Beyond the Shores

January 1, 2023

Award-winning Vanderbilt historian Blackbourn rethinks Germany in the World, arguing that it was a persuasive force even before unification in the 19th century. Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and a prolific historian, Borman (Crown & Sceptre) limns the historic significance ofAnne Boleyn & Elizabeth I. In Revolutionary Spring, Wolfson Prize--winning Clark refreshes our view of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848. In Homelands, Oxford historian Garton Ash draws on both scholarship and personal experience to portray Europe post-World War II. In Soldiers Don't Go Mad, distinguished journalist Glass uses the friendship and literary output of outstanding war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen--both gay and both ultimately opposed to fighting--to show how an understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment first emerged during the industrialized slaughter of World War I. Journalist Hartman's Battle of Ink and Ice shows that the contention between explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, both claiming to have discovered the North Pole, also sparked a newspaper war with all the earmarks of fake news. The long-anticipated My Friend Anne Frank recounts Holocaust survivor Pick-Goslar's friendship with Frank (she's called Lies Goosens in The Diary of a Young Girl), having been together with her at the Westerbork transit camp and eventually Bergen-Belsen. Also known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, the Columbia River Bar forms where the river pours into the ocean off Oregon's coast and creates fearsome currents that have claimed numerous lives; like his abusive father, Sullivan risked crossing it, and he makes his book at once history, memoir, and meditation on male behavior at its extreme. Former undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Obama administration, Vickers recalls a life in intelligence and special operations that arcs from his Green Beret days to his involvement in the CIA's secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan to the war on terror. In Road to Surrender, the New York Times best-selling Thomas (First: Sandra Day O'Connor) relies on fresh material to convey the decision to drop the atomic bomb from the perspectives of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, and Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific. In National Dish, three-time James Beard award-winning food journalist von Bremzen investigates the relationship between food and place by examining the history of six major food cultures--France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey. In Beyond the Shores, the Harriet Tubman Prize--winning Walker (Exquisite Slaves) considers why Black Americans leave the United States and what they encounter when they do, moving from early 1900s performer Florence Mills to 1930s scientists to the author's own grandfather. An historian at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Walton assays the century-long intelligence war between the West and the Soviet Union/Russia, considering lessons that can be gleaned today in Spies.

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June 1, 2023
An intimate history of African Americans who have opted to live abroad rather than endure racial oppression in the U.S. As a supposed "beacon of democracy" in the early 1900s, America wanted to show its best face to the world while masking the bigotry that was rampant in the Deep South, mired in racist laws and customs. Moving between historical figures and her own family's story of migration from the South, Walker, a professor of Africana studies at Barnard College, generally eschews the famous stories of James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and explores some lesser-known personalities during and after World War I. These men and women, who found the liberty abroad they could not enjoy at home, included Florence Mills, a dancer, singer, and comedian; Herman de Bose, an early Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya; and Philippa Schuyler, a journalist and author who died in Vietnam in 1967. Touring across the European continent in the mid-1920s, Mills was as wildly popular as Baker in Europe, though she died tragically young. The author also shares the incredible stories of Joseph Roane, an agronomy student from Virginia, and Oliver Golden, a Mississippi-born veteran and graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, who seized the chance to study at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow and later took job opportunities in Uzbekistan when they were denied career choices in their own country. Walker offers a particularly telling quote from one source: "There are places in this world where our presence isn't viewed as a menace, as a problem, or even as an inconvenience. There are places where we are welcomed, listened to, appreciated, and even loved." The author's own alternating family stories of migration and travel, in the military and for jobs, underscore the emotional tug of living and traveling aboard. Nuanced, poignant tales that beautifully flesh out a little-known aspect of the African American experience.

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July 17, 2023
In this innovative survey, historian Walker (Exquisite Slaves) profiles expatriate African Americans across the 20th century. Focusing on figures like Josephine Baker and Richard Wright, Walker highlights the inspiration and freedom that Paris and other international cities gave to Black American artists. She also touches on politics, business, academia, and the military, spotlighting the many ways in which African Americans have participated in world affairs beyond America’s shores. Among the profile subjects are Oliver Golden, a defector to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and Mabel Grammer, a military wife living in Germany in the 1950s who found homes for stigmatized “Brown Babies,” the mixed-race children of German women and American soldiers. There are also interviews with contemporary African Americans who have lived and worked abroad, including Kim Bass, an actor on Japanese television in the 1990s, which exemplify the challenges and opportunities Black Americans in foreign countries continued to come up against through the turn of the 21st century. (When he arrived in Japan in the 1980s, Bass was sometimes initially denied entry to bars and clubs not because he was Black per se, but because of strong public sentiment against the U.S. military; bouncers wrongly stereotyped all Black Americans as soldiers.) Drawing on a vast range of sources, including archival materials and memoirs, Walker provides a rich and nuanced portrait of an understudied aspect of African American life. It’s a unique contribution to American history.