifery in late colonial America. In addition to this work of historical fiction, Ballard is the subject of historical monographs and of a
PBS special on her life. Along ...
Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Project (11/24)
Lauren Grodstein's novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves was inspired by the Oneg Shabbat Project, a World War II archive compiled and hidden by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Established and run by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archive contained a wide variety of documents recording daily life in the Ghetto.
Ringelblum was born in ...
Protesting Operation Alert (11/24)
Alice McDermott's novel about the humanitarian efforts of American corporate wives living in Vietnam in the early '60s, Absolution, takes a detour to New York City in the previous decade, where Tricia, the protagonist, and her radicalized friend Stella participate in sit-ins against the compulsory Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
In ...
Traian Popovici: The Man Who Saved Jews in Czernowitz (11/24)
The Blood Years by Elana K. Arnold tells the story of Frederieke 'Rieke' Teitler, a young Jewish girl trying to survive the atrocities of Nazi-controlled Romania. Throughout the war, many of Rieke's friends are deported to Transnistria, a small country to the east where Jews were sent to live in camps and ghettos. Rieke and her family, ...
Buffalo Bill and His Wild West Show (11/24)
In Maylis de Kerangal's new short story collection, Canoes, a woman moves from Paris to Golden, Colorado, a mining town in the foothills of the Rockies. At the top of Lookout Mountain, overlooking Golden, Buffalo Bill is buried—which surprises the woman, who thought Buffalo Bill was a fictional character.
Who was Buffalo Bill...
The Meiji Restoration Era (1868–1889) (10/24)
Fictionalized events during Emperor Meiji's ascent to power set the scene for Danielle Trussoni's The Puzzle Box, including the titular puzzle box at the heart of this thriller. The Meiji Restoration era (1868–1889) is widely recognized as laying the foundation for modernizing Japan, and The Puzzle Box references Japan's first ...
Willie Reed: The Witness Who Returned Home (10/24)
The plan had to be executed perfectly by Willie Reed, an eighteen-year-old native of the Mississippi Delta. He had to walk into the darkness by himself making sure his bearings were correct. He had in his possession a coat and another pair of pants. He had to walk six miles on rural roads absent of all light. That would protect him, the ...
Sun Yat-sen (10/24)
In the novel The House of Doors, Lesley Hamlyn volunteers as a translator for Sun Yat-sen's political movement in Penang, Malaysia. Sun Yat-sen is one of the foremost figures in Chinese political history. By leading China from an empire to a republic, he also became an important inspiration to other independence movements of twentieth-...
Benito Juárez (10/24)
In his novel Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera illuminates the year and a half Benito Juárez spent as a political exile in New Orleans, an often-overlooked period in the life of Mexico's first Indigenous president.
Juárez was born in 1806 to a Zapotec family living in the town of San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca, Mexico. He was ...
The French East India Companies (10/24)
In David Diop's novel
Beyond the Door of No Return, French botanist Michel Adanson journeys across 18
th-century Senegal to discover the fate of a woman who was kidnapped. At the time of the story, much of the area was either directly or indirectly under the control of the French East India Company, a less-known competitor to
the ...
Isolation, Alienation, and Escapism: Observing Two Thriller Narratives (09/24)
It's 2024. COVID-19, while still dangerous, is no longer the unknown factor it once was, and extended quarantines are no longer mandated as in the earlier days, pre-vaccination. Though the world has never stopped talking about what isolation has done to our collective psyche, I think it's only this year that we're starting to see some of ...
Free People of Color and Their Roles in the American Slave Trade (09/24)
In Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend, one of Annis's enslavers is a woman. Typically, when people think about enslavers and those perpetuating slavery as a system, they often think about white men. Some may find it surprising that women played a significant role in the slave trade, too. Furthermore, white people were not the only ones who ...
French Philosopher Guy-Ernest Debord (09/24)
Characters in Creation Lake frequently reference the French philosopher Guy-Ernest Debord, whose popularity has recently grown due to his work's relevance to digital culture.
Born in Paris in 1931, Debord had activist leanings early on while protesting France's war with Algeria. He also joined the Lettrists at age 18. They were ...
The Kent State Pietà (09/24)
Of all the unsettling photos taken at Kent State University on May 4th, 1970, one of them became the iconic image of unthinkable tragedy. In
this photo, twenty-year-old student Jeff Miller lies face down bleeding as fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screams in horror over his body. The photographer was KSU student John Filo, and the ...
The United Fruit Company: The Scourge of Central and South America (09/24)
In Where There Was Fire, the neighborhood that is the central setting in the 1968 timeline is home to a banana plantation run by a fictional corporation called American Fruit Company, based loosely on the real-life United Fruit Company (UFC). United Fruit (which has since become Chiquita) had plantations in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, ...
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 ...
Comet Hale-Bopp and the Heaven's Gate Cult (09/24)
A central event in Ruby Todd's debut novel, Bright Objects, is the sighting of a comet in the atmosphere. Comet St. John appears in January of 1997 over Sylvia's small town in Australia, causing its residents, along with the rest of the world, to stargaze and ponder the mysteries of the universe.
While Comet St. John is a ...
American Entertainers Visiting the Vietnam Warfront (09/24)
In California Golden, Mindy has a transformative experience touring Vietnam during the war that makes her question her chosen career in show business. The Vietnam War was a transformative experience for America in the 1960s, impacting virtually everyone in some way. While the involvement of the United States in Vietnam was a profoundly ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
Chinese Science During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) (05/24)
May, the matriarch of Rachel Khong's Real Americans, is born into a poor rural Chinese family in the 1950s. Her fate is foretold by her mother's life: wake before dawn to cook breakfast, clean up after the men in the family, head to the rice paddies and toil until the time to head home to cook supper, rinse and repeat. It is backbreaking....
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. ...
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 ...
Artist Ana Mendieta (05/24)
The title character in Xochitl Gonzalez's Anita de Monte Laughs Last is closely based on the artist Ana Mendieta. Although Mendieta's shocking death at the age of thirty-five has overshadowed her artistic legacy in the public imagination, Mendieta was a rising star at the time of her death, and her creative work continues to hold ...
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'...
