In 1989, tens of thousands of protesters tore down the Berlin Wall. But as The New York Times points out, the irony is that in 2013 people are protesting because they want the Wall to stay up--or at least one stretch of it. The East Side Gallery is the...
Bay Forest Books released a new book trailer for The Vanishing Woman, produced by Stan Severance. Check it out:Â http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uai2yECAxCc The opening lines of the trailer say, "Eliza called her father 'Papa'. Her half-sister, Ellen, called him...
When I was writing my novel The Puzzle People, I came across a photo of the Church of Reconciliation as it was being blown up in 1985 (shown on the left). But what caught my eye in the photo was the cross on the church steeple flying off in mid-air. So I described the...
I was listening to the audio version of Adam Goodheart's amazing book, 1861, when the phrase "The Little Dougs" leaped out at me. As a Doug myself, I have to say I like the sound of the Little Dougs, the name that supporters of the famed Illinois Senator, Stephen A....
Julia Ward Howe woke up before sunrise one morning in 1861, and history was made. When she woke, Julia heard the tramping of soldiers marching beneath her window in her room in Washington. Suddenly, the words of a poem came to her, and she leaped out of bed and began...
On Martin Luther King Day, actress Jennifer Goran had the crowd mesmerized as she portrayed Ellen Craft (the Vanishing Woman) at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park near Indianapolis. Even the youngest in the audience seemed to be caught up in her story, judging...
Jennifer Goran, a Champaign actress, did her first presentation this past week as Ellen Craft, the slave who escaped in 1848 by posing as a white man. Jennifer did a marvelous job bringing Ellen and her story to life for seventh and eighth grade students in Champaign,...
You can thank an 11-year-old girl for Abraham Lincoln's beard. In October of 1860, a few weeks before Lincoln was elected president of the United States, Grace Bidell wrote a letter to Lincoln, in which she said: I have yet got four brothers and part of them will vote...
Take a good look at the two women pictured here. They were half-sisters, but they lived in two entirely different worlds. One was the other's slave. Ellen and Eliza had the same father, Major James P. Smith of Clinton, Georgia, but they had different mothers, and this...
The Vanishing Woman is now available on Kindle. The novel is based on the true story of Ellen Craft, a slave who escaped in 1848 by pretending to be an ailing white man. Her husband William posed as her slave as they made their way from Macon to Savannah to...