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...
When actress Jennifer Goran showed me a picture of her mother, I was immediately struck by the uncanny resemblance to Ellen Craft, heroine of my new novel, The Vanishing Woman. This amazing similarity was confirmation that Jenny is the right person to play the part of...
To many abolitionists, the Ohio River was the North's Jordan River, providing access to the Promised Land. The Ohio River was the dividing line between North and South, making it an important crossing point for escaped slaves in the Underground Railroad. It is also...
In a little over a week, I will be returning to the museum that altered my writing career and led to my passion--writing historical novels. On Saturday, November 17, at 1 p.m., I will be speaking about Henry "Box" Brown and Ellen Craft at the National Underground...
In the opening scene of my novel, The Disappearing Man, Henry Brown is running for his life from slave patrollers in the middle of the night on the streets of Richmond. He winds up hiding behind a monument at a church, on which are inscribed 72 names. Those 72 people...
My new novel, The Vanishing Woman, has just come off the press--although I haven't received my copies just yet. The Vanishing Woman is based on the incredible true story of Ellen Craft, a light-skinned slave who escaped in 1848 by posing as a white man. She couldn't...
First, the East Germans tried to kill the Church of Reconciliation by surrounding it with walls, barbed wire, and booby traps. Then they blew it up. But the church lives on today with the newly constructed Chapel of Reconciliation. When the Berlin Wall went up in...