Cultural History Archives - The History Reader : The History Reader

The Landmarks of Mary Ann Patten’s Maine

Sara Beth Haring — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:43:24 +0000

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

New York Times bestselling author Tilar J. Mazzeo gives a behind-the-scenes look at Rockland, Maine, the home of Mary Ann Patten and Joshua Patten. Her book, The Sea Captain’s Wife, tells the true story of Mary Ann, the first female captain of a merchant ship, and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica’s deadly waters.

When I was writing The Sea Captain’s Wife, I was interested to see in person some of the places in Maine that were important in her life and to her story, because, as a writer, following in the footsteps of the people about whom I’m writing is part of the process of seeing the world through their eyes and bringing them to life for readers. For me, following in Mary Ann and Joshua’s footsteps was a particularly interesting because, as I mention in the epilogue to the book, I also happened to grow up and have deep roots in the same small fishing village where Joshua Patten came from in midcoast Maine. I spent the first five years of my life, in fact, in Owls Head, near the Muscle Ridge Islands and the Weskeag River, where Joshua and Mary Ann dreamed of building a farm someday.

The Weskeag River is one of my favorite places, because it’s the kind of tiny village where you feel that you’ve stepped back in time. So much of Maine is touristed that, as a local, you tend to cherish those places where no one really has any reason to visit. Where exactly Joshua’s lot of land was is hard to figure out from the road, because much of that land has still never been developed and is deep woods, but in this photo you can get a glimpse of the river. This is where Joshua and Mary Ann dreamed of building a farm one day.

The Weskeag River where Mary Ann and Joshua dreamed of building a farm. Photo courtesy of Tilar J. Mazzeo, 2025.

This view is taken with your back to the sea, and if you turn and look the other direction you see the little village, with its reversing tidal falls, and then the river stretches out to sea for a bit as it bends and turns. Beyond the mouth of the river are the Muscle Ridge Islands, where Joshua’s family land was and where his brother, Uriah, owned property in the 1850s.

Overview of Maine’s coast by air. Courtesy of Tilar J. Mazzeo, 2025.

The best way to get a sense of the geography is from the air, and this is a photograph recently taken on a flight from Owls Head down to Boston, which, if you’re a first time visitor to Maine, is one of the most lovely ways to see the coast and sure beats sitting in summer traffic on Route 1.

How about where Mary Ann and Joshua lived in Rockland, while they were saving up a “competence” to build their farm? They owned a small house on South Main Street in Rockland, and I was also able from the old deed records to find the plot of land on the title register. In this photo, you can see the lot: it’s where the Maritime Energy gas station is on the left in this photo.

The plot of land on South Main Street in Rockland, ME, that the Pattens owned. Photo courtesy of Tilar J. Mazzeo, 2025.

However, over the centuries that plot of land has been chopped up and divided, and while the deed today is connected to the gas station property, I actually think it’s very likely that the Patten house did survive and is that little gray house you can see behind the gas station in this picture. That house, today 10 Crescent Street in Rockland, was built in 1851, making the timing right. I think it’s probably pretty unlikely that back in the 1850s they would have built another house so close by, though I guess that’s not impossible. But more likely, the gas station lot was once the front garden of the Patten family home and the little gray house was their first residence. Straight ahead of you in this photo, not too much further down that little street that runs in front of the gray house, is Rockland Harbor and the sea.

One of the other places that it took some detective work to find was the location of the Poor Farm in Rockland, where their son Joshua Jr. was an inmate. When I was five, we moved from Owls Head to an old 1790s farmhouse just beyond the north end of Chickawaukie Lake. The Mill Stream drains out of the southern end of Chickawaukie, so we knew that area well as children because it wasn’t far from the public beach.

Chickawaukie was also the site in the nineteenth-century of ice houses and an ice harvest, so, when Mary Ann Patten was offered ice from Rockland in her drinks on their voyage home from Panama, it’s pretty likely that the ice came from this same location. The Rockland Historical Society has an old photograph of that ice harvesting on Chickawaukie, in fact, from the 1890s, the period when Joshua Jr. was living nearby.

Ice harvesting on Chickawaukie Lake. Credit: Rockland Historical Society archives.

From Chickawaukie, if you follow the stream back into the Highlands (which are to the left and behind you in this photo), it’s easy to lose your orientation pretty quickly because even the course of stream has changed over the centuries.

The Poor Farm today is just a wooded lot, kind of down in a gulley when the stream runs through the woods and through some culverts. My mother says that when she was growing up in Rockland, most working people lived in fear of the Poor Farm, and if you were naughty someone might threaten to send you there. There used to be a dam and a mill pond just down the way from the Poor Farm, but that’s gone now too, and what used to be farmland now is forest so it can be quite disorienting.

Luckily, there is a postcard from the nineteenth century that shows the old Mill and the bridge, as Joshua Jr. would have known it though. This is the site of where he drowned that day and where the Patten family story ended.

Old Mill and Bridge. Courtesy of University of Maine.

DR. TILAR J. MAZZEO is the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle bestselling author of numerous award-winning works of narrative nonfiction, including history and biography titles. Formerly the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College and Professeur Associée in the Department of World Literatures at the University of Montreal, Dr. Mazzeo left the academy in 2019 to focus full-time on writing. A fifth-generation sailor and tenth-generation Mainer (where the Patten story begins), she lives today on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where, with her husband, she captains a Vancouver 42 offshore sailboat.

The post The Landmarks of Mary Ann Patten’s Maine appeared first on The History Reader.

Dolly Parton Knows Who She Is

Sara Beth Haring — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:37:32 +0000

by Martha Ackmann

Lifelong fan Martha Ackmann shares with The History Reader why she felt drawn to write her new book, Ain’t Nobody’s Fool, about music legend Dolly Parton.

I have loved Dolly Parton’s music for as long as I can remember. I’m attracted to the story-telling of her songs and what she calls the “lonesome chord” – that faraway, melancholy, haunting sound of her bluegrass music. I remember first seeing Dolly Parton on my grandparents’ black-and-white television in St. Louis. She was in her early twenties and the new “girl singer” on The Porter Wagoner Show. Something about her puzzled me. The big hair and curvy figure appeared at odds – it seemed to me – with who she might really be. My new biography, Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton, unravels what interested me in Dolly Parton all those years ago and what interests me still.

Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, 1969. Courtesy of Wikipedia. © Moeller Talent, Inc.

As I began researching Dolly Parton’s life – scouring archives, talking with music historians, interviewing Dolly’s friends, family, schoolmates, teachers, musicians, producers, even her first boyfriend – I discovered there was more to Dolly than meets the eye. The young woman who patiently stood behind Porter Wagoner with her hands folded was ablaze with ambition, composing songs at a feverish pace, and eager to step out from the shadows and strike out on her own. Seven years later when she eventually walked away from the popular show for a solo career, she did so with confidence. It wasn’t confidence based what she would do next but how far she knew she would go. Then there was Dolly’s decision to record pop music and appeal to audiences beyond country fans. Nashville music executives thought she had lost her mind. “I’m not leaving country,” she told them. “I’m taking country with me.” The genre exploded with new listeners.

The head scratching about Dolly continued when she moved from music to motion pictures, then to business with the opening of her theme park in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Within a few years, Dollywood became nothing less than the economic engine of East Tennessee. As her wealth grew, Dolly took another unprecedented step. Instead of keeping money for herself and becoming a billionaire, she gave her fortune away. She funded research for the COVID Moderna vaccine, assisted in flood and hurricane relief across the Smokies, established health clinics, and created the Imagination Library, giving over 300 million free books to children all over the world. “All my life,” Dolly once said, “there has been this strange thing within me that said, “Do this and that.” She knew when to walk into a room and when to leave. She knew where she was wanted and where she was not.

Dolly describes her image – the towering hair, the cinched waist, the layers of make-up – as her “get up” and admits that she looks like a cartoon of a woman. But Dolly Parton always has known who she is. The dichotomy of looking one way and being another is a strategy. It gives her something to work against, she says. She grabs people’s attention with her look and then bowls them over with how smart, creative, serious, and talented she is. Her look is a country girl’s idea of glam, she likes to say. But for Dolly – one critic noted – it is also her superpower.

Martha Ackmann is a journalist and author who writes about women who have changed America. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, the Paris Review, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She also is a frequent commentator for New England Public Radio, and has been featured on CNN, National Public Radio, and the BBC. Martha is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her books include: The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight; Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League; and These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson.

The post Dolly Parton Knows Who She Is appeared first on The History Reader.

Three New History Books to Read This January

Sara Beth Haring — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 12:56:07 +0000

With a new year comes a new set of history books publishing this month. Whether you’ve decided to read 12 history books this year or make a stretch goal of reading 40 of them, we’ve got you covered. Below are three new history books we’re excited to see this January from Jack Kelly, Susan Wise Bauer, and Jane Ziegelman.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Declaration of Independence marked the birth of the United States. But two essays of that era appealed even more directly to Americans’ feelings. In January 1776, Thomas Paine—a recent immigrant to America —published Common Sense. His straightforward argument upended the fraud of monarch. His words convinced Americans that the king had no divine right to rule them—they could rule themselves. He turned a rebellion over taxes and representation into a true Revolution.

Tom Paine’s War by Jack Kelly is a riveting exploration of our nation’s birth, showing how one man’s words—and the determination of American patriots—allowed our nation to survive its first crisis.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? The Great Shadow brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle—the experience of actually being ill. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions?

The Great Shadow uses extensive historical research and first-person accounts to tell a vivid story about sickness and our responses to it, from very ancient times until the last decade.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

By the close of World War II, six million Jews had been erased from the face of the earth. Those who eluded death had lost their homes, families, and entire way of life. Their response was quintessentially Jewish. From a people with a long-history of self-narration, survivors gathered in groups and wrote books, yizkor books, remembering all that had been destroyed. Jane Ziegelman’s Once There Was a Town takes readers on a journey through this largely uncharted body of writing and the vanished world it depicts.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

The post Three New History Books to Read This January appeared first on The History Reader.

Featured Excerpt: Progress

Sara Beth Haring — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:00:39 +0000

by Samuel Miller McDonald

In Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy it, author Samuel Miller McDonald offers a bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future. Read on for a featured excerpt in which McDonald deconstructs a letter written by former U.S. president to show the idea of progress.

A history of the ancient world, 1904. Courtesy of Wikimedia. Public Domain.

“Let the philosophical observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwardly toward our seacoast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association, living under no law but that of nature . . . He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals . . . and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day. And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration, and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth.”

This passage is from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1824, two years before his death and forty-one years after the end of the American Revolutionary War. Jefferson was the United States’ third president and one of the country’s most important Founders. This short text illuminates both the spiritual foundation of the country and the idea at the heart of this book. So let’s deconstruct it.

If you were to travel from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Atlantic coastline in the east, Jefferson suggests, the land you would pass through and the buildings dotted along your road would appear as they had at earlier points in human history, as if you were traveling along not just miles but centuries. Your journey would reflect the passage of time, the progress made by European settlers since they reached the East Coast of North America. In other words, by “savages . . . living under no law but that of nature,” Jefferson means that at the Rockies there would be ancient wilderness housing violent fur-clad people without society who foraged for food and shelter, and dangerous beasts, representing life in humanity’s earliest years. By the time you reached what are now the Midwestern states, you would find early agricultural societies, flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, and rows of corn and wheat surrounding simple towns and villages. Finally, reaching the end of your mirror-image quest of American westward frontier expansion, arriving in Washington, DC, New York City, or Boston, you would find the as-yet “most improved state” of human beings and their societies: laws, dense cities, bustling trade, and sophisticated technology. There, you could rest assured that such developments would continue into a bright future. What Jefferson is sketching out is a grand narrative in a specific tradition that can be best captured in one word: progress.

Pick up any crime novel and you are likely to find a narrative formula. The details may change from story to story, but the general structure stays the same: a crime is committed, a detective begins the process of finding and piecing together clues, and the story culminates with the crime solved and the criminal brought to justice. Like crime novels, narratives of progress follow their own formula. This excerpt from Jefferson’s letter offers an ideal distillation of that formula. Though the details have changed through time, from culture to culture, the formula’s essential elements have remained remarkably consistent over not just centuries, but millennia.

The formula starts in the dark and wild beginning of humanity and moves forward and upward into a superior, more refined present, through changes that compound over time, culminating in some still vague, ever-future paradise. The story always parcels its characters into a binary, splitting those deemed civilized from the savage, the heathen from the blessed, the wild from the domesticated, the developed from the undeveloped. There is almost always some kind of frontier space, physical or metaphorical, into which the blessed must enter. The salvation awaiting in the future is set aside for the chosen, but only if they remain obedient to this quest, or, rather, to those leading it.

This narrative formula has served as the intellectual foundation on which Western civilization itself has grown and spread. The American sociologist Robert Nisbet, the last author to publish a broad historical account of the idea of progress, wrote of the concept in 1980: “No single idea has been more important in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years.”

The narrative formula of progress has been important for even longer than that, across many geographies and cultures. It has been important to how countless people over the last five thousand years have understood their place in the cosmos, the timeline reaching back to the beginning of all things and forward to the end of all things. It has been important to how armies are motivated, slaves and peasants are placated, gods invented, and emperors unleashed. The formula has been foundational to those who have made major scientific discoveries or peeked beyond the planet’s atmosphere, but also to those who have waged world wars and enslaved masses. Tracing the lineage of this narrative, we can not only see the evolution of an idea, but also understand more clearly the process that created a certain kind of society that we call civilization, an anomaly that was sparked first in one place, and has since burned across time, peoples, and far stretches of the earth. Though two hundred years old now, Jefferson’s letter appears in the latter part of this history. His worldview was grown out of a lineage that stretched back nearly five millennia, to the world’s earliest civilization in Mesopotamia. But that tradition did not end with Jefferson. The progress formula still occupies a central place in societies and minds all over the world. It remains the default, subconscious framework by which most of us understand our place in our species’ history and our societies’ trajectories through time, and thus by which policies are decided and enacted. It remains the foundation on which we are currently building the future.

Start listening to an audio excerpt of Progress!

MacmillanAudio · Progress by Samuel Miller McDonald, audiobook excerpt

Samuel Miller McDonald is a geographer focusing on human-ecology, theory, and history. He holds a doctorate from Brasenose College, University of Oxford and degrees from Yale University and College of the Atlantic. He has written essays and analysis for The Nation, The Guardian, The New Republic, Current Affairs, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and has contributed interviews to BBC Ideas, VICE News Tonight, and various radio and podcast programs. Progress is his first book.

The post Featured Excerpt: Progress appeared first on The History Reader.

Featured Excerpt: A Biography of a Mountain

Sara Beth Haring — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:00:58 +0000

by Matthew Davis

In A Biography of a Mountain, Matthew Davis shares a comprehensive narrative history of Mt. Rushmore, written in light of recent political controversies, and a timely retrospective for the monument’s 100th anniversary in 2025. Read on for a featured excerpt.

Mt. Rushmore, 2014. Courtesy of Wikimedia. Public Domain.

Prologue
Chaos

Two nights before my second son was born, UH-72 Lakota helicopters buzzed above my house in northeast Washington, DC. These helicopters are named after the Lakota Nation and are deployed for national emergencies. They were one element used by the DC Army National Guard following the dispersal of peaceful protestors—demanding justice for George Floyd’s murder—outside the White House. The afternoon of June 3, 2020, when my wife went into labor, we saw the others. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms police guarded roadblocks at Pennsylvania Avenue, our most direct route to the hospital. Tanks lingered on Constitution Avenue where tour buses usually idled. And young men in National Guard uniforms slung assault rifles under the cherry trees across the National Mall.

In the turmoil of my wife’s third trimester of pregnancy, as the world shut down because of Covid-19, we had girded ourselves for an uncertain delivery. But we had not factored in the helicopters and tanks.

The month following Henry’s birth, we had largely taken refuge in our home. My wife, Laurel, was recovering from delivery, and Henry wasn’t going anywhere. I mostly entertained Aiden, our two-year-old, with long drives into bucolic Virginia where he could run around in open space. On July 3, though, we took a cautious family walk to a nearby park and then dined on meatball sandwiches a friend had dropped off. Before his bedtime, Aiden built Magna-Tile towers and plucked flowers from our small backyard, where Laurel and I sat that evening when the kids were asleep. The pop and smoke of store-bought firecrackers mingled with the heat and humidity to create an almost physical film, our beer bottles beaded with sweat. Sluggish from the heat, the sleeplessness of caring for a newborn, and the nonstop parenting of an energetic toddler, this quiet moment with my wife, infrequent as they had become, was its own minor gift. In the cocoon of our backyard and growing family, we paid little attention to what was happening across the country, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where President Trump was speaking at Mount Rushmore and protests were being organized to greet him.

The early summer had felt chaotic and existential, not solely because of the pandemic or the protests. Through debates over American history and how to memorialize it, deep fissures in national identity were exposed, revealing a country unable—and in some quarters unwilling—to confront the darkness of our national past. So that night, providing his answer to those debates, President Trump gave a speech with a singular vision of American history, its narratives, and its role in our democracy. He had chosen Mount Rushmore as the setting, and when I read about the event, his speech’s tenor and tone, I wondered what it was about the four granite faces that reflected his version of American history.

For most of my professional life, I had spent time living in, writing about,and working with countries and cultures different from my own. Mongolian. Syrian. Deaf American. When I founded an international literary organization in 2016, my attention often turned to writers across the world and the issues their prose and poetry explored. I wasn’t uninterested in American history, politics, or culture, but I preferred gazing abroad instead of within.

The summer of 2020 altered my focus, and Trump’s visit to Mount Rushmore captivated me. I did some cursory research: how Rushmore’s place in the Black Hills of South Dakota has served as a point of pain for generations of Native Americans, especially those belonging to the Oceti Sakowin and the Lakota Nation; how its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, was a famed though flawed artist with controversial politics and a combative personality; how Rushmore’s construction was a publicly funded feat of engineering and endurance.

I would learn more in the coming years—rustle through archives and books; spend time in South Dakota and the Greater Plains; and, most importantly, hear the stories of women and men who have influenced Rushmore’s evolving meaning today: an Oglala and Sicangu Lakota woman who leads an effort to remember the children who died in the Rapid City Indian Boarding School; the president of the Mount Rushmore Society whose family’s roots in the Black Hills originate before Dakota statehood; the first Native American superintendent of Mount Rushmore; and the Oglala Lakota leader of an organization who champions the Land Back movement. Men and women who, that July 3 evening, as I sat on the patio with Laurel, were congregating in different ways in the Black Hills, an evening that would forever change their lives and that of the memorial.

The mile-high shelf of Harney Peak granite, which was forged billions of years ago miles below the earth, and which now stands as our most visible piece of Americana, deserves to have its story told in full. This book is that attempt.

During the time spent with this project, I have kept firmly centered the images of my two sons. Their arrival spurred my interest in this topic. Every American generation faces unique challenges, but the American children of this pandemic era have been born into a fast-moving narrative whose current stakes are the future of our democracy. This book has given me the opportunity to think about what it means to be American at the quarter point of the twenty-first century, poised on the cusp of our 250th anniversary. To think about our past, how we represent that past in memorials, and to consider the United States we are developing for our children.

To echo Emerson, if all history is biography, then what can we learn about our country from a biography of a mountain?

Matthew Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, among other places. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Davis lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, a diplomat, and their two young kids.

The post Featured Excerpt: A Biography of a Mountain appeared first on The History Reader.

New Books to Read as the Days Get Shorter: November 2025

Sara Beth Haring — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:16:58 +0000

As the days get shorter and the temperatures drop, you’ll want to stay inside to enjoy these fascinating history books publishing this month. From Lorissa Rinehart’s major biography of the first woman to hold a U.S. federal office to Jeffrey Kluger’s highly anticipated story of NASA’s Gemini program, you can’t go wrong with any of these history selections.

The first major biography of Jeannette Rankin, a groundbreaking suffragist, activist, and the first American woman to hold federal office.

A suffragist, peace activist, workers’ rights advocate, and champion of democratic reform who ran as a Republican, Rankin remained ever faithful to her beliefs, no matter the price she had to pay personally. In Winning the Earthquake, Lorissa Rinehart expertly recovers the compelling history behind this singular American hero, bringing her story back to life.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

Just in time to celebrate the monument’s 100th anniversary, A Biography of A Mountain combines history with reportage, bringing the complicated and nuanced story of Mt. Rushmore to life. From the land’s origins as sacred tribal ground to the expansion of the American West to the politicized present-day conflict over the site, Matthew Davis writes with sensitivity about the complex past and future of one of America’s most recognizable landmarks.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

From the bestselling co-author of Apollo 13 comes the thrilling untold story of the pioneering Gemini program that was instrumental in getting Americans on the moon.

Told with Jeffrey Kluger’s signature cinematic storytelling and in-depth research and interviews, Gemini is an edge-of-your-seat narrative chronicling the history of the least appreciated—and most groundbreaking—space program in American history. Finally, Gemini’s story will be told, and finally, we’ll learn the truth of how we landed on the moon.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

In 2020, a bipartisan act of Congress mandated changing the names of nine military bases previously named for Confederate soldiers. Over the course of twenty months, the commission completed their mission, carefully combing through years of American history and hearing from tens of thousands of Americans from all walks of life. The commission ultimately chose ten Americans whose individual heroics reflect the collective best of all that America is and could be.

This is the inspiring story behind the ten American heroes whose names had been originally chosen, told by two members of the Naming Commission that selected them.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

The author of Free returns with an extraordinary inquiry into historical injustice, dignity, truth, and imagination.

When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, she is faced with unsettling questions. She had been told all records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there her grandmother is in the photo, taken during her honeymoon, smiling as WWII rages on.

What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, spanning the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, and the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history—and reveals the fragility of truth, collective and personal.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

Two-time National Outdoor Book Award-winning author Buddy Levy’s thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship―and the men who sacrificed everything, including their lives, for science, country, and polar immortality. Now available in paperback.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

A pathbreaking new way to examine US history, through the lens of the bestselling video game series: Red Dead Redemption.

Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they’ve been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as re-creations of history?

In this engaging book, award-winning American history professor Tore Olsson takes up that question and more. Colorful, fast-paced, and dramatic, Red Dead’s History sheds light on dark corners of the American past for gamers and history buffs alike. Now available in paperback.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

The post New Books to Read as the Days Get Shorter: November 2025 appeared first on The History Reader.

The Renegade Texan Who Made NFL History

Sara Beth Haring — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 19:00:24 +0000

by David Fleming

As David Fleming began researching his book, A Big Mess in Texas, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that Giles Miller, the owner of the first southern NFL football team in history, was quite the colorful character. Read on as Fleming introduces The History Reader to this renegade Texan who is at the heart of the most disastrous NFL team in football history. Once you’re done, check out this featured excerpt of A Big Mess in Texas.

AN NFL OWNER once flipped me the double-bird.

It was November 2009 in Nashville, and to be fair, the Titans’ feisty octogenarian owner Bud Adams was essentially waving his wrinkly middle fingers at everyone on the visiting side of the stadium after a 41-17 win over the Buffalo Bills. Adams, a Texas oilman through and through, was forced to apologize and fork over a $250,000 fine, but if I’m being honest, I thought the gesture was absolutely hilarious. Awesome, even. (And I’m certain Bud felt the exact same way.) If there’s one thing I’ve learned covering the NFL on a national level for three decades, as an author and writer at Sports Illustrated and ESPN, it’s that the NFL’s most colorful characters are often the owners themselves. Eccentrics and the mavericks like Bud Adams; Jerry Jones; Al Davis; George Halas, who once offered to fight Pittsburgh owner Art Rooney over gate receipts; bookie-turned-Giants-owner, Jack Mara; Al Capone associate Charles Bidwill; and, of course, the most outlandish owner in NFL history: Giles Miller, the dreamer and schemer at the heart of the 1952 Dallas Texans and A Big Mess in Texas.

Giles E. Miller and his wife, Betty, complete purchase of franchise to be called Dallas Texans with NFL Commissioner, Bert Bell, January 1952. Courtesy of Wikimedia. Public Domain.

You can’t imagine what a thrill (and a relief) it is to start researching a book and find out your main character is a former Golden Gloves boxer and band leader who was raised by a Black butler, then kicked out of law school, only to become the youngest NFL owner in history, all while hiding a secret second family. And, trust me, that description barely scratches the surface of Giles Miller or his escapades throughout A Big Mess in Texas as he went about changing the course of NFL history.

While growing up in a twenty-room mansion across from the swanky Dallas Country Club, Miller was once banned from the course for f-bombing a Methodist bishop who had committed the unforgivable sin of hitting into his group. (Miller should have just used sign language, like Bud Adams.) Traveling to Chicago for work while representing his father’s Texas Textile conglomerate, Miller often frequented a dark, dungeon-like tavern on Clark Street called The Ivanhoe. One night, a drunk patron trying to get a laugh jumped out of a dark doorway, hoping to rattle the eminently poised playboy. Miller coldcocked the guy, readjusted his tie, and stepped over the joker’s prostrate body without spilling so much as a drop of his bourbon.

In other words, Miller was the personification of the booming anything-is-possible post-war America in the 1950s that produced the final Wild West era of the NFL, long before TV money changed everything.

Blessed with movie star looks, a deadly right cross apparently, and a swagger bankrolled by his father’s massive textile fortune, in 1952 Miller, 31, was perhaps the only person in America who thought a Dallas NFL franchise was a good idea. Reacting to the news that the NFL was coming to Texas, the Saturday Evening Post declared that, “Giles Miller has stamped himself in the minds of folks from coast to coast as an All-American sucker.”

But as America, and NFL commissioner Bert Bell would soon find out, Giles Miller was a force of nature and a true Texas renegade who made bird-flipping Bud Adams seem like Mr. Rogers. And Miller’s initial plans for the new Dallas Texans, the first NFL franchise in the South, matched his larger-than-life persona: the players would be required to wear ten-gallon cowboy hats at all times off the field, the game uniforms would feature sewn in pistol belts, the game balls would be delivered by helicopter, or on horseback, and the roster would be packed with the best players money could buy, regardless of race, or the laws of Jim Crow South.

“He saw himself as a rock star and he was definitely larger than life,” said Giles’s grandson Rhett Miller, who just happens to be an actual rock star, as the lead singer of the renowned alt-country band Old 97s. “My grandpa was so charming, and the charisma and swagger just emanated off him. Sure, he didn’t really know what he was doing when it came to owning a football team. But he loved the idea of it, which meant it was only a matter of time before everyone else around him would love the idea of the NFL in Dallas, too.”

This is how insanely brash Giles Miller was: with zero experience running a football franchise he actually thought he could take the worst team in the NFL–with a roster packed full of hard-drinking, hard-hitting, loveable misfits like Art “Fatso” Donovan–and singlehandedly transform it into the original version of America’s Team, all while changing the course of NFL history.

As you’ll see on the pages of A Big Mess in Texas, somehow, Giles Miller nearly pulled it off.

And all it cost him was everything.

DAVID FLEMING is the author of four books and a Peabody-nominated correspondent for Meadowlark Media. During the last three decades at ESPN, Sports Illustrated and Meadowlark, Fleming has been one of the industry’s most prolific, versatile, and imaginative longform storytellers. His unique work has earned numerous national awards as well as a handwritten note from the White House. Fleming is the author of Who’s Your Founding Father?, Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship, and, Noah’s Rainbow. A native of Detroit, and a former D1 wrestler, Fleming and his wife, Kim, live in North Carolina with their daughters.

The post The Renegade Texan Who Made NFL History appeared first on The History Reader.

La Milagrosa, Havana’s Miraculous One

Sara Eslami — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:01:40 +0000

by Elena Sheppard

Elena Sheppard, author of The Eternal Forest, joins us to discuss the myth of La Milagrosa. The Eternal Forest masterfully weaves Cuban mythology and history, and is on sale today!

Havana Harbor entrance in 1841. Public domain via Wikipedia.

In Havana’s vast Cristóbal Colón Cemetery there is a tomb that women, many of them pregnant, visit with the goal of having their hopes and wishes granted. The tomb belongs to a woman who during life was named Amelia Goyri de Adot, but after death has become better known as La Milagrosa, “The Miraculous One.” According to legend, Amelia and her child both died during the baby’s birth, and when it came time for the burial, Amelia was buried with the baby between her legs. When years later, the tomb was reopened, La Milagrosa’s baby had moved; no longer between her mother’s legs, she was now nestled snugly in her mother’s arms. It had to have been a miracle.

In my book—The Eternal Forest: A Memoir of the Cuban Diaspora—I touch on that story ever-so-briefly. Every place on earth has people and locations that are steeped in lore, but learning of La Milagrosa, a legend from my mother’s home country, with my own young children sleeping in the room next door, stirred something inside of me; that generational connection of motherhood and childbirth, the gut drop of sadness when you learn of someone who died giving birth. So much of my book is about how myths and stories are passed down, and how women are so often the keeper of those oral histories. I am endlessly fascinated by the ways in which ordinary lives, and ordinary moments, are turned into stories told so many times they get worn into legends. But there doesn’t seem to be much saved about La Milagrosa’s ordinary life; about who the woman was when she was simply Amelia, before she’d become a miracle.

What is known is that Amelia Goyria de la Hoz was born to Francisco Goyri and Magdalena de la Hoz on January 29, 1877. While alive, she belonged to Havana’s aristocracy and, they say, was raised alongside her three brothers by a wealthy aunt in the Palace of the Marquis de Balboa. They say too that she fell in love with the man she would marry, a second cousin, when she was only 13, but that her family thought him too poor. There is so little recorded about Amelia’s life, but it is recorded that she married that man, José Vicente Adot, on June 25, 1900. By then, he was a captain in the Liberation Army, fighting for Cuba’s independence. Less than a year after they’d wed, and eight months pregnant, Amelia died on May 3, 1901. She was 24 and the culprit was likely preeclampsia; her baby girl died too.

The myth begins to really take shape when it comes to how her husband comported herself after Amelia died. Legend says he visited her grave twice a day, not really believing she was dead. Legend says that once he arrived, he would knock on the tomb right above where her heart should be, as if knocking on a door, to wake Amelia up. Then he would speak to her for hours. When it came time for him to take her leave, he would put his hat over his heart and back away, never wanting to give his bride his back.

The tomb was reopened in 1914, thirteen years after Amelia’s death, in order to bury José’s recently deceased father. It was then that not only was the baby discovered in Amelia’s arms, but Amelia was discovered, legend says, entirely intact. A sure sign of holiness, or perhaps something supernatural.

José, for his part, spent the next four decades of his life, up until his own death, visiting his wife’s tomb. Today, thousands visit her tomb every year, asking for La Milagrosa to grant them miracles, and thanking her for the miracles she’s already granted. The tradition is to follow José’s pattern, so after people speak with La Milagrosa, they back away. Many who visit her are pregnant or want to be. Her tomb is often covered in flowers, in baby bottles, in tiny tablets bearing messages and prayers and thanks. She has come to be a symbol for motherhood, matrimony, something miraculous and possible.

Legends like this stir me. They are the types of stories that are passed down through generations; it is as easy to imagine a story like this existing in the 1st century as it is the 21st. That timelessness speaks deeply to what makes us human: our wants. Depending upon your beliefs about an afterlife, you may think Amelia knows her posthumous fate as La Milagrosa—or you may think her consciousness was buried with her bones. I have no answer for that, but I do believe in the awesome power of desire. I know there is something deeply connective and human about wanting something so potently—about wanting life so potently—that the only logical path forward is to plead with the dead.

Elena Sheppard is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Cut, The New Yorker, Vogue, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and W, as well as on NBC and MSNBC. She has been a writer-in residence at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and taught creative nonfiction and journalism in Columbia’s High School Summer Program. She lives in New York with her husband and children.

The post La Milagrosa, Havana’s Miraculous One appeared first on The History Reader.

Featured Excerpt: Brady vs. Belichick

Sara Eslami — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:02:20 +0000

by Gary Myers

Read an excerpt of BRADY VS. BELICHICK, a unique and unparalleled look into the nature and relationship of two of the pillars in the NFL’s greatest dynasty.

Chapter 1: Get Out of Bounds!

Pepper Johnson, the New England Patriots inside linebackers coach, was cringing on the home team sidelines at the old Foxboro Stadium as he watched franchise quarterback Drew Bledsoe drift out of the pocket, roll to his right, turn the corner, and take off in a desperate scramble for the first down sticks.

Johnson felt sick to his stomach fearing what was about to happen as New York Jets All-Pro linebacker Mo Lewis ran full speed at Bledsoe and positioned himself to deliver a ferocious hit. A massive collision was inevitable unless Bledsoe did the prudent thing for his physical well-being, career, and wife and kids: run the hell out of bounds.

He did not.

Johnson wanted to scream. No, no, I warned you!

All Bledsoe accomplished was getting splattered, nearly dying, and inadvertently changing the course of NFL history by creating two legends. Lewis has never once felt guilty about the hit—it was 100 percent clean—and he’s tired of hearing that he is responsible for the Patriots’ dynasty.

New York led 10–3 with just under five minutes remaining in a blah affair in what otherwise had been an extremely patriotic day on the first weekend of NFL games played after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The Patriots had a third and 10 at their own 19-yard line when Bledsoe was unable to find a receiver downfield or a checkdown option underneath. He was chased out of the pocket and made a run for it around the right edge with defensive end Shaun Ellis on his ass. The first-down marker was 10 yards away but might as well have been 10 miles. He was not getting there.

New England started the season with a loss in Cincinnati after it was 5–11 in 2000 and finished in last place in the AFC East in Bill Belichick’s first year as head coach. Bledsoe had enough athletic arrogance to refuse to believe he was playing for his job, but Belichick was not a Bledsoe fan. Belichick had an affinity for a second-year quarterback out of the University of Michigan named Tom Brady, who completed one pass in three attempts the previous season as a rookie, the seventh quarterback taken in a bad quarterback draft. Not to be discounted: Belichick was barely into his second season, and he was telling people in his inner circle in the Patriots’ front office that they all could be fired by Robert Kraft if things didn’t turn around by the end of the year. He even told that to Mike Westhoff, the Jets’ special teams coach, on the field before the game.

The words were not directly spoken, but Kraft was putting pressure on Belichick; in turn, Belichick was putting pressure on Bledsoe. Unless the Patriots started 1–7 or 0–8, Belichick didn’t have to be worried about getting fired midseason by Kraft. Bledsoe was not going to keep his starting job without winning games and that could have been in the back of his mind.

The NFL is not a contact sport. It’s 60 minutes of high-speed collisions with too many look-the-other-way train wrecks every Sunday. Great for TV ratings. Dangerous to a player’s long-term well-being. Lewis was a superb and powerful athlete at 6-foot-3, 258 pounds, and he was about to crush Bledsoe, a large man himself, two inches taller but 20 pounds lighter.

Bledsoe could feel Ellis grabbing his legs, but more importantly could see Lewis sprinting, unobstructed, at him, a couple of 18-wheelers driving in opposite directions on the same side of the highway with no air bags. Bledsoe decided against making a business decision as he neared the sideline. He was trying to pick up the first down, win the game, and keep Brady on the bench. He did not run out of bounds. Lewis lowered his right shoulder and drove it into Bledsoe’s left shoulder and chest, splattering him on the grass.

“Oh, does he hit … Oh my,” Dick Enberg said on the CBS broadcast.

Bledsoe fumbled out of bounds as he crumpled in a daze and was briefly unconscious on the Patriots’ sideline. He was quickly surrounded by teammates and medical staff. Literally adding insult to injury, he was two yards short of the first down and miles away in the never-never land of concussions with a life-threatening sheared blood vessel in his chest not immediately detected. Even today, with rules protecting quarterbacks to the extent that it often seems they’re wearing bright red hands-off practice jerseys, this was not a penalty.

“It was third down, and I was heading toward the sideline,” Bledsoe told me. “It was two yards short of a first down, and I tried to turn back, and when I did, I gave Mo Lewis my full chest, and he blew me up.”

The Jets were in a nickel defense. Cornerback Ray Mickens saw Bledsoe start to run and called out for Lewis to get after him. Lewis thought Bledsoe was going to slide, but Lewis hit him with full force when Bledsoe didn’t show any inclination to get down on his own.

“You got to realize, Mo Lewis is a very powerful dude,” Jets linebacker Marvin Jones said as he recalled the play. “We call it country strong. It’s just natural. He wasn’t a little guy, either.”

Jones was out of the game on third down. He could hear the hit from 53.3 yards away on the Jets’ sideline. The Earth shook. Soon there would be an ambulance.

“It sounded like somebody ain’t getting up,” Jones said. “It was a hit to remember.”

“It was the loudest hit I could ever remember hearing,” Brady told the NFL’s website years later.

“I’ve never heard a hit sound like that,” said Ted Johnson, standing just a few feet away. “It was a sound that I’ve never heard before and never heard since.”

In a matter of minutes, the Brady Era began and Bledsoe was yesterday’s news, another quarterback who would lose his job to injury. More than two decades later, Lewis still hates talking about the hit and its history-altering ramifications. Specifically, he despises being remembered and even blamed by Jets fans for jump-starting the Belichick–Brady dynasty and beginning two decades of misery for Jets Nation.

After some coaxing, Lewis agreed to talk about it. Dispassionately, he began, “I just look at it as another play. Period.”

As far as he’s concerned, the blame for the injury and the Patriots’ run to seemingly unattainable success is misplaced.

In his mind, one person deserves the blame: Drew Bledsoe.

“He just signed a $100 million deal to be what type of quarterback? A passing quarterback, correct?” Lewis said. “Had he not got outside the pocket and ran with the ball, would we be talking about this? Who caused the event? The person who was with the ball. Now he’s doing what he didn’t sign up for. He signed up to be a passing quarterback. What do I do? I stop the people with the ball. It’s just another play for me. But it’s a different play for him.”

As part of the NFL’s celebration of its 100th season in 2019, it conducted a poll to determine the top 100 game changers in league history. Lewis came in at No. 82. He should have been much higher. “He was the guy that actually started Tom Brady’s career,” said Herm Edwards, the Jets coach in that 2001 game.

As soon as Bledsoe went down, Pepper Johnson’s mind raced to two days earlier, September 21, when Belichick “had me talk to the offense about the Jets’ defense,” right before the Patriots took the field for their Friday morning practice.

Johnson was more a Belichick guy than a Bill Parcells guy when he was a linebacker for the New York Giants, winning two Super Bowls in his first five seasons. Belichick was the defensive coordinator, and they built a strong coach-player relationship. Johnson played for Cleveland in the final three of Belichick’s five seasons with the Browns from 1993 to 1995, spent one season with his hometown Detroit Lions, and then finished up with two years with the Jets in 1997 and 1998, reuniting with Parcells and Belichick.

Johnson sat in Jets linebacker meetings with Lewis and Jones for two years at Weeb Ewbank Hall on the campus of Hofstra University. He had grown close to them. “I was one step removed from playing with those guys,” he said. The three often “broke bread together,” Johnson said, and he respected their game-changing ability when he played with them and knew the damage they could inflict on the Patriots’ skill position players.

He gave New England’s offensive players an ominous yet prescient scouting report.

Johnson stood up in front of the meeting room and delivered a strong warning:

“Hopefully this doesn’t sound bad because the last thing I want to do is pump fear into anybody, but if you are headed into a one-on-one with Marvin Jones or Mo Lewis, go out of bounds, sidestep them, get out of the way,” he said.

One thing they should not do is let their pride get in the way and challenge them. Bledsoe clearly was not taking notes. “Do not try and bump heads with these guys,” Johnson continued. “They are Scud missiles. Mo is one of the guys you need to avoid.”

“Pep,” running back Kevin Faulk said, “you’re talking about two guys.”

“But those guys can change a game,” Johnson said.

Then he watched in horror as Bledsoe ignored his warning. “I’m mad at Drew because I just told him not to freaking go one-on-one with this dude,” Johnson said. “I painted the scenario for him to run out of bounds.”

After the game, Johnson was confronted by Patriots safety Lawyer Milloy and cornerback Ty Law. They said teammates were saying that Johnson was laughing, joking, and high-fiving with Lewis and Jones when Bledsoe was on the ground. Milloy was especially close to Bledsoe. Johnson didn’t deny that he spoke to Lewis and Jones when the game was stopped but said he would never celebrate any player getting hurt, especially the quarterback on his own team.

Bledsoe never started another game for New England.

* * *

Gary Myers is a longtime NFL insider who has written six books, including the New York Times bestselling BRADY V MANNING and most recently, ONCE A GIANT. He has covered the NFL for over 40 years.

The post Featured Excerpt: Brady vs. Belichick appeared first on The History Reader.

Back to School History Reads: September 2025

Sara Eslami — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 14:39:15 +0000

Looking for your next history read? Need a book for back to school season? Check out some of our favorite new history books publishing in September 2025.

The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz

New York Times bestselling author of Les Parisiennes and That Woman: A Life of Wallis Simpson now examines how a disparate band of young girls struggled to overcome differences and little musical knowledge to please the often-sadistic Nazi overseers.

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

The Eternal Forest

In the tradition of The Yellow House and Half Broke Horses, a memoir of the Cuban diaspora that follows one family’s exile from the island, through a lyrical exploration of memory, cultural mythology, and the history of Cuban-American relations.

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

Wild for Austen

Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser.

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

A Thousand Ways to Die

A deeply personal exploration of the generational impact of guns on the Black experience in America.

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

The Stalin Affair

Now in paperback. From internationally bestselling historian Giles Milton comes the remarkable true story of the motley group of Allied men and women who worked to manage Stalin’s mercurial, explosive approach to diplomacy during four turbulent years of World War II.

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

Confronting Evil

By the #1 bestselling history author in the world, Bill O’Reilly: A dramatic confrontation with good, evil, and the worst people who ever lived.

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

Killing the SS

Now in paperback. Killing the SS is the epic saga of the espionage and daring waged by self-styled “Nazi hunters.” Over decades, these men and women scoured the world, tracking down the SS fugitives and bringing them to justice, which often meant death.

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

Q

Now in paperback. Combining biography, essay, cultural history, dream diary, travelog, and satire, Craig Brown—the bestselling and award-winning author of Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret and Hello Goodbye Hello—presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of this most public yet most private of sovereigns.

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

The Black Utopians

Now in paperback. A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia—and sought to transform their lives.

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

The post Back to School History Reads: September 2025 appeared first on The History Reader.