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Nonfiction Views: Trump fires the Librarian of Congress, plus the week's notable new nonfiction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-13
No doubt you’ve heard the news that Trump abruptly fired without cause or explanation the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden. It was covered here on Daily Kos by several diarists, including this one by Denise Oliver Velez: Trump has fired Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden.
A lot of the focus has been on the fact that she is Black and she is an accomplished woman, two attributes Trump hates and seeks to eradicate from public life. There is an undeniable truth to this as Trump’s motive, but there is also a more basic, simpler reason: she was appointed by President Obama, and we all know that Trump burns with hatred of Obama and wants to wipe away everything accomplished by him. Indeed, it’s surprising that Trump didn’t seek to fire her during his first term. I can only think that the idea of books and libraries are so epically distant from his mind that it never even occurred to him. This time, the usual haters and book banners have been tearing her down as DEI, so it got onto Trump’s radar.
The firing was incredibly disrespectful, done by an email from a low-level apparatchik, Trent Morse, deputy director of the White House personnel office, and addressed Dr. Hayden by only her first name: “Carla, on behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”
Dr. Hayden has had a long and accomplished career. She has a master’s degree and a doctorate in Library Sciences, has served as head of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library and as President of the American Library Association. Her tenure as Librarian of Congress has been exceptional.
Obama nominated her 2016, the final year of his presidency, and she was approved by the Senate 74-18, with eight not voting. All of the 18 Senators who voted against her were, of course, Republicans. A good number of them are still involved in tearing down the nation:
Early in her career, Dr. Hayden wrote a couple of academic books on Library Science, but she has not written a book for the general public. I would dearly love to see her publish a memoir. She has contributed introductions to several of the catalogs accompanying exhibits presented by the Library of Congress during her tenure. Here are some examples:
The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution (Exhibit Companion)
Carla D. Hayden (Foreword by), Susan Reyburn (Editor), Zach Klitzman (Editor) . The first book to simultaneously explore in depth the lives and contributions of two globally significant figures of the late eighteenth century: George III (1738-1820), king of Great Britain, and George Washington (1732-1799), first president of the United States. Serving as the official companion publication to the Library of Congress exhibit, the book reexamines the life of George Washington and paints a fuller picture of King George III.
The first book to simultaneously explore in depth the lives and contributions of two globally significant figures of the late eighteenth century: George III (1738-1820), king of Great Britain, and George Washington (1732-1799), first president of the United States. Serving as the official companion publication to the Library of Congress exhibit, the book reexamines the life of George Washington and paints a fuller picture of King George III. Collecting Memories: Treasures from the Library of Congress (Exhibit Companion)
Library of Congress, Carla D. Hayden (Foreword by) . The official companion to the Library of Congress exhibition, Collecting Memories uses vivid photographs and interpretive text to bring context to a wide variety of historic objects, from President Abraham Lincoln's handwritten draft of the Gettysburg Address to Steve Ditko's original drawings of the Spider-Man origin story. Other highlights include: * Maya Lin's original competition drawings for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial * The first Italian cookbook, Libro de arte coquinaria, published in the late 1400s * An incredibly rare crystal flute given to President James Madison by French flute maker Claude Laurent * Illustrations from a thirty-nine-foot nineteenth-century Japanese scroll * Scenes from the fifteenth-century Washington Haggadah * Images of a colorful six-by-nine-foot canvas family tree documenting a Black family genealogy dating back to the eighteenth century * A hand-painted scroll, or thangka, given to the Library by the fourteenth Dalai Lama * A small pocket notebook carried by Sigmund Freud.
Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote
Library of Library of Congress, Carla D. Hayden (Foreword by) . Official Companion to the Library of Congress Exhibition. The campaign for women’s suffrage—considered the largest reform movement in American history—lasted more than seven decades. The struggle was not for the fainthearted. For years, determined women organized, lobbied, paraded, petitioned, lectured, picketed, and faced imprisonment in pursuit of the right to vote. Drawing from the Library’s extensive collections of photographs, personal papers, and the organizational records of such figures as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, the National Woman’s Party, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Shall Not Be Denied traces the movement leading to the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, the contributions of suffragists who worked to persuade women that they deserved the same rights as men, the divergent political strategies and internal divisions they overcame, the push for a federal women’s suffrage amendment, and the legacy of the movement.
American Feast: Cookbooks and Cocktails from the Library of Congress (Collection Close-Ups) Zach Klitzman, Susan Reyburn, Carla D. Hayden (Foreword by). American Feast: Cookbooks and Cocktails from the Library of Congress showcases some of the 40,000 books related to cookery in the nation's library. From the earliest founding-era American household manuals to twenty-first century themed cookbooks and everything in between, this book traces the lip-smacking evolution of American recipes. And not just food recipes, but cocktail recipes too For what goes better before, after, or with a delicious meal than the right liquid concoction? The word "cocktail" originated in America, and the Library houses a wide collection of cocktail-related materials as well.
Trump added insult to injury by appointing one of his lawyers, someone with zero library experience, to the position. Incredibly enough, this of all things has awakened a bit of opposition from Congress, who are pushing back against Trump’s usurpation of their role in the Library of Congress affairs. Staffers of the Library have been putting up resistance as well.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
Here is a selection new nonfiction published today, with blurbs from publishers and reviewers.
Detained: A boy's journal of survival and resilience, by D. Esperanza, with Gerardo Iván Morales . The first-ever memoir of a child’s experience in detention on the US/Mexico border under President Trump’s infamous family separation policy.
D Esperanza was just thirteen years old when he lost his caregivers, his beloved grandmother and uncle. Since both of his parents were working and living in the United States, D was left on his own in a small town in Honduras. He quickly realized he simply could not make enough money to survive so he made the difficult decision to head north with his cousins and hopefully reunite with his parents in el norte.
When he is captured and processed at a facility, neither D nor his family are given an update on when he will be released or where he’ll go next. Over the next five months, he kept a journal of his experience. The pages tell a story of pain, cruelty, friendship, and resilience, a living testament to the reality of the border. Amidst the senseless inhumanity and violence of US immigration policy, D found hope in the friendship he and his fellow companions forged, and mentorship from one intrepid advocate who fought on his behalf named Gerardo Iván Morales.
The first-ever memoir of a child’s experience in detention on the US/Mexico border under President Trump’s infamous family separation policy. D Esperanza was just thirteen years old when he lost his caregivers, his beloved grandmother and uncle. Since both of his parents were working and living in the United States, D was left on his own in a small town in Honduras. He quickly realized he simply could not make enough money to survive so he made the difficult decision to head north with his cousins and hopefully reunite with his parents in el norte. When he is captured and processed at a facility, neither D nor his family are given an update on when he will be released or where he’ll go next. Over the next five months, he kept a journal of his experience. The pages tell a story of pain, cruelty, friendship, and resilience, a living testament to the reality of the border. Amidst the senseless inhumanity and violence of US immigration policy, D found hope in the friendship he and his fellow companions forged, and mentorship from one intrepid advocate who fought on his behalf named Gerardo Iván Morales. The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon's Enduring Impact on America, by Mark Whitaker . Malcolm X has become as much of an American icon as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. But when he was murdered in 1965, he was still seen as a dangerous outsider. White America found him alienating, mainstream African Americans found him divisive, and even his admirers found him bravely radical. Although Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our own Black shining prince,” he never received the mainstream acceptance toward which he seemed to be striving in his final year. It is more in death than his life that Malcolm’s influence has blossomed and come to leave a deep imprint on the cultural landscape of America. With impeccable research and original reporting, Mark Whitaker tells the story of Malcolm X’s far-reaching posthumous legacy. It stretches from founders of the Black Power Movement such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton to hip-hop pioneers such as Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur. Leaders of the Black Arts and Free Jazz movements from Amiri Baraka to Maya Angelou, August Wilson, and John Coltrane credited their political awakening to Malcolm, as did some of the most influential athletes of our time, from Muhammad Ali to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and beyond. In compelling new detail, Whitaker also retraces the long road to exoneration for two men wrongfully convicted of Malcolm’s murder.
Malcolm X has become as much of an American icon as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. But when he was murdered in 1965, he was still seen as a dangerous outsider. White America found him alienating, mainstream African Americans found him divisive, and even his admirers found him bravely radical. Although Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our own Black shining prince,” he never received the mainstream acceptance toward which he seemed to be striving in his final year. It is more in death than his life that Malcolm’s influence has blossomed and come to leave a deep imprint on the cultural landscape of America. The Battle for the Black Mind, by Karida L. Brown . The Battle for the Black Mind is an explosive historical account of the struggle for educational justice in America. Drawing on over a decade of archival research, personal reflection, and keen sociological insight, this book traces a century of segregated schooling, examining how early efforts to control Black minds through education systems has laid the foundation for the systemic inequities we still live with today. NAACP Image Award-winning author Karida L. Brown, takes readers from the rural South to the bustling cities of the North and connects the dots between the experiences of Black students and educators across the nation. From the founding of early Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), such as Hampton, Atlanta, and Tuskegee University, to the rise of the Black freedom struggle, The Battle for the Black Mind weaves together the stories of pioneering Black leaders and the institutions they built to educate future generations. Far from dwelling solely on oppression, this book offers powerful insight into how Black people have always fought to create environments where Black minds could thrive. Brown concludes with an urgent and empowering call to action, equipping everyday Americans with practical steps—both big and small—to ensure that Black minds can continue to flourish, even as our education system itself comes under attack.
The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties, by Dennis McNally . Few cities represent the countercultural movement of the 1960s more than San Francisco. By that decade, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was home to self-branded “freaks” (dubbed “hippies” by the media) who created the world’s first psychedelic neighborhood—an alchemical chamber for social transformation. They rejected a large part of the traditional American identity, passing over American exceptionalism, consumerism, misogyny, and militarism in favor of creativity, mind-body connection, peace, and love of all things.
The Last Great Dream is a history of everything that led to the 1960s counterculture, when long-simmering resistance to American mainstream values birthed the hippie. It begins with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, peaks with the Human Be-in in Golden Gate Park, and ends with the Monterey Pop Festival that introduced Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to the world. It tells of several micro-histories, including beat poetry, visual arts, underground publishing, electronic/contemporary compositional music, experimental theater, psychedelics, and more. "McNally masterfully combines many disparate lineages of political, social, art, and pop history into one singular, sweeping portrait. The result is a stunning vision of a broad and powerful idealism that gripped the world for more than two decades."— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Few cities represent the countercultural movement of the 1960s more than San Francisco. By that decade, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was home to self-branded “freaks” (dubbed “hippies” by the media) who created the world’s first psychedelic neighborhood—an alchemical chamber for social transformation. They rejected a large part of the traditional American identity, passing over American exceptionalism, consumerism, misogyny, and militarism in favor of creativity, mind-body connection, peace, and love of all things. The Last Great Dream is a history of everything that led to the 1960s counterculture, when long-simmering resistance to American mainstream values birthed the hippie. It begins with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, peaks with the Human Be-in in Golden Gate Park, and ends with the Monterey Pop Festival that introduced Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to the world. It tells of several micro-histories, including beat poetry, visual arts, underground publishing, electronic/contemporary compositional music, experimental theater, psychedelics, and more. "McNally masterfully combines many disparate lineages of political, social, art, and pop history into one singular, sweeping portrait. The result is a stunning vision of a broad and powerful idealism that gripped the world for more than two decades."— Mark Twain, by Ron Chernow . In this richly nuanced portrait of Mark Twain, acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brings his considerable powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, he eventually settled in Hartford with his wife and three daughters, where he went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.
Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. “Chernow’s voluminous biography presents Twain with all his complications and flaws — disastrous financial decisions, his evolving views on race — in this account both of the man and of a nation torn apart by war and stitched painfully back together, all of it brightened by Twain’s signature humor and wisdom.” —New York Times Book Review
In this richly nuanced portrait of Mark Twain, acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brings his considerable powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, he eventually settled in Hartford with his wife and three daughters, where he went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play. Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. “Chernow’s voluminous biography presents Twain with all his complications and flaws — disastrous financial decisions, his evolving views on race — in this account both of the man and of a nation torn apart by war and stitched painfully back together, all of it brightened by Twain’s signature humor and wisdom.” Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, by Patrick McGee . After struggling to build its products on three continents, Apple was lured by China’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. Soon it was sending thousands of engineers across the Pacific, training millions of workers, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the world’s most sophisticated supply chain. These capabilities enabled Apple to build the 21st century’s most iconic products—in staggering volume and for enormous profit.
Without explicitly intending to, Apple built an advanced electronics industry within China, only to discover that its massive investments in technology upgrades had inadvertently given Beijing a power that could be weaponized.
In Apple in China, journalist Patrick McGee draws on more than two hundred interviews with former executives and engineers, supplementing their stories with unreported meetings held by Steve Jobs, emails between top executives, and internal memos regarding threats from Chinese competition. “ Apple in China captures every twist and turn of the tech giant’s off-kilter and decidedly off-script relationship with the authoritarian state. What will surprise many is how China ensnared a corporate titan by matching and then surpassing its knack for ruthless efficiency and global dominance.” —Megan Murphy, former Editor in Chief of Bloomberg BusinessWeek “ Patrick McGee shows us how Apple's quest for wealth and power in China may in the end be the undoing both of the company and of America's quest for technology supremacy.” —Rana Foroohar, CNN Global Economic Analyst and author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
Apple in China “ Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land, by Ross Halperin . The vast majority of Hondurans would have never dared to set foot in Nueva Suyapa, a mountainside barrio that was under the thumb of a gang whose bravado and cruelty were the stuff of legend. But that is precisely where Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, chose to raise their families. Kurt and Carlos were best friends who had committed their lives to helping the poor, and when they accepted that nobody else—not the police, not the prosecutors, not the NGOs—was ever going to protect their neighbors from the incessant violence they suffered, they decided to take matters into their own hands. “This gripping account—unbelievable, were it not true—of the transformative work of a small, unassuming nonprofit tells the story of what happened in one of the most violent communities in the world when it asked a question that had escaped everybody from the Honduran government to the US Department of State to the United Nations: What if we make the institutions of justice actually work for the people?” —David M. Kennedy
The vast majority of Hondurans would have never dared to set foot in Nueva Suyapa, a mountainside barrio that was under the thumb of a gang whose bravado and cruelty were the stuff of legend. But that is precisely where Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, chose to raise their families. Kurt and Carlos were best friends who had committed their lives to helping the poor, and when they accepted that nobody else—not the police, not the prosecutors, not the NGOs—was ever going to protect their neighbors from the incessant violence they suffered, they decided to take matters into their own hands. “This gripping account—unbelievable, were it not true—of the transformative work of a small, unassuming nonprofit tells the story of what happened in one of the most violent communities in the world when it asked a question that had escaped everybody from the Honduran government to the US Department of State to the United Nations: What if we make the institutions of justice actually work for the people?” Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, by John Cassidy . At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, inequality, trade wars, and a right-wing populist backlash to globalization are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company and Industrial Revolution to the digital revolution. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics. From the English Luddites who rebelled against early factory automation to communists in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, the absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names―Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi―but also focuses on many less familiar figures, including Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; Thomas Carlyle, the conservative prophet of the moral depredations of the market; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of Keynes; and Samir Amin, the leftist French-Egyptian economist and analyst of globalization. Blending rich biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics is true big history that illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time
There are actually two books coming out this week on transgender issues in Germany in the run-up to World War Two. The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story, by Brandy Schillace , tells the forgotten story of the Institute for Sexual Science, the world’s first center for homosexual and transgender rights. Headed by a gay Jewish man, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the institute aided in the first gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments, acting as a rebellious base of operations in the face of rising prejudice, nationalism, and Nazi propaganda. An expert in medical history, Brandy Schillace tells the story of the Institute through the eyes of Dora Richter, an Institute patient whom we follow in her quest to transition and live as a woman. While the colorful but ultimately tragic arc of Weimar Berlin is well documented, The Intermediaries is the first book to assert the inseparable, interdependent relationship of sex science to both the queer rights movement and the permissive Weimar culture, tracking how political factions perverted that same science to suit their own ends. And then there is The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin, by Daniel Brook . The author retraces Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In an era when gay sex was a crime and gender roles rigid, Hirschfeld taught that each of us is their own unique mixture of masculinity and femininity. Through his public advocacy for gay rights and his private counseling of patients toward self-acceptance, he became the intellectual impresario of Berlin’s cabaret scene and helped turn his hometown into the world’s queer capital. But he also enraged the Nazis, who ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science and burned his books Driven from his homeland, Hirschfeld traveled to America, Asia, and the Middle East to research sexuality on a global scale. Through his harrowing lived experience of antisemitic persecution and a pivotal late-in-life interracial romance, he came to see that race, like gender, was a human invention. Hirschfeld spent his final years in exile trying to warn the world of the genocidal dangers of racism.
The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, by Michelle Young . On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and ultimately spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans’ final line of defense. Would the museum curator be killed before she could tell the truth—a story that would mean nothing less than saving humanity’s cultural inheritance? Based on troves of previously undiscovered documents, The Art Spy chronicles the brave actions of the key Resistance spy in the heart of the Nazi’s art looting headquarters in the French capital. A veritable female Monuments Man, Valland has, until now, been written out of the annals, despite bearing witness to history’s largest art theft. While Hitler was amassing stolen art for his future Führermuseum, Valland, his undercover adversary, secretly worked to stop him. “At last, the greatest spy of wartime Paris has her story told. Working in a museum turned fortress where Nazi occupiers were staging the biggest art theft in history, Rose Valland played a game against the Reich with impossibly high stakes. At play were lives, the world's masterpieces, and the course of the war itself. Michelle Young writes with the clarity of a historian and the pacing of a thriller." — Elyse Graham, author of Book and Dagger
On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and ultimately spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans’ final line of defense. Would the museum curator be killed before she could tell the truth—a story that would mean nothing less than saving humanity’s cultural inheritance? Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney . Daughter. Duhitár-. Dustr. Dukte. Listen to these English, Sanskrit, Armenian and Lithuanian words, all meaning the same thing, and you hear echoes of one of history's most unlikely journeys. All four languages-along with hundreds of others, from French and Gaelic, to Persian and Polish-trace their origins to an ancient tongue spoken as the last ice age receded. This language, which we call Proto-Indo-European, was born between Europe and Asia and exploded out of its cradle, fragmenting as it spread east and west. Its last speaker died thousands of years ago, yet Proto-Indo-European lives on in its myriad linguistic offspring and in some of our best loved works of literature, including Dante's Inferno and the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings and the love poetry of Rumi. How did this happen? Acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We retrace the epic journeys of nomads and monks, warriors and kings – the ancient peoples who carried these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve the lost languages and their speakers: the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed that ancient diaspora. What they have learned has profound implications for our modern world, because people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.
Queen of All Mayhem: The Blood-Soaked Life and Mysterious Death of Belle Starr, the Most Dangerous Woman in the West, by Dane Huckelbridge. On February 3, 1889, just two days shy of her forty-first birthday, Myra Maybelle Shirley—better known at that point by her outlaw sobriquet “Belle Starr”—was blown from her horse saddle and killed by a pair of shotgun blasts, delivered by an unseen assailant, only a few miles away from her home in the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. Thus ended the life of one of the most colorful, authentic, and dangerous women in the history of the American West.
While today’s household names like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane had dubious criminal bona fides, Belle’s were not in any doubt. She led a gang of horse thieves (a very serious crime in an era when horses were often the basis of one’s livelihood); was romantically involved with two of the West’s most legendary outlaws. Why did a woman who had considerable advantages in life—a good family, a decent education, solid marriage prospects, a clear path to financial security—choose to pursue a life of crime? The life of Belle Starr is one of almost endless trauma: the horrors of the Civil War, which destroyed her hometown and killed her beloved brother, Bud; the untimely deaths of her first two husbands, both of them murdered; a stint in Detroit’s notorious women’s prison. Her career coincided with those of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and yet Belle Starr was a very different sort of feminist icon. “Dane Huckelbridge's engaging biography of Belle Starr—a female outlaw who gained notoriety for her criminal activities in the second half of the nineteenth century—reveals surprising new insights about a spirited woman who defied gender norms.” — Amanda Bellows, author of The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions
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I’m adding more books every week to my RESIST! 20% off promotion. The coupon code RESIST gets you 20% off any of the books featured there.
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