Share: 

Festival to spotlight historical fiction and nonfiction Sept. 23-25

September 16, 2022

A woman who broke through the publishing industry’s glass ceiling, a nurse who grappled with post-segregation violations of her patients, and dictators who used a world’s fair for propaganda are among the topics featured in the Sixth Annual History Book Festival in Lewes.

Authors of some two dozen works of nonfiction and historical fiction will discuss their books throughout the day on Saturday, Sept. 24.

Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age – the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts – Mrs. Frank Leslie is a forgotten figure. But for 20 years, she ran the country’s largest publishing empire, an industry dominated by males. A celebrity of her time, she also hid a past that included an illegitimate birth, a hardscrabble childhood and early years in the sex trade.

In “Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age,” author Betsy Prioleau tells the story of a mistress of concealment who saved her biggest secret for last, bequeathing her multimillion-dollar estate to support women’s suffrage, which helped ensure passage of the 19th Amendment.

Prioleau taught English and world literature at Manhattan College and was a scholar in residence at New York University, where she also taught cultural history. Her books include “Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love”; “Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them”; and “Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells.” Prioleau received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Virginia, and earned her doctoral degree in American literature from Duke University.

Inspired by government-sanctioned abuses involving health and reproductive rights of Black Americans as recently as the early 1970s, “Take My Hand” by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is a novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama. Civil Townsend is eager to make a difference in her community, but her first case will haunt her for decades. It also will shape her career as she is compelled to blow the whistle on a terrible injustice done to her patients.

Perkins-Valdez was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction. She was presented the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

In the same year that both Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power, the city of Chicago staged what was, up to that time, the most forward-looking international exhibition in history. “Broken Icarus: The 1933 World’s Fair, The Golden Age of Aviation and the Rise of Fascism” describes how aviation was the star of the show, with its promise to improve lives.

Author David Hanna highlights some of the fair’s most celebrated figures, including German airship pioneer Hugo Eckener and Italian Air Force Marshal Italo Balbo. But their aeronautical feats also provided significant propaganda coups for Hitler and Mussolini.

Hanna teaches history at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He is a recipient of The New York Times Teachers Make a Difference Award and the University of Chicago’s Outstanding Educator Award. 

The 2022 History Book Festival begins Friday, Sept. 23, with a keynote presentation by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Buzz Bissinger and concludes Sunday, Sept. 25, with a closing address by Ada Ferrer, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History. Tickets for the keynote and closing presentations must be purchased in advance at bit.ly/hbf22-tickets

All events except for the keynote and closing speakers are free; seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Biblion in Lewes and Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach will have books available for purchase ahead of the festival. History Book Festival titles also may be borrowed through the Delaware Public Libraries system as they are published.

Presenting sponsors of the festival are Delaware Humanities and The Lee Ann Wilkinson Group of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices PenFed Realty. Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Distilling Company is the funding partner for the keynote address; Joe and Debbie Schell are funding partners for the closing presentation.

The History Book Festival is the first and only book festival in the United States devoted exclusively to history.

To learn more, go to historybookfestival.org.

 

 

 

Subscribe to the CapeGazette.com Daily Newsletter