Rather than reporting from the famous front lines of Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, Martha Gellhorn instead covered war-torn China and the Caribbean.

Gellhorn was in the journalistic trenches of these two lesser-known areas of combat. She had previously reported on the Spanish Civil War and would go on to cover the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, and unfortunately unnamed conflicts in Central America.

She was the real deal, and her coverage of China and the Caribbean remind us that war happens beyond what the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the front page of Google report. Gellhorn acts as a personal witness to the devastation caused by the Japanese and the Germans in her memoir, Travels with Myself and Another (Putnam, 1978).

Even among poverty and disease, Gellhorn writes with the wit of Dorothy Parker and the detachment of Albert Camus. In 1941, while traveling through war-torn but stubbornly beautiful China, she remembers the paper arches that were constructed to welcome her as a member of the press: “We passed through slatternly villages, each adorned with a triumphal arch for us and a duck pond with malaria for them” (32). Malaria was no joke in China: “The mosquitoes were competing with the flies and losing” (35).

Although Hunter S. Thompson would be later credited with spawning Gonzo journalism, Gellhorn was going Gonzo when Thompson was learning to read. She writes unabashedly about elements of war zones that personally annoy her. With a decisive lack of multi-cultural training she refers to the Chinese language as a “nasal, harsh sing-song” (28). Disease, sing-song, and pernicious smells that inevitably accompany war-resulting poverty were bearable; it was only the “hawking up phlegm” that made her retch (28). But she literally sucked it up, made her retching look like swallowing, and got down to business of war reporting.

She affectionately refers to her war travels as “horror journeys” and lovingly refers to her traveling-partner husband, also a well-known writer, as U.C. (Unwilling Companion). When Gellhorn is acting the part of shrew – complaining about the food, the cold, and the damp – U.C. is busy advising and cheering her through whisky-riddled speech. He also served as her main apologist and explained her departure from large gatherings with these words: “Martha loves humanity but can’t stand people” (48).

This humanism would compel Gellhorn to visit the Caribbean in August and September of 1942, when German U-boats were busy doing what they did best. Caribbean natives were less concerned about Nazis than they were about hurricanes, although they did advise her, as a white woman looking to travel by boat, “to wait until after the war and hire a yacht like everyone else” (62). The rough seas resembled “churned cement,” but Gellhorn met more cockroaches and tarantulas than Nazis on her sloop-cruise through the dangerous Anegada Passage between Virgin Gorda and Anguilla, a “hunting ground for submarines” (63, 67). She seemed disappointed to find little beyond nuclear-resistant insects and furry, carnivorous arachnids.

Gellhorn leaves behind an impressive list of both fictional and non-fiction works. But again, she may be best known for U.C. dedicating his iconic For Whom the Bell Tolls to her.

Unfortunately her five-year marriage to Ernest Hemingway made her more famous than her fifty-plus years of writing: the war reporting, the numerous novels and short stories, and even the O. Henry prize in 1958.

Well, she was a leggy blond with a lot of sass.

Will, you’ve had a pretty colorful history yourself. Can you give us some of your background and tell us how you became a history geek?

I was born in a small log cabin in Toronto, Canada … OK, let’s skip to the juicy bits …

I enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17, and served in various capacities from infantry grunt, to guided missile fire control technician, to the Military Police and criminal investigations. I graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Philosophy, with Honors.

My combat experience, which has served me well in writing about war, was just short of two tours in Vietnam. While there I worked closely with Vietnamese Army Military Police, Korean Military Police, the CIA, the Phoenix Committee, and other agencies on drug interdiction and other special operations.

As a military criminal investigator I investigated all types of crime including robbery, rape, and homicide, but specialized in undercover narcotics investigations. I worked drug cases in the States for a time, then went to Europe. I served undercover in Amsterdam, Belgium, and Frankfurt, Germany, eventually becoming Chief of the military Level One Drug Team in Europe.

On my return to the States I was eventually assigned as Chief of the Illegal Drug Branch of the Army Criminal Investigations Command (USACIDC). This actually began my writing career in earnest. I wrote and revised CID manuals for Drug Investigations, Criminal Intelligence, and Undercover Operations, as well as worldwide drug threat assessments focusing on the impact of illegal drugs on military personnel stationed in foreign countries.

On retiring as a military officer I went to work for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of Investigations (USNRC OI), as a Senior Special Agent, investigating program fraud, sabotage, and terrorism. My writing focus shifted to incredibly boring endeavors like annual reports and budgets, but my literary skills improved. I retired from Government service as the Asst/Director of the Office of Investigations. Now I do occasional law enforcement consulting work, the odd photography project, and write historical fiction.

After retirement from the Government I thought I might explore writing for myself, under my own name for a change. I tried writing non-fiction history, but it didn’t get very far. I was bored. Thus, I tried fiction writing, and loved it from the outset.

As far back as I can recall, I’ve had a passion for military history, and have lectured on the American Civil War for over twenty years. I think part of the fascination has to do with the research involved and my investigative background. Historical research is very much an investigation. You come up with theories, develop evidence, conduct interviews, put it all together and come up with a conclusion. Writing historical fiction was an obvious direction and choice.

To me historical fiction needs a foundation in historical reality. Thus, it took me two and a half years of intense research before I wrote my first novel, Follow Me to Glory. The sequel, bringing Ian Carlyle into the American Civil War, was easier research because I’ve been studying this period for most of my life.

I’ve heard you use the term, “flying under the radar of history”, in your approach to historical fiction. Your latest book is about an attempted assassination of Abraham Lincoln when he comes to dedicate the cemetery at Gettysburg. We know it won’t be successful. So how do you maintain the suspense?

Flying under the radar means to me that you try diligently not to change any major part of history. This is especially difficult when some of your characters are real historical figures, and you are giving them life and dialogue. It is, however, possible if you remain steadfast to history.

I create a group of fictional characters who carry the story as heros, villlians, or participants in the action, then I weave them in with real people of the time. The story takes place at a level beneath the actual historical line. Ian Carlyle, for instance, isn’t a general or a major politician. He’s a company commander, a staff officer, a British observer on McClellan’s staff, or a military liaison officer at the British legation – all minor positions in the big historical picture.

My latest book is a perfect example, a story about a fictitious assassination attempt on Lincoln. We know there were such threats and attempts. The story is thus plausible. We know he had terrible security and we know he went to Gettysburg for the address. We know his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, was concerned for his safety in Gettysburg…the story is even more plausible…Could it have happened? We know it fails, but how does it fail? How does the hero foil the plot? Who are the bad guys? What will happen to them?

Someone once said fiction is drama, and drama is conflict. Even if you know the end, you can create drama within the tale. After all, in most crime dramas, the bad guy gets caught. The questions are how does he get caught, who catches him, and am I, the reader, invested in the characters – both good guys and bad guys. In historical fiction you can add questions like: Is the story believable? Could it have happened? Is the background and setting authentic and plausible? Is the dialogue real for the historic period?

Some time as Lincoln rode back to DC by train, Lamon might have said to him quietly, “Say, Abe, there was an attempt to assassinate you back there in Gettysburg. Not to worry, we took care of it.” Lincoln might nod his head and resume looking out the train window as it rolled east toward Washington … Below the radar of history … a minor footnote at best, yet a good story when you’re involved in reading it.

To learn more about Will Hutchinson, visit his website. You can also purchase books directly at www.buybooksontheweb.com.

Davis: You describe the 1967 film about Eddie Chapman, Triple Cross, in your book as a rather poor film that bore only a superficial relation to the truth.

Macintyre: I think it tried to turn Chapman into a James Bond character, which he was not, and missed the opportunity to make a really interesting and challenging film about the nature of heroism. It was essentially propaganda, in my view.

Davis: I thought it was a good thriller, if poor history. The cast – Christopher Plummer, Yul Brynner, Gert Frobe and others – were very good, in my view. Frobe portrayed Auric Goldfinger in the film Goldfinger and Triple Cross‘ director, Terence Young, as you know, directed the first two Bond films and the fourth in the series.

Macintyre: The film was entirely inaccurate, and despite some very good actors, I found the acting very wooden.

Davis: As you wrote a book, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, do you find it curious that Young knew both Chapman and Fleming?

Macintyre: I think there is a direct link between Chapman and the film version of Bond, in the sense that Connery modeled his performance on Young, who in turn modeled his own image on his former friend and flatmate, Eddie Chapman.

Davis: In part, yes, but I see more of Fleming’s Bond from the novels in the early films. Did Fleming know Chapman?

Macintyre: Not as far as I know.

Davis: Have you received any offers to make a film based on your book?

Macintyre: The film rights have been bought by New Line (Warner Bros.) with Tom Hank’s production company Playtone as co-producer. The first script has now been completed.

Davis: What actor would you like see portray Chapman?

Macintyre: The actor I would dearly love to play Chapman is James McAvoy. He is not only a brilliant actor, and British, but he has that callow, slightly dodgy expression, while being extremely good-looking. That would fit Chapman perfectly.

Davis: How, and why, should we remember Chapman?

Macintyre: As both an example and warning: he was a very bad man who managed, for one very brief period of his life, to find the inner mettle to do something very good indeed.

Davis: Are you working on a new book?

Macintyre: Yes, another wartime espionage and deception story, coming out next year. I cannot say any more, as it is under wraps!

Davis: I read and enjoy your Times column online. Does being a columnist for a major British newspaper that maintains historical archives help you in your research of books on historical people?

Macintyre: I have found the Times archive hugely useful for all my books, but these archives are now full digitized and accessible to the public, so working for the Times does not really give the advantage it once did!

Davis: I truly enjoyed Agent ZigZag and I look forward to reading your new book as well.

Read parts one and two of the interview.

Paul Davis also writes an American crime blog for GreatHistory.com. You can visit Paul Davis’ web site here . You can reach him at pauldavisoncrime@comcast.net

Warner was invigorated by the natural history of the region, and she became friendly with the nearby Indians of the San Ildefonso Pueblo. The stark landscape of the plateau, with its deep canyons and volcanic remnants, inspired this city girl to embrace the sacred space the Tyuonyi Indians had deserted 500 years prior.

She was offered the job as caretaker of the train depot along the Rio Grande, at “the place where the river makes a noise” (34). This place was the Otowi Bridge, and as the years progressed, the river noise became a song.

Miss Warner lived alone at the train depot for many years (cue the spinster music) and enjoyed the community of the Pueblo Indians – attending their weddings, funerals, and ceremonies. Within a few years, she had befriended one of their outcasts, a Puebloan who had traveled the world and in doing so, had lost his connection to his people. Warner and the lost Indian Tilano made a home, bringing together the Anglo and the Indian world.

Life was peaceful there by the river-song, and the inhabitants of the train depot built a cozy adobe that always had hot tea and chocolate cake ready for visitors and friends.

But the peaceful plateau was literally shaken up by the US entrance into WWII. Warner’s biographer tells of a particular spring day in 1942 when she was out trailriding northwest of Los Alamos:

Trees lay scattered as though spilled from a giant matchbox. Great roots had been flung upward out of pits of earth. Picking my way through the ruined landscape I lost all sense of direction…At the peak of despair I stumbled across a shattered root. Exposed in the gaping earth shone a black piece of carved obsidian. That unexpected pattern of symmetry could only have been formed by the hand of man (82).

The uprooted forest, and the growing presence of low-flying airplanes and military uniforms, meant that the war effort was coming to the plateau.

It meant that Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Niels Bohr, the fathers of the atom bomb, sought respite at Warner’s train depot. In fact, Oppenheimer and his wife made a weekly trek to Warner’s peaceful adobe home – with its Navajo rugs and San Ildefonso Pueblo black pottery – to enjoy her chocolate cake, homemade bread, chokecherry jam, and tea. And to hear the river sing.

Bohr wrote to Warner in 1945, telling her how the canyon and her company had comforted them while working on the Manhattan Project:

We learned to watch the snow on the Sangres (de Cristo mountain range) and to look for deer in Water canyon. We found that on the mesas and in the valley there was an old and strange culture…Evenings in your place by the river, by the table so neatly set, before the fireplace so carefully contrived, gave us a little of your assurance, allowed us to belong, took us from the green temporary houses and the bulldozed roads. We shall not forget (98).

Let us not forget Edith Warner, the woman who fed the souls of the men who built the first atom bomb. I’m guessing they needed it.

Recent list-toppers:

Highest-paid actress: Angelina Jolie (People)

Sexiest woman alive: Cheryl Cole (FHM)

Highest-paid female athlete: Maria Sharapova (Forbes)

Richest woman alive: Christy Walton of Wal-Mart (Forbes)

Ordered lists of intangibles like talent and influence are much more difficult to defend, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to make them. In fact, I’m willing to go so far as to say:

Best and most influential female writer (ever): Virginia Woolf.

Mrs. Woolf wrote during the Modernism heyday, when Joyce was penning his brilliant but cryptic Ulysses, and when Eliot was trying to shock and awe us with Prufrock and The Wasteland.

In declaring Mrs. Woolf the recipient of most amazing female ever to string a sentence along and influence not only a genre but future generations of little girls with pens, I do not mean any disrespect to Madames and Misses Austen, Bronte, Eliot, Angelou, Atwood, or Morrison. I’m simply saying: That Ginny, she didn’t just contribute to genres – she defined them.

The first genre she defined was the aforementioned Modernism. As I stated in an earlier blog, writers abandoned form and played with language. Modernists explored the inner angst of the human condition while purposefully trying to confuse you with stream of consciousness writing. The world no longer made sense to the Modernist writer. How could it, after the devastation of the first world war?

In lists of greatest novels of all time, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) almost always falls in the top 100. If you read the book or saw the movie The Hours (1998, 2002) with Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, and Nicole Kidman, then you have experienced Woolf. It’s a look at the lives of three women – all living in different eras – and their personal demons. In fact, in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours, almost all of the action takes place inside the characters’ heads.

But one book, even one great book, is not enough to earn the title of Greatest. Female. Writer. Ever. Woolf also wrote the clever Orlando (1928), which traces the time travel of the eponymous androgynous protagonist (also made into a film starring Tilda Swinton). My favorite Woolf novel, however, is To the Lighthouse.

Lighthouse is divided into three parts, and the second part, perhaps the most elusive, is also the best. It’s entitled “Times Passes,” and the major plot events are brief and set off by [brackets]. As in, oh, by the way, [so-and-so died] and [so-and-so got married]. Even though the so-and-so folks are major characters, their deaths and marriages were not nearly as important as their inner struggles.

In “Times Passes,” the housekeeper, seventy year-old Mrs. McNab, goes about cleaning the cottage that the main characters summered at in the Hebrides, a less than tropical collection of islands off the west coast of Scotland. She’s cleaning alright, but her mind is racing:

Rubbing the glass of the long looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her lips – something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps, had been hummed and danced to, but now, coming from the toothless bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency itself, trodden down but springing up again, so that as she lurched, dusting, wiping, she seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble, how it was getting up and going to bed again, and bringing things out and putting them away again.

Woolf was fond of sentences that ran on for days, but run-ons create memorable scenes. Now, maybe you’ve still got your teeth and maybe your bonnet only makes special-occasion appearances, but how many of us have cleaned a mirror, gotten a good look at ourselves, and had a bout of melancholia only to be interrupted by Gloria Gaynor’s mantra, “I will survive and I will dust behind the furniture!”

Which brings me to the second genre that Mrs. Woolf not only shaped, but darn-near invented: the feminist essay. Feminism for Woolf had nothing to do with the conflagration of undergarments. For Woolf, it was giving present and future female writers hope and inspiration that the female voice was unique and worth reading. She’s the woman behind that argument that the lack of female writers was not for a lack of talent but for a lack of opportunity. She brilliantly illustrates this point in her famous non-fiction treatise, A Room of One’s Own. In Room, we meet Shakespeare’s fictional and not-nearly as successful sister, Judith.

Paraphrasing Woolf is akin to serving dry toast when buttery croissants are cooling off in the next room, so the crux of the argument is below. The paragraph is long, but it’s got rhythm, baby:

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since the facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably – his mother was an heiress – to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin – Ovid, Virgin and Horace – and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighborhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practicing his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter – indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager – a fat, loose-lipped man – guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting – no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted – you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last – for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows – at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so – who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? – killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

The sad epilogue: our beloved Ginny also killed herself. But she gave us a big fat rock and told us to aim at the ceiling.

The glass one.

—Rick Steves

Rick Steves is best known for his popular travel series on PBS, Rick Steves’ Europe. I have envied Rick as he makes his way through medieval castles and biergartens and art museums. I was pleasantly surprised this past winter when I flipped on the television and there was Rick Steves. In…Iran?

There was Rick Steves, boldly going where few Americans dare to go, frolicking around the ruins of ancient Persia, laughing with university students, visiting lush valleys, and eating food so succulent you could taste it through your television. Steves showed us that behind strange titles like the Supreme Leader and behind what many of us view as a tantrum-throwing Ahmadinejad and a nuclear program, there is a bold culture and a friendly populace within the Axis of Evil. Yes, it’s true, Virginia, actual humans live in Iran.

Still, sinister elements remain. And the contentious relationship between Iran and the United States continues to engender fear on both sides. Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian who also holds an American passport, reminds us of what happens to ordinary citizens who get caught between these two great nations. Her most recent book, My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran, (HarperCollins, 2009) tells the horrifying ordeal of a woman falsely accused of colluding with the United States to overthrow the Iranian government. This unfounded accusation would land her in solitary confinement in the dreaded Evin Prison for 105 days.

Dr. Esfandiari is traveling to the Tehran airport on New Year’s Eve to return to her husband, child, and grandchildren back in the United States. On route, her passports and belongings are stolen, and she returns to her mother’s house and begins the arduous task of replacing her paperwork so she can leave the country. But over the next few months, she meets with hurdle after hurdle from the Iranian bureaucracy. She is ordered to report to the Intelligence Ministry day after day and is subjected to questions about her marriage to a Jewish man, her work with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and her former work on various newspapers in Iran. The interrogation scenes remind me of a McCarthy hearing or a famous Kafka story. After months of paranoid questioning, she is arrested and taken to Evin Prison.

Through her work with the Wilson Center, Dr. Esfandiari was guilty of nothing more than bringing intellectuals together to bridge the very gap in communication and understanding that led to her arrest in the first place. She herself recognizes this:

When I returned to Iran in December of 2006, I did not realize I was walking into the heart of a storm. It was fueled by long-standing animosity between Tehran and Washington, an ineffective and ultimately harmful program of democracy promotion that contributed to my detention and that of many others, and an iron determination by Iran’s security services to squash all American plans regarding the Islamic Republic” (121).

Now before we go name-calling and call the Americans the moral victors in the Iran-US fight, let’s look back at Iran’s history before 1979. When the shah came to power in 1941, it was an ally of the West. During the Cold War, Iran looked to the United States for protection against the Soviet Union.

But 1953 changed all that. In 1953, during the oil nationalization crisis, the shah was losing power. It was only through a coup manufactured by the CIA and British intelligence that the shah was able to retain power. The Iranians never forgot this. The shah was consistently viewed by some of his own people as a puppet of the United States. The powerful Ayatollah Khomeini continually reminded his fellow Iranians of this and in 1979, the monarchy was overthrown.

Then, on November 4, 1979, the students of Tehran’s universities stormed the American embassy and took 60 hostages and held 52 of them for 444 days.

And during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the US supported Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein.

If we cannot forgive Iran for kidnapping our diplomats and imprisoning intellectuals like Esfandiari, then maybe we can understand, just a little better, why they might be paranoid. Maybe. Maybe not.

Here’s a primer:

The Wampanoag tribe numbered about 20,000 before the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower. Three epidemics reduced their population to 2,000 on the mainland and 3,000 on the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Epidemics and King Philip’s War left the number at 400 mainlander Wampanoags by 1676.

The colonists, apart from casualties, also saw a devastating loss of settlements in southern New England. Over 90 towns were attacked by the Wampanoag Indian Federation. A single stone house was all that was left of Warwick, Rhode Island. And anywhere from 600-800 of the 52,000 settlers were killed.

Per capita, this was the bloodiest war in American history.

But this is not a war many Americans know about, an inevitable war as the colonists continued to encroach on native land and as ideas about land ownership continued to clash.

Even more surprising about its relative obscurity is that the first American bestseller, The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), recounts the story of Mary Rowlandson, a minister’s wife, who was taken into captivity and wrote of her time with the Wampanoags and their allies.

The Narrative is broken up into Removes, of which there are 19. Each Remove is a new chapter – the next leg of the traveling journey of the Wampanoags. That means she and the band she was traveling with moved 19 times in three months. That’s a lot of moving around. But then again, there was a war going on.

The Narrative begins horrifyingly enough. At daybreak, Mrs. Rowlandson witnesses, from the garrison in Lancaster, Massachusetts, houses burning and people being killed in barbarous ways. She watches as men are shot and disemboweled and buildings are set afire. She and her family were riddled with gunfire, and the “stout dogs” they kept for protection did nothing but cower.

The next morning she is moving with the Narragansetts and her wounded child, who dies eight days later. She is sold to the Wampanoags shortly after her six year-old’s death. She reunites in this and subsequent removes with other members of her family, including her daughter, son, and sister. These reunions do not last long.

For the most part, Mrs. Rowlandson is alone on her removes. She takes to knitting and sewing, sometimes in exchange for food or shelter, and sometimes because she is commanded to do so. Given that food was scarce, I would venture to say that knitting saved her life.

She and the Wampanoags traveled like nomads, carrying babes in papooses and bare necessities and building shelters and rafts when they needed them. The food she ate was not five star. On good days, she sipped broth: horse, bear, and tree bark. She also ate the Wampanoag version of a tortilla, or johnnycake, made of “parched wheat, beaten and fried in bear’s grease.” When there was nothing else, she ate ground nuts.

Her tone regarding her captives changes with the varying degrees of compassion she is shown. At first they are barbarous when they take her, then they are generous when they take pity on her and give her meat, then they are thieves when they steal said meat from her. Unfortunately for her, she never knew who was on the pity and who was on the scorn side: “sometimes I was met with favor, and sometimes with nothing but frowns.” Apparently the frown is a universal facial expression.

For comfort she relied upon her Bible, she prayed, she reunited intermittently with members of her family, and she was, for the most part, reassured she was not going to be killed. Let’s face it: She was too valuable alive.

She describes her audience with King Philip (Metacom to his own people) and how she refused the pipe from him. Tobacco, to her, “seems to be a bait the devil lays to make men lose their precious time.” What would she think about Facebook?

Conditions in the moving camp were not ideal, as she often had to beg for food, scramble for shelter, and was mocked by her captors. I honestly do not know how this woman found the strength to write.

Three months into her captivity she gets to name her ransom: twenty pounds.

Six years later, she became a bestselling author.

Tracey McCormick is Managing Editor at GreatHistory.com.

I thought about it a moment, then waved a white flag. “Can I think about that and write you back?”

“Certainly.”

For those unfamiliar, Coyote Warrior was written from the vantage point of an Indian village beside the Missouri River, and it told one version of America’s story through the eyes of the Mandan/Hidatsa family that welcomed Lewis and Clark to the Knife River Villages in October, 1804. To write Savages and Scoundrels, I crossed that river and wrote it from the vantage point of the “shining city on the hill,” looking back at the river across time and space.

This is what I wrote to her:

Two hundred years after our founding, the struggle for dignity and justice in this grand experiment we call the United States of America is an ongoing ordeal for many citizens. The reasons for that struggle are embedded in ideological conflicts that were present at the founding, and they are with us today. As George Washington and Benjamin Franklin feared, this republic was shaped in a crucible of irreconcilable moral and political conflicts. We could not, on the one hand, hold out the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to our citizens without actively denying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to anyone who stood in the way of our desires.

Washington, Franklin, and others, like John Adams, were correct in their assessment and predictions. In the 19th century, those conflicts played out in a disgraceful drama that saw the dominant society abandon all of the lofty principles on which the republic was founded. By mid-century the overwhelming passion for this nation was reaching the Pacific Ocean and claiming the continent, but we had a very big problem. The Indian owned all of the land between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean. And even though our most sacred and foundational laws solemnized that ownership, when push came to shove, we were more than willing to unhinge the very thing we said we were – a nation of laws – in order to satisfy our appetites and to fulfill our Manifest Destiny, a self-proclaimed divine mission to take dominion over the earth and to vanquish heathens and infidels who stood in our way. To say nothing of the Africans. And the Chinese, et al. A century later, that engine of social engineering is still with us in the form of Neo-Conservatism, and we have carried that creed to distant shores.

A lesson from the two books? There are many different paths through the American story, through the meta-narrative that is this nation, and what you perceive that meta-narrative to be will in large part be shaped by a vantage point of geography and of your political and economic position within the hierarchy of our society. I often think of writing narrative as a trip down a river, and the readers are passengers in the rafts seeing the country unfolding before them for the first time. The narratives in these books flow together to form a river through the American experience that is unlike any of the routes that have become so familiar, and so mythologized, in the telling and retelling. It is the experience not of the victor, but of the unvanquished. All of our self-congratulatory talk about freedom and democracy and the inviolable rights of the individual, we have just as often acted in monstrous ways that sadly confirm Washington’s darkest fears.

Perhaps we have entered a new day. If justice and dignity are to become the ruling values in a pluralistic society of diverse cultures, religions, and views, then perhaps we have entered into a revolutionary age that will see the dominance of the European replaced by a more polymorphic society. Like it or not, our history is a cascade of ironies and unintended consequences, and the biggest irony of all might be that those who were denied life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – those who persevered and endured the struggles of the last two hundred years and remain unvanquished – might finally secure for all citizens the liberties reserved by the founders for the select few.

Until I began digging into the details of the Great Depression in California, a state I visit several times each year, all I knew about Sinclair was his work as a crusading writer who exposed the meatpacking industry in The Jungle, published in 1920.

Then I stumbled on Sinclair’s run for governor in 1934 and learned that he was a starry-eyed utopian socialist who became the unlikely Democratic nominee. More remarkable than Sinclair’s campaign were the vicious attacks on him via the media by William Randolph Hearst, Louis B. Mayer and others.

A stage for the clamorous political extremes of the 1930s, California was still heavily agricultural when the hard times hit. The state was home to left-wing radicals, violent right-wing police, business leaders and some crackpots. As the hard times unfolded, San Francisco police shot dead striking longshoremen; a retired dentist built a national movement for retiree benefits that enrolled millions of followers; and 300,000 arriving migrants populated stinking shanty and shack towns in the Central Valley. To say that overreaction and messianic zeal complicated matters isn’t overstatement. That was California’s Great Depression.

Enter impetuous, rail-thin Sinclair, a vegetarian who had a history of socialist activity in California from the 1920s. Sinclair had built a utopian community in New Jersey that was destroyed by fire, leaving him broke. After relocating to Pasadena the writer mixed tennis, politics and privileged access to the wealthy elite, and he formulated plans to remake society as an agricultural and industrial utopia based on production for use, rather than profit. This airy vision also involved heavier taxes on wealth and property. He called it the End Poverty in California, or EPIC program. (The End Poverty League set up an office at 1501 South Grand Avenue in Los Angeles.)

Somehow Sinclair gained the Democratic nomination as he released a book, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. He faced off against incumbent Republican Frank Merriam.

In horror the California establishment rose up to stop Sinclair, and in so doing, invented some of the most dastardly practices of media manipulation that blight our political process to this day. Hearst did his part, but so also did famed producers Mayer and Irving Thalberg. An orchestrated campaign of lies about Sinclair appeared regularly in the mostly Republican-owned newspapers. Thalberg and Mayer put together a series of newsreel-like film shorts that showed actors masquerading as deadbeats and hobos who said they were heading to the state to enjoy Sinclair’s coming socialist revolution.

After a famous meeting at the White House between FDR and Sinclair, the writer declared the president to be one of the most “lovable” men he had ever met. But FDR adroitly withheld endorsement.

Sinclair used the media too, and millions received his newsletter. And at times he was his own worst enemy, revealing “a sense of himself at center stage that verged on narcissism,” according to author and historian Kevin Starr. “There was something foreign,” wrote Starr, in “the messianic statism of the movement.” But then again, wrote Starr, “Roosevelt’s critics would soon be saying the same thing about the New Deal.”

Richard Korman’s biography of inventor Charles Goodyear was picked by the Library Journal as one of the best business-related books of 2002. His feature writing has appeared in The New York Times and Business Week and his website for developing writers is http://www.confidentwriter.com.

For Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, an ex-World War II and commercial aviator, it was a vision of a different kind of television drama. To support his family, Roddenberry had to work as a Los Angeles policeman while moonlighting as a writer of teleplays for popular TV series such as Highway Patrol and Have Gun – Will Travel. After six years of developing the concept of a space-based drama, he finally sold NBC executives on the idea of taking the very popular Western genre to new territory, a “Wagon Train to the Stars.” The cleverness of Rodenberry was to create a new fictional universe with its own rules where he could symbolically comment on social issues he saw as important without upsetting network sensibilities, practices and standards of the time.

The drama combined relatively standard elements – strong central characters, conflict and action, good and evil – with the exotic ideas of space travel that were only beginning to have some basis in reality in the 1960s. Although some of the gadgets seem comical by today’s sophisticated production techniques, (the automatic sliding doors on Enterprise? two beefy grips pulling at the same time), many have worked their way into the vernacular of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Still others (the tri-corder, Dr. McCoy’s diagnostic table) have influenced the development of technological products and techniques (the PDA, the MRI).

The other phenomenon of Star Trek is its failure-to-success story. Cancelled by NBC after three seasons due to low ratings, Roddenberry’s morality plays in space piqued the interest of a unique audience. In the original Star Trek series, the characters battled each other as well as their own frailties for the greater good in a future world that Roddenberry envisioned without violence or greed or petty squabbles. The struggling writer-producer carried the story to the lecture circuit after the cancellation left him without a franchise to build on. The grassroots interest eventually led Paramount, which controlled the series, to give Roddenberry another shot, even though an animated version of Star Trek was already running on TV as the first franchise spin-off.

Though the second television series was never produced, it led to the first of the Star Trek motion pictures, in which Roddenberry was creatively involved. He also had a large hand in developing Start Trek: The Next Generation, a series that not only found great favor among critics and legions of Star Trek fans (known as Trekkies or Trekkers), but completely bypassed the networks and became one of two successful first-run syndication series, along with Deep Space Nine, in the Star Trek legacy.

Gene Roddenberry never became enormously wealthy from Star Trek and his creative differences and personal difficulties paint a picture of a troubled artist. But his effective idea of combining basic dramatic elements, popular television concepts and a fantastic flair for a world of hope and progress clicked with audiences and spawned many creative forces both within and outside the vast Star Trek franchise. With eleven feature films, six television series, a theme attraction in Las Vegas, as well as hundreds of books, games and other merchandise objects and of course, an unwavering fan base and annual fan conventions, the franchise will have a life and legacy in popular culture for untold star dates.