Miles Harvey. The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020. You might know something about Brook Farm, Massachusetts, and New Harmony, Indiana—but what about Beaver Island, Michigan? You have heard of Joseph Smith and Brigham More
Timothy B. Neary. Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago: 1915–1954. Chicago, University of Chicago Press (2016). The author makes good on his promise to tell “the little-known and largely forgotten story of Catholic interracialism prior to the modern civil rights movement.” Founded in 1930, the Catholic Youth Organization brought together boys More
M. Jane Johansson, ed. Albert C. Ellithorpe the First Indian Home Guards and the Civil War of the Trans-Mississippi Frontier. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press (2016). The title is a mouthful, but the fact is that this intriguing More
Marcia Chatelain. South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration. Durham, NC, Duke University Press (2015). This is a very important study of lives of black girls during the Great Migration. At its core are the girls themselves, More
Ethan Michaeli. The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America from the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (2016). This history is beautifully written and exquisitely researched. More