Schedule

September 29, 2023

7:00 pm : Eastern, the 2023 History Book Festival Keynote Address will feature Steve Inskeep, author of Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America (Penguin Press, 2023). Inskeep will be in conversation with Christina Shutt.

The Keynote Address is funded through the generous support of Sally Mott Freeman and John K. Freeman.

September 30, 2023

10:30 a.m : American Ending - Mary Kay Zuravleff’s - Bethel United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall.

This novel, chosen for Oprah’s Spring Reading List, is the story of a woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s. Yelena’s Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents have settled in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. In a place where boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at 14, Yelena — the first American born in her family — seeks a thoroughly American life. Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a story that reflects the challenges immigrants continue to face today.

12:30 p.m : The Bell in the Fog - Lewes Public Library Meeting Room

In 1952 San Francisco, gay men like Andy Mills walk a tightrope daily: if people find out who they really are, their careers — indeed their lives — could be threatened. Andy, a former cop, has started a new life as a private detective, but no one in the queer community trusts him enough to ask for help. When James, an old flame from the war who had mysteriously disappeared, arrives in his office, Andy wants to kick him out. But the job seems to be a simple case of blackmail, and Andy’s debts are piling up. He agrees to investigate, despite everything the case stirs up from his past.

10:30 a.m : Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War

Rollins Community Center and Lewes History Museum

This is the remarkable true story of two Chinese sisters, inseparable as children, whose lives were irrevocably disrupted when the “bamboo curtain” dropped between Communist mainland China and Nationalist Taiwan in 1949. At the end of the Chinese Civil War, Jun was on an island under Nationalist control. She became a model capitalist, founded a successful trading company, and eventually immigrated to the U.S. Her sister Hong on the mainland became a doctor and model Communist who survived two waves of “re-education” and internal exile. For decades the sisters had no contact.

Eli and the Octopus: The CEO Who Tried to Reform One of the World’s Most Notorious Corporations
(Harvard University Press, 2023)

12:30 p.m : Bethel United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall , Garcia will be discussing Eli and the Octopus

9:00 a.m : Historic Lewes Farmers Market
Garcia will be discussing Food Across Borders

In addition to his presentation at HBF, Matt Garcia will be visiting the Historic Lewes Farmers Market at 9:00 a.m., where he’ll talk with market-goers about his life as a farmer and the book he co-edited, Food Across Borders. The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging. When it comes to food, there’s more that unites us than divides us.

9:00 a.m :  Greetings from Rehoboth Beach: Postcards from the Collection of the Rehoboth Beach Museum

Rollins Community Center and Lewes History Museum

Published in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Rehoboth Beach Camp Meeting Association in 1873 (an event recognized as the founding of what became known as “The Nation’s Summer Capital”), this book includes images of black-and-white, sepia-tone, tinted, and full-color postcards produced in or for Rehoboth Beach from 1905 to the present. The authors describe the major periods of development in the postcard industry in the United States, correlated to the history of development and change in the Rehoboth Beach community.

3:30 p.m : Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World  - Rollins Community Center and Lewes History Museum

In 1459, after nine years of work, a Venetian monk named Fra Mauro completed an astonishing map of the world. This seven-feet-in-diameter, round cartographic masterpiece was the first map in history to show that a ship could circumnavigate Africa, thus joining the West and the East by an easily navigable water route. It was also the first to show that the Indian “Sea” was an ocean, and that traders would no longer have to haul goods from the East to the West by land. Fra Mauro’s mappamundi was the visual push that expanded international trade across the globe.

2:00 p.m : Hotel Cuba: A Novel - Lewes Public Library Meeting Room

Fleeing the chaos of World War I and the terror of the Soviet Revolution, two sheltered Russian Jewish sisters — practical, sensible Pearl Kahn and her lovestruck, impulsive younger sibling Frieda — sail for America to join their sister in New York. But discriminatory new immigration laws bar their entry, and the young women are turned back at Ellis Island. With few options, Pearl and Frieda head for Cuba, convinced they will find a way to overcome this setback, but they become trapped in the sultry, hedonistic world of 1920s Havana.

12:30 p.m : I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction - Rollins Community Center and Lewes History Museum

African Americans transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865 were besieged by a campaign of White supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond, but for too long their lived experiences have been sidelined. I Saw Death Coming is a breakthrough history of the Reconstruction period, transporting readers into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people. Williams deploys cutting-edge scholarship on trauma to consider how the effects of nighttime raids and Ku Klux Klan strikes would linger for decades — indeed, generations — to come.

Miss del Río: A Novel of Dolores del Río, the 12:30 p.m : First Major Latina Star in Hollywood - Lewes Public Library Fireplace Reading Area

In 1910, as civil unrest spreads in Mexico, young Dolores, the daughter of a wealthy banker, must flee her comfortable life in Durango or risk death. Her family settles in Mexico City, where, at 16, she marries the worldly Jaime del Río. At a party she meets an influential American director who invites her to Hollywood, and practically overnight, her days become a whirlwind of moviemaking and glamorous events. But as her career soars, her personal life becomes increasingly complicated, with family tragedy, divorce, and heartache.

9:00 a.m : The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World - Lewes Public Library Meeting Room

When fossil hunter Barnum Brown unearths the first Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils in the Montana wilderness in 1902, forever changing the world of paleontology, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a curator at the struggling American Museum of Natural History in New York, sees a path to save his museum from irrelevancy. As the public turns out in droves to cower before this bone-chilling giant of the past, Brown and Osborn turn dinosaurs from a biological oddity into a beloved part of culture, igniting a new understanding of our planet and our place within it. Smithsonian magazine named this one of their Ten Best Books of 2022.

2:00 p.m : The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War - Bethel United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall

On September 29, 1913, one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, vanished from the steamship Dresden as it crossed the North Sea from Belgium to England. Diesel had become a multi-millionaire with a powerful new internal combustion engine that didn’t require expensive petroleum-based fuel, but he also became the enemy of two powerful men: Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world. Was his disappearance an accident, suicide, or murder? Douglas Brunt provides an astonishing new conclusion about Diesel’s fate.

3:30 p.m : The Old Lion: A Novel of Theodore Roosevelt - Bethel United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall

This is the story of a man who both defined and created the modern United States. From his upbringing in the rarefied air of New York society in the late 19th century to his time in the rough-and-tumble world of the badlands in the Dakotas; from his rise from political obscurity to the position of assistant secretary of the navy; from being hailed as a national hero as the leader of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War to his accidental rise to the presidency itself, Theodore Roosevelt embodied both the myth and reality of the country he loved and led.

3:30 p.m : The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire - Lewes Public Library Meeting Room

This is the saga of the making (and undoing) of a great family dynasty: the riveting untold story of the Sassoons, the Jewish Baghdadi family known as “the Rothschilds of the East.” For two hundred years, from the 19th century to the 20th, they built a vast empire through global finance and trade — cotton, opium, shipping, banking — that reached across continents, beginning in Mesopotamia and moving through the Persian Gulf, India, China, and Japan, eventually reaching Paris and London. The author had full access to rare family photographs and archives.

2:00 p.m : The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever - Lewes Public Library Fireplace Reading Area

In the 1950s and ’60s, Coenties Slip — an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan, overlooking the East River — was home to a group of extraordinary, then-struggling artists: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they formed a unique community of unbridled creative expression and experimentation, producing eclectic and influential works that changed the course of American art.

2:00 p.m : Time’s Undoing  - Rollins Community Center and Lewes History Museum

This novel about a young Black journalist’s search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in 1929 was inspired by the author’s own family history. Meghan McKenzie, a reporter at the Detroit Free Press in 2019, has grown up hearing family lore about her great-grandfather’s murder, but no one knows what really happened, and his body was never found. Determined to find answers to her family’s long-buried tragedy, and spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement, Meghan travels to Birmingham to uncover the truth.

10:30 a.m : Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century - Lewes Public Library Meeting Room

Selected as one of the “Best Books of January 2023” by shondaland.com, Twice as Hard establishes a lineage of Black women doctors whose accomplishments are undeniably important and deeply contemporary. As she profiles each woman, ranging from Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, who graduated 14 months after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and provided medical care for the newly freed slaves, to present-day leaders, Brown weaves her own experiences into these intimate histories.

9:00 a.m : The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams - Bethel United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall

In 1953 the Korean War was in full throttle when two pilots flew across the fabled 38th Parallel into Communist airspace aboard matching Panther jets. John Glenn was an ambitious officer with 59 World War II combat missions under his belt. His wingman was Ted Williams, the two-time American League Triple Crown winner who, at the pinnacle of his career, was inexplicably recalled to active service in the Marine Corps. Their enduring friendship, forged in battle, would see them through exhilarating highs and devastating lows in the decades to come.

9:00 a.m : Women of the Post - Lewes Public Library Fireplace Reading Area

This novel takes a new approach to World War II historical fiction by giving voice to the pioneering Black women of the U.S. Army’s 6888 Central Postal Battalion, based in Birmingham, England, who made history by sorting a backlog of one million pieces of mail sent to the troops that had invaded Normandy. Told from the alternating perspectives of three members of the battalion, this is an inspiring story of perseverance, female friendship, romance, and self-discovery.

October 1, 2023

1:00 p.m : James McBride, author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel (Penguin Random House, 2023). McBride will be in conversation with Marie Arana.

The Closing Address is funded through the generous support of Dogfish Head Beer and Benevolence.

This event is presented in partnership with Seaside Jewish Community and Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice (SDARJ).

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When state officials came looking for a deaf boy in order to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community — heaven and earth — that sustain us.
    
Date : September 29 - October 1, 2023

Location : Various Venues, Lewes, DE 19958

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