History Book Festival to host Weiss, Nehrig and Young Sept. 27

The ninth annual History Book Festival will present 20 author talks on a wide variety of topics Saturday, Sept. 27, all free of charge. Authors Elaine Weiss, Nicole Nehrig and Michelle Young, respectively, will present books about voting rights in the Jim Crow South, textile arts and women’s liberation, and a heroic French art curator during World War II.

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author and public speaker. She is the author of “The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote” and “Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of the Great War.” She lives with her husband in Baltimore, Md.

Weiss’ gripping narrative, “Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement,” tells the hidden history of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans in the Jim Crow South laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement. In 1954, the Citizenship Schools project was begun at an interracial training center for social change in rural Tennessee to prepare Black Southerners to pass the daunting voter registration literacy tests designed to disenfranchise them. By 1965, more than 900 such schools across the South had prepared tens of thousands of Black citizens to read, write and vote.

The community partners in support of Weiss’ presentation are the ACLU of Delaware, Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice and the Delaware Historical Society.

Also appearing on Sept. 27 is Nicole Nehrig, a clinical and research psychologist, and a passionate knitter and textile crafter living in Brooklyn, N.Y. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology.

Nehrig’s captivating work, “With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories,” explores the myriad ways that art forms such as knitting, sewing and embroidery were and continue to be liberating for women. Nehrig brings together remarkable stories of women, ranging from an 18th-century Quaker boarding school that used embroidered samplers to teach girls math and geography, to the Miao women of southern China who, in the absence of a written language, pass down their histories in elaborate “story cloths.”

The Rehoboth Art League and the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild have signed on as community partners in support of Nehrig’s presentation.

Michelle Young is an award-winning journalist, author and professor whose writing on looted and lost art has appeared in Hyperallergic, The Forward, and The Wilson Quarterly. She is a professor of architecture at Columbia University and divides her time between New York City and Paris.

In her book, “The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland,” Young tells the story of Rose Valland, curator at the Jeu de Paume museum in August 1944, with the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The co-opted museum was the Germans’ final line of defense, and Valland was inside, deliberately putting herself in harm’s way to protect the museum, her staff and humanity’s cultural inheritance. Based on previously undiscovered documents, “The Art Spy” chronicles the brave actions of a hero whose courage and tenacity in a time of violence and terror are an inspiration for all.

The community partner in support of Young’s presentation is the Delaware Art Museum.

To learn more, go to historybookfestival.org.