95 Books Like Not All Wives

Gelles has written several books and articles about Abigail (and John) Adams, but this is my favorite. Not a classic cradle-to-grave biography, It examines a series of episodes in Abigail’s life and her relationships with her husband, two sisters, and her children, especially her daughter Abigail junior (Nabby) and her son John Quincy. The series of well-crafted vignettes convey great insight into this important “founding mother,” the wife of the second president, mother of the sixth, and a lively intellect in her own right.

In his latest book, Baker explores the various explanations for the Salem witch trials. He concludes that there was no single factor, but rather the result of a convergence of conditions, political, social, cultural, and economic. 

He focuses on key players in the outbreak, including the accused, the accusers, the judges, and government officials who failed to deal with the hysteria in a timely manner, thereby sparing those who lost their lives in the process.

In his final chapter, he discusses the response of Salem town, “witch city,” to the events of 1692 and its attempt to mine the tourist opportunities while recognizing the personal tolls taken by the accused. 

Anya Seton is my kind of historical fiction writer. She follows history throughout the story. Unlike, many historical fiction writers who dress characters in period clothes but magically make them think like modern liberals, her characters are true to their times. This well-researched book is written with integrity, style, and skill proving that history can be more of a page turner than fiction.

A path-breaking study of Black and White women in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Virginia, this book shows what can be learned about the origins of slavery in the Chesapeake region from a focus on women--free, enslaved, and indentured alike. Life on early Chesapeake tobacco plantations was very different from the image of “classic,” semi-mythic nineteenth-century cotton plantations familiar to Americans today. Living conditions were crude, especially in the early settlements, and the demands of tobacco cultivation differed greatly from cotton production. Brown shows how all the women in early Virginia were critical to the colony’s  development.

I love to find “hidden gems” in history. Ona Judge is a gem. First published in 2017, Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge is a biography that reads like an engaging novel. It depicts the life of George and Martha Washington’s young enslaved girl that grows to a young woman in the shadows of the most powerful couple in our new nation. At age 16, Ona leaves Mount Vernon to accompany President Washington and Martha while they live in New York and then Philadelphia. She is treated splendidly, but she is still property. This terrible truth crashes upon Ona when Martha, wanting to give the absolute best gift she can to her difficult, disagreeable, and stubborn granddaughter, decides to give her Ona – her most cherished possession, as a wedding gift. Rather than be property to be gifted and given, Ona escapes. This book shows how President… show more.

Philadelphia, June 1780. George Washington's two least likely spies return, masquerading as husband and wife as they search for traitors in Philadelphia. Months have passed since young widow Becca Parcell and former printer Daniel Alloway foiled a plot that threatened the new nation.

But independence is still a distant dream, and General Washington can't afford more unrest, not with food prices rising daily and the value of money falling just as fast. What a brilliantly written mystery!

I felt a sense of urgency reading this novel (even though we know what happened in 1780). The overriding question of The Counterfeit Wife, I thought, reflects our current divided nation: Will our new democracy survive amid chaos, rising food prices, and a group of citizens who want our country to revert to the control of an authoritarian leader (King George)?

Amazing how a picture, published in 1948 in an American Magazine, of four children with a sign saying they were for sale can lead to a book.

I loved the way the writer used it to take me to the States of the forties and fifties with its different classes and its deep poverty. For me, being a journalist, part of the attraction of the book is that the story involves old-fashioned journalists and newspapers. And fake news of the worst kind, long before it became a daily occurrence.

Former US Senator, Augie Sangiamo, runs a political consulting company in Philadelphia, but his candidates are floundering.

When Augie agrees to take some illegal campaign donations from a local oil company, he gets his candidates within striking distance of victory, but this attracts the attention of the D.A., who wants Augie back in prison. However, the wily senator still has a few tricks up his sleeve. 

The dialogue is witty, the story filled with larger-than-life characters, and there’s a clever twist that sees the Philly goombahs pull a fast one on the feds. Ultimately, it’s a heartwarming tale of an old-time pol getting bailed out by his streetwise driver, whose paying Augie back for getting his father a job decades ago, an act that ensured Joey had a happy childhood.

When I first read Fever 1793—set in Philadelphia during a yellow fever epidemic—I thought it was a well-written and thought-provoking glimpse into how people would respond in a crisis. After re-reading it post-pandemic, I would now add “prophetic.” Mattie is a typical grumpy teen who would rather have fun than work in her family’s coffee house. But there is a deadly fever rapidly spreading through the city. Desperation unleashes her inner strength, allowing her to prevail over disease, fear, food shortages, unscrupulous thieves, and well-intentioned but poorly-managed medical science.

More than 12,000 Philadelphia residents died when the Spanish Flu began global deaths in 1918. Although the virus had already wreaked havoc in New England, Philadelphia officials went ahead with plans for a scheduled parade designed to raise public funding for the Great War across the ocean. An estimated 200,000 people watched and cheered as soldiers, veterans, and workers involved in the war effort marched down Broad Street on Sept. 28, 1918. An article about the spectacle published that afternoon in The Evening Bulletin, began “This is a great day in Philadelphia.” 

But another article in the same edition noted that a police officer had died from the flu and more than 100 people had recently tested positive for the virus. The parade was what we now would call a “super spreader event.” Within weeks, “the grippe,” as many called the disease had killed thousands and shut down the… show more.