Claudia Keenan

Nonfiction

99 Years Later, Sensational Evolution Trial Comes Full Circle

The sensational “monkey trial” of 1925 didn’t actually concern monkeys. The issue was whether a young schoolteacher in rural Tennessee had violated state law by teaching the scientific theory of evolution to his public school students. In her new history of the Scopes Trial, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and…

Claudia KeenanSeptember 5, 2024

Nonfiction

The Klan Comes to the Midwest: Brutality, Power and Terror in 1920s Indiana

American history is replete with horrors that have been buried over time. Like an ancient skeleton that may never be discovered, the stories remain untold unless someone comes along to excavate. That is exactly what occurred when Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, decided to write about the Ku Klux…

Claudia KeenanJune 28, 2024

Nonfiction

The Long Journey & Ultimate Triumph of the Famine Irish

Throughout modern history, immigrants have journeyed to the United States (even if some of our citizens believe it is a recent phenomenon). Typically, immigrants arrive in waves. During the 17th century, the first wave came from the British Isles. During the 19th and 20th centuries, waves of Northern Europeans, Asians,…

Claudia KeenanJune 6, 2024

Nonfiction

Way Back in the Twentieth Century: A Tale of Fashion, Influence & Vision

Three women, three stores and a vanished world. You may be lucky enough to remember Lord & Taylor, Bonwit Teller and Henri Bendel — fabulous emporiums that drew elegant women shoppers from all over the world. Alas, times changed and the stores declined. Malls, catalogues, discount stores and the internet…

Claudia KeenanJune 3, 2024

Preacher teacher Hater Fraud by Charles Trantanella

Nonfiction

Seeking the Limelight: A Forgotten Actor in a Great American Tradition

No doubt about it—the twenty-first century is bursting with unsavory influencers, but this type of character has always been around. Social media gives them greater reach and louder voices than those who racked up followers 150 years ago. Yet human nature does not change. A Life of Intrigue and Notoriety…

Claudia KeenanMay 13, 2024

Nonfiction

American Disaster: A New History of the San Francisco Earthquake in “The Longest Minute”

Thousands of years before Spanish soldiers and missionaries arrived in California, its northern coast was inhabited by Native Americans. The Ohlone people lived on the land that would become San Francisco. This beautiful peninsula, encircled by the ocean and bay, would be seized by the invaders in the 1770s, sending…

Claudia KeenanMarch 13, 2024

Nonfiction

Twin Sisters Behind the Camera: Groundbreaking Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines

The beautiful, chic McLaughlin sisters were born in Brooklyn in 1919. Within five months their father died of influenza, leaving the twins in the clutches of their over-protective mother Kitty. But Kitty was resourceful. She belonged to an Irish Catholic clan that lived in picturesque Wallingford, Connecticut, and wasted no…

Claudia KeenanMarch 5, 2024

Nonfiction

Jim Crow Never Ends: A Legacy of Mental Illness and Torture

When she began studying the history of medicine at Harvard in 2011, Antonia Hylton found herself captivated by the development of modern psychiatry. But she kept wondering where Black people fit into that history. As the award-winning journalist writes in Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum: “What…

Claudia KeenanJanuary 15, 2024

Nonfiction

Portrait of the Astors, a Wealthy and Powerful Family That Defined the Gilded Age

For more than 200 years, the descendants of John Jacob Astor dominated American society, style, and commerce. Yet the name Astor signifies little to recent generations. Astor, the Rise and Fall of an American Fortune by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe will certainly make readers sit up and pay attention.…

Claudia KeenanNovember 10, 2023

Nonfiction

Lessons From the Pacific Northwest: The Black Student Movement of the 1960s

In 1967, Stokely Carmichael visited Seattle and delivered a speech that galvanized his largely Black audience. The civil rights activist and future Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party spoke urgently: “. . . it is simply a question of he who has power. And we don’t have that. We…

Claudia KeenanAugust 21, 2023

Fiction Miscellany

Susannah Marren Explores What Lurks Beneath Palm Beach’s Glittering Facade

Once again from the excess and folly of Palm Beach society, the novelist Susannah Marren has woven an intricate tapestry of secrets and foreboding. The third volume in her trilogy about the Florida haunt for the wealthy and famous, Maribelle’s Shadow comes to life with biting dialogue and the inner…

Claudia KeenanJune 27, 2023

Nonfiction

No Ordinary Girl: the Story of Young Jacqueline Kennedy

Jacqueline Kennedy was so poised, stylish, and cultured that one might imagine she sprang into existence, fully formed, in July of 1929. In fact, baby Jacqueline arrived just a few months before the famous Wall Street Crash, but diminished family wealth was not the only reason that her first 24…

Claudia KeenanJune 21, 2023

Nonfiction

Timely Exploration of the Crusade for a Black History Curriculum in Segregated Chicago Schools

The daughter of an elevator operator who wended his way from rural West Virginia to Chicago in 1903, Madeline Morgan grew up in a city transformed by an extraordinary influx of Black Americans. In an exodus known as the Great Migration, millions of southern Blacks moved north between 1910 and…

Claudia KeenanMay 23, 2023

Groundbreaking Research Reframes Helen Keller’s Journey in New Biography

Born into an affluent Alabama family in 1880, Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing during a childhood illness. Unsurprisingly, in late-nineteenth-century America, few doctors and teachers devoted time to making the world a happy, comprehensible place for disabled children. “My mind was a question mark, my heart a frustration,”…

Claudia KeenanApril 4, 2023

Fiction

Author of “The Glass Castle” Brings Secrets, Betrayal & Destitution in New Novel

Thanks to the rage for popular history, Americans have been treated to hundreds of images of the Roaring Twenties. Although a full century has passed since the ascension of flappers, jazz, blues, speakeasies and airplanes, the wonder and calamity of those years have become familiar to us through film and…

Claudia KeenanMarch 27, 2023

Nonfiction

An Eye-Opening Look at Edith Wilson, America’s First Acting Female President

The White House has been home to many deceitful acts. One of the lesser-known frauds occurred between 1919 and 1920, after President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke during the peace negotiations following World War I. In the course of several months of diplomacy in Europe — largely at Versailles —…

Claudia KeenanMarch 7, 2023

Claudia Keenan

Susannah Marren Explores What Lurks Beneath Palm Beach’s Glittering Facade

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