Claudia Keenan

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

Nonfiction Recommended

Murder, Mayhem & Sex Cults in 19th Century True Crime Odyssey

Even if you’re no expert on American history, you will have your finger on its pulse while reading An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder (Pegasus Crime). The third book by journalist Susan Wels, whose bestseller on the Titanic appeared in…

Claudia KeenanFebruary 6, 2023

Nonfiction

A Wreck of a Life: Deadly Intersection of Wealth, Eugenics and Womanhood

Twentieth-century America brimmed with stories about poor little rich girls: young women born into great wealth yet afflicted with miserable childhoods and marriages. Tales of unhappy heiresses stirred the public’s voyeurism and sense of smugness. Just imagine — all the money in the world can’t make up for life’s disappointments!…

Claudia KeenanDecember 19, 2022

Nonfiction

American Truth or Mythology? Historian Revisits the Illustrious Grimke Family

During the late sixties, women scholars began to urge their male colleagues to carve out a place for “herstory” alongside “history.” Over time, with the establishment of women’s studies departments in colleges and universities, second-wave feminists would correct many longstanding legends of American history. Their research produced transformative knowledge while…

Claudia KeenanNovember 17, 2022

Nonfiction Nonfiction - Featured

Poison, Poetry and Romance in a Bohemian Tragedy

“La vie de Boheme” was not an American phenomenon. It emerged in the Latin Quarter of Paris during the early 19th century and arrived flamboyantly in New York, Boston, and San Francisco around the time of the Civil War. Bohemians dressed rakishly, lived unconventionally, boasted pro-labor, sometimes socialist sympathies, and…

Claudia KeenanOctober 21, 2022

Nonfiction Nonfiction - Featured

Investigative Hot Take on Murder Trial that Confounded 1920s America

In May 1924, the headlines blared and the public became transfixed by a kidnapping that ended in a gory murder. Lured into a car a block from his home in the elegant south Chicago neighborhood of Kenwood, 14-year old Bobby Franks stopped breathing 20 miles away in a nature preserve.…

Claudia KeenanSeptember 29, 2022

Claudia Keenan

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

Murder, Mayhem & Sex Cults in 19th Century True Crime Odyssey

Poison, Poetry and Romance in a Bohemian Tragedy

Investigative Hot Take on Murder Trial that Confounded 1920s America

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