Here are 100 books that The Sewing Girl's Tale fans have personally recommended if you like
The Sewing Girl's Tale.
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As a kid I loved visiting the local history museum, wandering through the dusty displays of taxidermy buffalo and medieval helmets. I enjoyed the creepy feeling I’d get when I stood next to the wax figures and looked at their frozen faces and not-quite-right hair. As I grew older, I became more interested in seeking out weird and unusual history, and it became a passion throughout my teenage years and into adulthood. Now, I’m able to combine my love of the creepy and occult with historical research. I teach U.S. history at SUNY Brockport, I co-produced Dig: A History Podcast, and I am the co-author of my new book (below).
This book wrecked me; it’s such a deep dive into the lives of the woman brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold reconstructs their lives with great empathy, bringing them to the forefront of the story. The five were real women who felt love, pain, and hope—not faceless victims of sensationalized murder.
These women are often portrayed as “five prostitutes” in pop culture, but Rubenhold shows that there is no evidence of sex work for most of the women. This book pulls back the curtain on the tension, violence, poverty, and heartbreak in Victorian London. This book brought me to absolute tears.
THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2019 'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming' GUARDIAN
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve always liked narrative history and how we can take research and turn it into a story. More importantly, I love books that can recover the histories of marginalized people—people who don’t make it into the history textbooks. Historical true crime gives me access to realities we don’t often see. Court transcripts, detective reports, news accounts, and oral histories all combine to illuminate a world beyond the famous and known. I’m drawn to those books (and book projects) that ask the question: what can we know about the past if we look at it through the lens of a crime? Whose realities do we witness through such a lens?
This was one of the first books I read that showed me how powerful true crime can be as a vehicle for historical narrative. Jewett’s murder in 1830s New York was all but forgotten until Cline recovers that case and the social world of sex workers in that era.
It’s the writer’s eye for narrative details and her contemporary sleuthing into the complexities of Jewett’s life that keeps me coming back to this book again and again. Cline continually reveals her research process, and by doing so, I felt like I was part of the story as she reconstructs the crime and New York in the 1830s.
In 1836, the murder of a young prostitute made headlines in New York City and around the country, inaugurating a sex-and-death sensationalism in news reporting that haunts us today. Patricia Cline Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett.
From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself that helped her build a sympathetic clientele among New York City's elite, and she further captivated her customers through her seductive letters, which mixed…
As a child in Oklahoma and Texas during the 1960s and 1970s, I remember being told two things: “Oklahoma is OK” and “The Eyes of Texas” were upon me. My grandparents and great-grandparents helped carve the new state of Oklahoma out of nothing within the span of only a few years. For a long time, I accepted the party line, but as an adult, I realized I wasn’t—the picture was incomplete. Underneath the inspiring tales of grit and heroism was something darker. That’s a big part of what my writing is about.
My great-grandfather came to Oklahoma during the Run of 1893, the fourth of the five land runs that officially opened the state to white settlement. As a kid, I was spoon-fed, uplifting stories about the state’s founding while being kept in the dark about its bleaker episodes.
One of them was the theft by white men in the 1920s of oil rights owned by the Osage people of northern Oklahoma. A story of murder, theft, and betrayal, Grann’s book made me angry about the lies I was told as a child, not to mention the injustice still shownto Oklahoma’s indigenous population.
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. But the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. Together with the Osage he and his undercover…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’ve spent years studying individual people involved in the American Revolution, especially the British soldiers and their wives. These were the people who did the day-to-day work, and their stories deserve to be told. I troll archival collections to find original documents that allow me to piece together the lives of the thousands of individuals who made up the regiments and battalions, focusing not on what they had in common, but on how they were different from each other, part of a military society but each with their own lives and experiences. They made the history happen.
The issues that led to the American Revolution are often oversimplified, and discussion of them can lose the human element, as well as the complexities of the issues and effects they had on real people.
A key example is the quartering of British troops “among the people” in America. The details of this grievance with the British government are widely misunderstood – troops were not quartered in private homes, as is often incorrectly written; instead, the British Quartering Acts constituted an indirect form of taxation.
This book explains the complications and implications of quartering in a wonderfully readable manner, clarifying the perspectives of governments and citizens on both sides. It is a book about people, and how the laws affected them.
When Americans declared independence in 1776, they cited King George III "for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us." In Quarters, John Gilbert McCurdy explores the social and political history behind the charge, offering an authoritative account of the housing of British soldiers in America. Providing new interpretations and analysis of the Quartering Act of 1765, McCurdy sheds light on a misunderstood aspect of the American Revolution.
Quarters unearths the vivid debate in eighteenth-century America over the meaning of place. It asks why the previously uncontroversial act of accommodating soldiers in one's house became an unconstitutional act. In so…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
The Boston Massacre: A Family History takes an event that I thought I knew inside and out, an event I teach in my classes, and tells an entirely new story.
The soldiers who shot the protestors in Boston on a wintery day in 1770 are usually the villains—Paul Revere and other Boston revolutionaries labeled the deaths a “massacre,” after all. But by starting a few years earlier, Zabin shows the British soldiers as young men coming to a colonial town that was also, at the time, British.
They lived in colonial houses, made Bostonian friends, and married Bostonian women. So by the time tensions between the protestors and the British government were accelerating into war, it was a community of friends and families that would be torn apart.
“Historical accuracy and human understanding require coming down from the high ground and seeing people in all their complexity. Serena Zabin’s rich and highly enjoyable book does just that.”—Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal
A dramatic, untold “people’s history” of the storied event that helped trigger the American Revolution.
The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.
I’ve spent years studying individual people involved in the American Revolution, especially the British soldiers and their wives. These were the people who did the day-to-day work, and their stories deserve to be told. I troll archival collections to find original documents that allow me to piece together the lives of the thousands of individuals who made up the regiments and battalions, focusing not on what they had in common, but on how they were different from each other, part of a military society but each with their own lives and experiences. They made the history happen.
Books on the war’s campaigns usually aggregate large numbers of people into bland terms like “regiments” and “refugees,” singling out only a few key players as individuals.
This book takes a refreshingly different approach, examining one of the war’s major operations from the level of participants of all sorts, from senior government officials down to the soldiers, civilians, and spies caught up in the fighting. The campaign itself has heretofore been almost entirely overlooked, or seen only in terms of a few of the battles that were part of it.
The result is a vivid account of the many components of a major campaign, and the legions of individuals involved.
After two years of defeats and reverses, 1778 had been a year of success for George Washington and the Continental Army. France had entered the war as the ally of the United States, the British had evacuated Philadelphia, and the redcoats had been fought to a standstill at the Battle of Monmouth. While the combined French-American effort to capture Newport was unsuccessful, it lead to intelligence from British-held New York that indicated a massive troop movement was imminent. British officers were selling their horses and laying in supplies for their men. Scores of empty naval transports were arriving in the…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’ve spent years studying individual people involved in the American Revolution, especially the British soldiers and their wives. These were the people who did the day-to-day work, and their stories deserve to be told. I troll archival collections to find original documents that allow me to piece together the lives of the thousands of individuals who made up the regiments and battalions, focusing not on what they had in common, but on how they were different from each other, part of a military society but each with their own lives and experiences. They made the history happen.
General William Howe was among the most important figures in the American Revolution, commanding British forces during the critical early years of the war.
Biographers have been challenged in understanding this man, largely because of a dearth of his own personal writings. Here, an author has taken the innovative approach of studying the writings of his sister, which reveal her own influential role in the conflict as well as shedding new light on the general, and on his brother Admiral Richard Howe.
The book is a stunning example of new research that brings an entirely new perspective to a family that played an outsized part in shaping the events of the era.
In December 1774, Benjamin Franklin met Caroline Howe, the sister of British Admiral Richard and General William Howe, in a London drawing room for "half a dozen Games of Chess". As Julie Flavell reveals, the games concealed a matter of the utmost diplomatic urgency, a last-ditch attempt to forestall the outbreak of war.
Aware that the Howes, both the men and the women, have seemed impenetrable to historians, Flavell investigated the letters of Caroline Howe, which have been overlooked for centuries. Using these revelatory documents, Flavell provides a compelling reinterpretation of England's famous family across four wars, centring on their…
I’ve always liked narrative history and how we can take research and turn it into a story. More importantly, I love books that can recover the histories of marginalized people—people who don’t make it into the history textbooks. Historical true crime gives me access to realities we don’t often see. Court transcripts, detective reports, news accounts, and oral histories all combine to illuminate a world beyond the famous and known. I’m drawn to those books (and book projects) that ask the question: what can we know about the past if we look at it through the lens of a crime? Whose realities do we witness through such a lens?
Fieseler brings his journalistic eye to this forgotten 1973 tragedy when an LGBTQ social club in New Orleans was set ablaze, killing 32 people. I appreciate how Fieseler not only details the fire and the mainstream media’s utter disregard for the crime but, more importantly, how he focuses on the individuals who perished and those who survived, situating their stories within the burgeoning LGBTQ rights movement of the era.
I’ve been haunted by this book since the first time I read it. Its power rests in its narrative force of witnessing and remembrance and the immediacy of Fieseler’s prose.
Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue- collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. The aftermath was no less traumatic-families ashamed to claim…
I was born in Sweden in a northern fishing town. My parents come from Lapland. I always loved reading, especially crime novels. My parents used to drop me off at the local library and pick me up at closing time. When young, I worked for the local newspaper and had dreams of becoming a journalist. Instead, it became a corporate career with postings all over the world. When I picked up writing again in my early forties, it didn’t come together for me until I put a dead body in there, and thus I found myself writing thrillers. Nordic Noir is a genre I am particularly fond of. It is crime, where setting in the broadest use of the word (physical, mental, geographical, climate…) is allowed to take space. Below you will find five of my favourites.
Girls is not written by a Nordic author but feels very Nordic Noir… so I am giving it an honourable mention.
Jack and Fanny’s baby daughter has died, and they are struggling to cope. Jack, a Vietnam Vet, is trying desperately to find ways to bring them back together. A fourteen-year-old girl goes missing, and Jack turns his focus to finding her, as if this could be their redemption.
Girls is the perfect read. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Clean prose, irresistible characters so finely drawn. Voices that resonate. Add to this a very suspenseful plot…
In the unrelenting cold and bitter winter of upstate New York, Jack and his wife, Fanny, are trying to cope with the desperate sorrow they feel over the death of their young daughter. The loss forms a chasm in their relationship as Jack, a sardonic Vietnam vet, looks for a way to heal them both.
Then, in a nearby town, a fourteen-year-old girl disappears somewhere between her home and church. Though she is just one of the hundreds of children who vanish every year in America, Jack turns all his attention to this little…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Rock music has been in my blood and my soul for as long as I can remember. I’ve recorded two albums, "Twice Upon a Rhyme" (1972) and "Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time" (2020). My most recent novel is It’s Real Life. I’m also Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and my students will tell you that from time to time, I’ll sing a bar or two from a song in my class. A book about music is always a hard-to-resist temptation.
I’ve lived in New York City all of my life. I sang doo-wop in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village when I was a teenager, and then folk rock with my group, The New Outlook.
If ever there was a time-travel ticket to a past and a place that I knew so well I could still see the sun glinting through the tree leaves, hear the din of the eateries as I walked by, and, most important, still hear the music by people vastly more famous than me, music that actually defied any given time or place, it would be David Browne's book, Talkin' Greenwich Village.
