This biography of the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh is the first to make clear that his misunderstood younger brother, Tenskwatawa, was an equal partner in the last great pan-Indian alliance against the United States. Tenskwatawa has been dismissed as a talentless charlatan and a drunk, but historian Peter Cozzen shows that while Tecumseh was a brilliant diplomat and war leader, it was Tenskwatawa, called the “Shawnee Prophet,” who created a doctrine of religious and cultural revitalization that unified the disparate tribes of the Old Northwest.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

This first book in a planned World War II mystery series is set in a U.S. Army field hospital in Sicily in 1943, where nurses contend with heat, dirt, the threat of German counterattack, and a flood of horribly wounded GIs. Military Police lieutenant Eddie Harkins is called there to investigate the murder of Dr. Myers Stephenson. Harkins and nurse Kathleen Donnelly, a childhood friend who may be something more, struggle to find the killer as the battle lines push forward.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

The year 2020 marks the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower. This book looks at the Plymouth colony’s founding events through the eyes of the Wampanoag people, who have long contended that the tale of the first Thanksgiving that most Americans are familiar with is not history but a myth that sugar coats the viciousness of colonialism for Native peoples. The Pilgrims were not arriving at a desolate wilderness: in fact, human civilization in the Americas was as rich and ancient as in Europe. Personal stories and oral histories highlight the Wampanoags’ ongoing struggle for self-determination.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

“When Vicksburg fell, the fate of the Confederacy was sealed.”—Ulysses S. Grant

The surrender of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, 1863, opened the Mississippi to Union commerce and severed the Confederacy, isolating the slave states of Arkansas and Texas and part of Louisiana. It also ignited a social revolution in Mississippi and eastern Louisiana that culminated in the violent overthrow of plantation slavery. The victory elevated General Grant to command of all Union armies and sent him east to take on Robert E. Lee.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

This combination of memoir and travelogue traces the relationship between “wild food” and environmental conservation. Foraged foods—two centuries ago the mainstay of the North American diet—are now becoming a luxury, served to the wealthy in exclusive restaurants. The author discusses philosophies toward “wild nature” over time and explores the impacts of colonialism, capitalism, climate change, and slavery on wild foods. We meet the wild food gatherers of today and go behind-the-scenes of the trendy wild food industry.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this book explores the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists. Suffragists built a coalition of moderate lobbyists and radical demonstrators who forged a strategy of winning voting rights in crucial states, setting the stage for securing suffrage for all American women in the Constitution. The suffragists’ final victories in Congress and state legislatures, and the last, most difficult ratification, in Tennessee, are vividly described.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

In 1957, Frank Kameny, an astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, was dismissed because he was homosexual. Unlike many who faced the same fate, Kameny fought back, founding the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. This story of America at a cultural and sexual crossroads is based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

While Americans have a reputation for being strait-laced, many of the nation’s leaders (e.g., Alexander Hamilton, Warren G. Harding, Grover Cleveland, and John F. Kennedy) have been anything but puritanical. This book revisits some of the sex scandals that have rocked the nation’s capital and shocked the public. While Americans have judged their leaders’ affairs more harshly compared to citizens of other nations, did they mostly just hate being lied to? And do they now care more about issues other than a politician’s sex life?

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

The idea that certain peoples and species belong in certain places can be tracked from the 18th century studies of Carl Linnaeus, to the eugenics movement of the 20th century, through the anti-immigration policies of today. Experts have historically considered any type of migration as necessarily calamitous, upsetting the “natural order.” But in the broad calculus of our biological history, the benefits of movement have outweighed the terror. The continuation of life on a changing planet depends on migration.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

For thousands of years, West African griots (men) and griottes (women) have recited the stories of their people. Without this tradition Bettye Kearse would not have known that she is a descendant of President James Madison and his slave, and half-sister, Coreen. Her family’s credo—“Always remember you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president”—was intended to be a source of pride, but for her, it echoed with abuses of slavery, including rape and incest. Embarking on a journey of discovery, Kearse tried to confirm the information her ancestors had passed down, but she encountered obstacles at every turn

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

This novel told in stories follows four generations of Cherokee women across four decades. It begins in 1974 in Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country where 15-year-old Justine is growing up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. Eventually Justine and her daughter Reney move to Texas in the hope of finding a more stable life, but they struggle to survive in a world where unreliable men and natural forces such as wildfires and tornados threaten their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

An old sugar plantation in Louisiana, called Carville by locals, was the site of the only leprosy colony in the continental United States, where generations of afflicted Americans were isolated—often against their will and until their deaths. Amid widespread public anxiety about foreign contamination and contagion, patients were deprived of basic rights and shunned by those outside. This is the story of the patients, nurses, doctors, and researchers at Carville who struggled for over a century to eradicate Hansen’s disease, the modern name for leprosy.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

In the fall of 1918, Philadelphians are celebrating the end of World War I when an even more urgent threat arrives: an influenza pandemic. After her mother’s brutally sudden death, thirteen-year-old German immigrant Pia Lange must leave their tenement apartment to find food for her two baby brothers. Then she herself falls ill and after a hospital stay is forced into an orphanage. Pia runs away to find her brothers, while a woman who is perhaps a greater threat than the virus itself plots to keep them separated.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

John Maynard Keynes was not just a British economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. Moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes reinvented Enlightenment liberalism to meet the harrowing crises of his time. In the United States, his ideas became the foundation of a burgeoning economics profession, but they also became a flash point in the broader political struggle of the Cold War, as Keynesian acolytes faced off against conservatives in an intellectual battle for the future of the country—and the world.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

The liberating nature of automobiles has long been romanticized in song, film, and literature, but that narrative has largely been owned by white Americans. For the average black American, restriction of movement—a holdover from slavery—lingered long into the 20th century and shaped the way African Americans navigated behind the wheel. Long car rides and vacations required careful preparation, early morning departures, and infrequent pit stops. In grassroots fashion (most famously with the “Green Book” guidebooks), a new industry sprang up, a world of black-only B&B’s, hotels, and restaurants that played a vital role in the civil rights movement by feeding and housing activists who traveled South to protest.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

Ten years after the Mayflower Pilgrims established a colony based on the dream of religious freedom, Plymouth is led by fervent Puritans who prohibit residents from living, trading, and worshipping as they choose. The arrival of new colonists ratchets up the tension in this mystery novel that reframes the story of the Pilgrims through the previously unheard voices of two women of very different status and means. This is a story about a murder and a trial that asks: whose stories get told over time, who gets believed, and who gets punished?

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, a challenge to Hitler’s dominance at the iconic Grand Prix auto circuit was mounted by three unlikely collaborators: Rene Dreyfus, a former top driver who had been all but banned by the mid-1930s because he was Jewish; Charles Weiffenbach, head of the struggling automaker Delahaye; and Lucy Schell, racing enthusiast and daughter of an American multi-millionaire. Their remarkable success was a feat akin to African American runner Jesse Owens’ triumph at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

LEARN MORE | REGISTER | BUY THE BOOK

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

The Elaine Race Massacre took place in and around the town of Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919 when white residents felt threatened by black sharecroppers’ attempts to unionize. Author J. Chester Johnson was an adult before he learned that his beloved grandfather had participated in an event that led to the deaths of at least 100 African Americans (exact numbers are unknown). In 2014, Johnson met Sheila L. Walker, a descendant of several massacre victims, and the two joined to pursue a path toward racial reconciliation. Walker wrote the Foreward to the book. LEARN MORE | REGISTER

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

Framed movingly by her own family’s story of immigration to America, Jia Lynn Yang’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is a deeply researched and illuminating work of history, one that shows how Americans have strived and struggled to live up to the ideal of a home for the “huddled masses,” as promised in Emma Lazarus’s famous poem. Kirkus Reviews says: “Throughout her important story, Yang highlights human and political drama, from the histrionics of racists to the political machinations of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson on behalf of the displaced and others.” LEARN MORE | REGISTER

The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival: Bring History Home is presented by Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.

SPONSORED BY DELAWARE HUMANITIES AND THE LEE ANN WILKINSON GROUP

In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless.” It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. LEARN MORE | REGISTER

The settlers’ disappearance and the lone clue they left behind – a “secret token” carved into a tree – have baffled historians and amateur sleuths for centuries. Following a chance encounter with a British archaeologist, Lawler discovered that solid answers to the mystery were within reach. He set out to unravel the enigma of the lost settlers and documented his work in “The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke” (Random House, 2019).

HBF and Fort Miles celebrate the 75th Anniversary of D-Day with a presentation and discussion of D-Day Girls with author Sarah Rose. This event is free, park and museum fees apply.

D-DAY GIRLS: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II by Sarah Rose (on sale April 23), tells the largely unknown story of the women who engaged in clandestine warfare in enemy territory to pave the way for the Allied victory on D-Day. 

SARAH ROSE is the author of For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History. She was the Dynasties columnist for the Wall Street Journal and has written for Outside, Travel + Leisure, Bon Appétit, and Men’s Journal. In 2014, she was awarded a Lowell Thomas Prize for travel writing.

A journalist with over 30 years' experience, Steven Pressman is the writer, director and producer of the HBO documentary film, Fifty Children.

In the spring of 1939, a Jewish lawyer and his wife left their comfortable home and two children in Philadelphia and embarked on a bold and improbable plan to rescue fifty children from Nazi-controlled Vienna. 

In the 1870s, before women had the right to vote or a firm standing in the workplace, a lucky few found employment at the Harvard College Observatory. The first female assistants were born to the work—as the wives, daughters, and sisters of the resident astronomers.