Category: Book Lists

As the ship Charity sails from England across the Atlantic, two vastly different yet equally courageous women make the perilous journey.

Strong-willed, upper class Margaret Brent has invested in Lord Baltimore’s Maryland plantation because the new colony is her single chance for a home of her own. Anicah is a teenage guttersnipe who lives by her wits and quick tongue. Kidnapped off the streets of Bristol, she is transported to the New World as an indentured servant. But for both women, the future will bring love and rewards they never imagined. . . .

An independent landowner, Margaret was the first woman in the English colonies to formally request the right to vote.

The year is 1739. Eliza Lucas is sixteen years old when her father leaves her in charge of their family’s three plantations in rural South Carolina and then proceeds to bleed the estates dry.

Upon hearing how much the French pay for indigo dye, Eliza believes it’s the key to their salvation. Eliza finds that her only allies are an aging horticulturalist, an older and married gentleman lawyer, and a slave with whom she strikes a dangerous deal: teach her the intricate thousand-year-old secret process of making indigo dye and in return—against the laws of the day—she will teach the slaves to read.

Based on historical documents, including Eliza’s letters, this is the account of how a teenage girl laid the foundation for the incredible wealth of several Southern families. When she passed away in 1793, President George Washington served as a pallbearer at her funeral.

Kidnapped from her home in Senegal and sold as a slave in 1761, a young girl is purchased by the wealthy Wheatley family in Boston. Phillis Wheatley—as she comes to be known—has an eager mind and it leads her on an unusual path for a slave—she becomes America’s first published black poet.

She was greatly influenced by the words of George Whitefield and used his arguments about the fairness of God to argue against slavery.

In the heart of revolutionary Boston, Abigail Adams raises her children amid riots, blockades, and the outbreak of war. While her husband, John Adams, rises from country lawyer to nation-builder, often away for years at a time, Abigail builds her own independence—managing their farm, making lucrative investments, amassing savings, battling plague and loss, and defending their home.

She famously offers fearless political counsel, urging John to “remember the ladies” in the new government. When peace is secured, Abigail steps onto the world stage, presiding over the parlor politics of the early American republic.

Even after her husband’s presidential administration, she continues battling political foes and working behind the scenes to ensure a better life for the next generation of Americans.

In 1760, Deborah Samson is born to Puritan parents in Plympton, Massachusetts. When her father abandons the family, Deborah is bound out as an indentured servant.

Twenty years later, as the American colonies begin to buckle in their battle for independence, Deborah, disguises herself as a soldier and enlists in the Continental army. Her impressive height and lanky build make her transformation a convincing one, and it isn’t long before she finds herself confronting the horrors of war.

But as Deborah fights for her country’s freedom, she must contend with the secret of who she is—and, ultimately, a surprising love she can’t deny.

1885 – 1914. Mary Fields, a fifty-three-year-old emancipated second-generation slave receives news of her friend’s impending death. She rushes to the Montana wilderness to find Mother Mary Amadeus lying in a frozen, broken-down cabin. Certain that the cloister of frostbit nuns and their students, Indian girls rescued from nearby reservations, will not survive without assistance, Mary decides to stay.

Mary drives a horse and wagon through perilous terrain and sub-zero blizzards to improve the lives of missionaries, homesteaders and Indians. But she doesn’t stop there. An avid patriot, she is determined to register for the vote, despite the high price.

She rode with the most famous outlaws of her time. Then she vanished.

In the fall of 1895, Etta Place falls in love with Harry Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid. She gives up everything to follow him and his partner-in-crime, Butch Cassidy, in their outlaw life across the continent and beyond. Every inch a lady, Etta can also ride and shoot as well as any man.

But soon, she finds herself alone and living in a convent with her newborn son. Etta moves halfway across the country to begin anew, praying her past won’t catch up with her.

In 1872, sixteen-year-old Goes First, a Crow Native woman, marries Abe Farwell, a white fur trader.

When a group of drunken whiskey traders slaughters forty Nakota and takes five Nakota women back to their fort, she begs Farwell to save them. When he refuses, Mary takes two guns, creeps into the fort, and saves the women from certain death.

Thus, she sets off a whirlwind of colliding cultures that pushes the love between Farwell and Crow Mary to the breaking point.

Though born into bondage on a “miserable tobacco farm” in Little Dixie, Missouri, Cathy Williams never forgot her noble warrior blood. Her chance at freedom arrives with Union general Sheridan, who takes the rawboned, prideful young woman into service.

At war’s end, Cathy refuses to return to servitude and disguises herself as a man and join the Army’s legendary Buffalo Soldiers.

Alone now in the ultimate man’s world, Cathy vows to never give up on finding her mother, her little sister, and the love of the only man strong enough to win her heart.

In South Carolina, Harriet Tubman plots an expedition behind enemy lines to liberate hundreds of bondsmen and recruit them as soldiers for the struggling Union army. A bounty on her head, she has given up husband and home for the noblest cause.

General David Hunter places her in charge of a team of black scouts even though skeptical of what one woman can accomplish. For her gamble to succeed, “Moses” must outwit alligators, overseers, slave catchers, sharpshooters, and even hostile Union soldiers to lead gunships up the Combahee River.

1876. In the glittering world of Manhattan’s upper crust, women are valued by their pedigree, dowry, and, most importantly, connections. And none is more powerful than Caroline Astor—the Mrs. Astor.

Alva Vanderbilt has recently married into one of America’s richest families. But what good is dizzying wealth when society refuses to acknowledge you? Alva, who knows what it is to have nothing, will do whatever it takes to have everything.

Sweeping three decades and based on true events, this is the mesmerizing story of one of the most remarkable feuds in history.

Born to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation, Madam C.J. Walker rose from poverty and indignity to become America’s first black female millionaire, the head of a hugely successful beauty company, and a leading philanthropist in African American causes.

Renowned author Alex Haley became fascinated by the story of this extraordinary heroine, and before his death in 1992, researched and outlined a major novel based on her life. Now, critically acclaimed writer Tananarive Due brings Haley’s work to an inspiring completion.

Based on the inspiring true story of Virginia’s Black Wall Street and the indomitable Maggie Lena Walker, the daughter of a formerly enslaved woman who became the first Black woman to establish and preside over a bank in the United States.

Maggie’s childhood in 19th-century Virginia, helping her mother with her laundry service, opened her eyes to the overwhelming discrepancy between the Black residents and her mother’s affluent white clients.

Maggie buckled down and went from schoolteacher to secretary-treasurer of the Independent Order of St. Luke, founder of a newspaper, a bank, and a department store where Black customers were treated with respect. She revolutionized Richmond in ways that are still felt today.

To inspire support for a constitutional amendment, 25-year-old Alice Paul organizes a magnificent procession down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Joining the march is thirty-nine-year-old Maud Malone, who has acquired a criminal record for interrupting politicians’ speeches with pointed questions they’d rather ignore.

Civil rights activist and journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett resolves that women of color must also be included in the march—and the proposed amendment.

But negligent police allow vast crowds of belligerent men to harass the parade, endangering not only the success of the demonstration but the women’s very lives.

Based upon events in the life of the author’s wife’s grandmother, Gum Moon (Cantonese for “Golden Gate”) is the story of a Chinese-American girl, Mei Chun Lai, who is sold in 1898 at the age of three to a cruel brothel keeper. She is rescued and placed in a Home for abused and trafficked girls, only for it to be destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

Chun survives, and in an attempt to raise funds to rebuild the Home, she and a group of seven other Chinese children embark on a cross-country singing tour. Performing for President Theodore Roosevelt is the highlight of the journey, but when the matron of the Home suffers a breakdown, thirteen year-old Chun must find the strength and resolve to lead the children home.

In WWI, more than 7,600 women responded to the call for telephone operators, including Grace Banker of New Jersey, Marie Miossec, a Frenchwoman and aspiring opera singer, and Valerie DeSmedt, a twenty-year-old Pacific Telephone operator from Los Angeles.

They were among the first women sworn into the U.S. Army under the Articles of War. The male soldiers they replaced had needed one minute to connect each call. The switchboard soldiers could do it in ten seconds.

Deployed throughout France, including near the front lines, the operators endured hardships and risked death or injury from gunfire, bombardments, and the Spanish Flu. Not all of them would survive.

Independent socialite Edith Bolling has been in no hurry to find a new husband since she was widowed. But Woodrow Wilson wins Edith over and she becomes the First Lady of the United States.

Edith is soon indispensable to her husband’s presidency. When WWI hits, she encrypts top- secret messages and becomes an important policy adviser. But during critical peace talks, Woodrow’s delicate health takes a dramatic turn for the worse. In her determination to preserve both his progress and his reputation, Edith all but assumes the presidency herself.

Now, Edith must contend with the weight of a nation, her secrets, and the potentially devastating consequences of her failure.

America is falling in love with silent movies, including young Wong Liu Tsong. Choosing the stage name Anna May Wong, she leaves high school at sixteen, defying her traditional father’s wishes.

After a series of nothing parts, nineteen-year-old Anna May gets her big break starring opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad. Yet she is still relegated to supporting roles as a helpless, exotic butterfly or a vicious, murderous dragon lady, while Caucasian actresses in “yellowface” are given starring roles portraying Asian women.

Though she suffers professionally and personally, Anna May fights to win lead roles, financially support her family, and keep her illicit love affairs hidden—even as she finds freedom and glittering stardom across the globe.

In 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe is a young, unknown art teacher when she travels to New York to meet Stieglitz, the famed photographer and art dealer, who has discovered O’Keeffe’s work and exhibits it in his gallery.

O’Keeffe is quickly drawn into Stieglitz’s sophisticated world, becoming his mistress, protégé, and muse. Their attraction deepens and his photographs of her, both clothed and nude, create a sensation.

Yet as her own creative force develops, Georgia begins to push back against what critics and others are saying about her and her art and choose a life she believes in.

Frances Perkins arrives in New York City at the turn of the century, armed with an unyielding determination to make a difference.

But when she meets a young lawyer named Franklin Delano Roosevelt at a tea dance, sparks fly in all the wrong directions. Frances thinks he’s a rich, arrogant dilettante. He thinks she’s a priggish, insufferable do-gooder. Neither knows it yet, but they will form a historic partnership that will carry them both to the White House.

Frances is destined to face down the Great Depression as FDR’s most trusted lieutenant—even as she struggles to balance the demands of a public career with marriage and motherhood. Can she overcome vicious political attacks and personal tragedies to save a nation?

In 1918, a fearless twenty-two-year old arrives in bohemian San Francisco, renaming herself Dorothea Lange. She soon becomes the owner of the city’s most prestigious portrait studio and wife of the talented but volatile painter, Maynard Dixon.

By the early 1930s, as the America’s economy collapses, her marriage founders and Dorothea must find ways to support her two young sons single-handedly. Determined to expose the horrific conditions of the nation’s poor, she takes to the road with her camera, creating images that inspire, reform, and define the era.

And when the United States enters World War II, Dorothea chooses to confront another injustice—the incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans.

Her beauty saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated, she overheard the Third Reich’s plans while at her husband’s side and understood more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, landing her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star.

But she kept a secret more shocking than her heritage or her marriage: she was a scientist. And she had an idea that might help the country fight the Nazis and revolutionize modern communication… if anyone would listen to her.

At seventeen, Alice Marble has no formal tennis skills and no coach, but rises to be one of the top-ranked players in the world. But with the outbreak of war with Germany, Alice loses everything, including her career.

Then, the US Army sends her a request: Under the guise of playing tennis in Switzerland, she would be a spy for them. Alice aches for nothing more than to avenge what the war has taken from her. But what awaits her might be her greatest challenge yet.

When Jackie meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy in Georgetown, she is twenty-one and dreaming of France. She has won an internship at Vogue. Kennedy, she thinks, is not her kind of adventure: “Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.”

Yet she is drawn to his mind, his humor, his drive. The chemistry between them ignites. During the White House years, the love between two independent people deepens. Then a love affair, a complicated marriage, and the fracturing of identity that comes in the wake of unthinkable violence.

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the first black woman literary editor of The Crisis magazine.

But she has a secret – W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, but her lover. Despite the rumors, Jessie is determined to prove herself. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives… every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.

When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but will discover a high cost of her unparalleled success.

In 1940s and ’50s America, polio is as dreaded as the atomic bomb. No one’s life is untouched by this disease that kills or paralyzes its victims, particularly children. The man who finds the cure will be a god.

But Dorothy Horstmann is not focused on beating her colleagues to the vaccine. She just wants the world to have a cure. She hunts down the monster where it lurks: in the blood.

This discovery of hers, and an error by a competitor, catapults her closest colleague to a lead in the race. When his chance to win comes on a worldwide scale, she is asked to sink or validate his vaccine—and to decide what is forgivable in pursuit of the cure.