My Favorite Books of 2016: American History

One of my reading themes in 2016 concerned American history. Events from places I have lived and the times I have lived in, presidential history, Native American history, African American history, and the American Revolution continue to be interest areas I am drawn to.The books were galley ebooks, Arcs, or books provided by the publisher. All were my choices to read.

Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression Era Detroit by Tom Stanton brought to life a city thrilled by its team's sport wins while The Black Legion, a hate group spawned from the KKK, pressed unsuspecting people into membership at gunpoint then sent them out to kill.

The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World's Fair by Margaret Creighton peels back the tinted postcard memories of the Pan-American Exposition to reveal the seamy side of American society a hundred years ago. 


67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence by Howard Means was a moving, important, and disturbing book, particularly for my generation.

Of Arms and Artists by Paul Staiti shows how artists of the American Revolution created a national identity.  

The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe by Elaine Showalter reveals the complicated life of the woman who penned our national anthem.

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink reveals how the lack of preparation by a for-profit hospital resulted in avoidable deaths.

Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital by Joan Quigley is the story of 90 year old Terrell's fight to end segregation in Washington D.C. in 1950. It is the inspiring story of how age has nothing to do with standing up for what is right.

The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping by Lucy Maddox is a historian's study of the Fugitive Slave Law through the kidnapping of two African American teenagers.

Truevine: Two Bothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South by Beth Macy concerns Albino African Americans enslaved by a circus and their mother's endeavor to protect them.


Massacre at Sand Creek: How Methodists Were Involved in an American Tragedy by Gary Roberts was commissioned by the United Methodist Church. Leaders in this attack on 'friendly' Native American women and children were Methodist. It is a warning of how 'good people' can be led by cultural norms to commit crimes against humanity.

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, The Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History by Paul Andrew Hutton is a dense and comprehensive history, another revelation of treaties broken and genocidal military leaders.

The Thunder Before the Storm: The Autobiography of Clyde Bellecourt is a raw, honest, and moving relating of his journey from juvenile delinquent to the leader of the American Indian Movement.

John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery by David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason draws from Adams diaries to trace his evolving understanding, personally and legally, of slavery, culminating in his eight year battle to end the Gag Rule that forbade the House from accepting petitions to end slavery.

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye is a fascinating biography focusing on Bobby's evolution from McCarthy staffer to Civil Rights spokesperson.

Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency by Charles Rappleye is a great study on how the Great Humanitarian, a successful business man, failed as president.

The Gatekeeper:Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Partnership that Defined a Presidency by Kathryn Smith is the first biography of President Roosevelt's constant companion for twenty years in the office and out, the first female 'chief of staff'.

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn considers the friendship, and possibly love affair, that supported the First Lady to blossom into leadership.

Valient Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick shows that our country's founding was pretty messy and the ramifications of leaders obsessed with image, personal power, and monetary success.

Washington's Spys: The Story of America's First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose is the book behind the series Turn, the real story of the Culpepper spy ring.

Love Canal: A Toxic History From Colonial Times to the Present by Richard S. Newman was another upsetting read of how industry used Niagara Falls for profit, leaving a legacy of chemical waste, Activist Lois Gibbs work helped establish the Superfund, which almost immediately was defunded. We are all affected by industrial toxic waste.

A History of New York in 101 Objects by Sam Roberts is a more lighthearted look at our past, considering the things that made New York, and America and the world, what it is today.

Dead Wake by Eric Larson is the moving tale of the Lusitania.

I hope you found something here to put on your 2017 reading list!

The History and Legacy of Love Canal

Requesting the book Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present by Richard S. Newman was personal. I have lived near two toxic waste sites left by Hooker Chemicals.

I was born in Tonawanda, NY an old industrialized area along the Niagara River. My hometown dump contains radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project. Just down river near the city of Niagara Falls, Hooker Chemicals took advantage of an unfinished canal to dump industrial waste.

The canal had been part of William T. Love's plan to create a Model City. The chemical industrialist envisioned a self-contained city with homes and parks. Clean, hydroelectric power was to come from an artificial falls. A canal from the Niagara River would be built to divert water over another section of the Niagara escarpment. Love mismanaged his money. All he accomplished was to leave a big ditch.

The city of Niagara Falls needed to expand and bought the land. A community of homes and a school was built over the filled-in canal. The young families living in Love Canal believed they were living the American Dream. Their dream turned into a nightmare.

They noticed basement seepage, chemical odors, rocks that burst like fireworks, grass that left chemical burns, and a high rate of miscarriages. Their complaints were unheeded. Housewives turned into activists. It was the first grass roots movement for environmental justice.

It took years for government leadership to act. The activists influenced the passage of environmental laws and in 1980 the creation of the Superfund for hazardous waste remediation. (Which under President Reagen was already being weakened with reduced funding in the battle between what is good for business vs. what is best for the people.) Love Canal has become the poster child for American environmental disasters.

I wrote about organizer and environmental activist Lois Gibbs and Love Canal at: http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-green-heroes-quilt-lois-gibbs.html

America's toxic past is never 'in the past'. The Environmental Protection Agency states that one-quarter of all Americans live within five miles of a Superfund site, the worst toxic dumps in the nation.

Consider my own history.

My family had moved from Tonawanda in 1963 when I was ten, several years after the first basement seepage was reported in Love Canal. President Carter approved emergency financial aid to Love Canal the year I graduated from university.

When my son was a tot we moved from Philadelphia to a small Michigan town where a chain link fence separates a toxic waste site from a park with a little flowing stream. An elementary school is on the other side.

We moved again. Our church needed to expand. They bought adjacent land then discovered the business had left toxic waste. They took out loans to supplement Federal aid to clean up the site. It took nine years. Half the land was sold for a charter school and senior housing.

We moved again, to a city on a lake  that fed into Lake Michigan, with a picturesque marina, sand dune beaches and a light house near by. The lake had been foully polluted by a tannery and the clean up had been going on for decades. The town was also home to Michigan's worst toxic waste site, left by Hooker Chemicals. Montague, like Niagara, had a massive salt mine. The rise of  a chemical center brought much needed jobs to the area. And a sad legacy. A woman in our church lost a child to a rare cancer. She began collecting stories of other cancer victims. Days after moving in, I met a neighbor while walking our dog. She said three dogs on the street had died of cancer.

My retirement home is a half mile from a 'spill'. Superfund money is limited and spent on the 'worst' sites. The rest are just fenced off.

Newman grew up in the Buffalo area, and like my family, visiting Niagara Falls was a typical family day trip. He worked on this book over a long time, writing Freedom's Prophet about former slave and African Methodist Church founder Richard Allen in the meantime. (A book I would love to read!)

Niagara Falls, taken by my dad on his last trip home

The book covers:

• The first European explorers, who identified it's economical potential
• The rise of the 'chemical century' and industrialization of the area with particular attention to Elon Huntington Hooker, including information based on new archival research
• The rise of citizen environmentalism in the 1970s and 80s
• The partial resettlement of the Love Canal neighborhood in the 1990
• The legacy of Love Canal

I appreciated the book's inclusiveness, especially the 'big picture' of the Niagara Frontier's industrial history. Love Canal is a story of failure and success, of how citizens can alter policy. It raises issues of responsibility and the role of government in monitoring industry. Can we contain the toxins we create for the products we demand? And what becomes of the land that has been poisoned? Montague residents worried that people will forget and build on the Hooker toxic waste site. Well, they did at Love Canal.

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Love Canal
by Richard S Newman
Oxford University Press
Publication Date May 4, 2016
$29.95 hard cover
ISBN: 9780195374834

My Green Heroes Quilt: Lois Gibbs

After completing my First Ladies quilt "Remember the Ladies"  I decided to make a series of  quilts on American leaders. I did complete "I Will Lift My Voice Like a Trumpet" which portrays women abolitionists and Civil Rights Workers. Life and several moves got in the way, but I finally  finished a quilt top for Ecology Heroes...Only because I found a wonderful website that offers information sheets and line drawn portraits for use in teaching, Better World Heroes (http://www.betterworld.net/heroes/ ).  I wanted to focus on American heroes, so I had to forgo using some favorite leaders, including Jacques Cousteau and Jane Goodall. I added a few that were not included on that website, such as Annie Dillard, whose Pilgrim at Tinker Creek impressed me so much when it was published.

I wanted to try a modern color scheme, and so chose green fabric and black embroidery thread.

I found a leaf print that added colors, including red, and set in a small border of red and green woven plaid. The blocks sat and languished for a year. I hope I get it quilted before another year goes by!

One of my favorite people on this quilt is Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal mom and activist.

Love Canal is not far from where I grew up in Tonawanda, NY. On Sunday afternoons we would drive to Niagara Falls and be back in time for dinner.

This part of New York is an industrial center. When we went to visit my cousins on Grand Island in the Niagara River,  we passed the Ashland Oil refinery which lined the road near the Grand Island Bridges. It smelled! In front of our house was an Ashland gas station which my grandfather had built in the late 1940s. My family sold the house and station in 1963, and several years later they were torn down and an apartment building was built on the site..

We'd go boating on the Niagara River and pass industrial sites of all kinds. The Tonawanda dumps, where my dad used to go as a kid, was full of hazardous waste. Uranium from  the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb, was dumped there! (We actually own a painting found in the Tonawanda Dump in the early 1970s.  I wonder if we should get it tested for radioactivity!)

The Linde Air Products plant was near the housing project in Sheridan Park where my mom grew up. Known as 'the Projects,' the duplexes housed the influx of workers for the war plants. My grandfather was an engineer at a Chevy plant. A 2001 report by Don Finch of F.A.C.T.S. states that  the Tonawanda problems  is not "as bad as the Love Canal findings of the 1970s" but he sees the entire Western New York area as a chemical wasteland. "If you move here you have a choice. Do you want to live on top of radioactive, toxic, or heavy metal materials?" The area's cancer cases were 10% higher than expected.
 http://factsofwny.org/fundmtls.htm; http://westvalleyfactsofwny.org/chrono.htm



Love Canal began as a scheme to connect the Niagara River with Lake Ontario. Money ran out and water filled the site. In the 1920s, the canal became a City of Niagara dump. In the 1940s, the U.S. Army used the dump, including for waste from the Manhattan Project. Hooker Electrochemical Company also used this site as a dump until 1953. Hooker sold the property to the City of Niagara for $1. In 1955 the City of Niagara built a school on the property, and a second on was built a year later.And in 1957 the Love Canal housing project was built.

In 1976 reporters found toxic chemicals in sump pumps in the area. Birth defects and health problems were reported at higher than normal levels. On August 2, 1978, Lois Gibbs founded the Love Canal Homeowners Associations. The activists fought for four years until President Carter allocated government funds to Love Canal clean up. Nearly 900 families were relocated, and reimbursed for their lost homes. Congress passed the Superfund Act because of Love Canal.

In 1981 Lois created the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice.She proved that through activism, people can change the world.

Hooker Chemical also left behind a polluted area in Montague, MI, where we lived for four years. The site was fenced off, but it had not been cleaned up  Residents there were concerned that in the future people would forget its history, and build there.

My parents both died of cancer. When mom was diagnosed in 1990, at age 57, she was asked if she had been exposed to toxins, and she thought of Love Canal and the polluted corridor of Western New York.

For more information on Lois Gibbs:
http://chej.org/about/our-story/about-lois/
http://www.fredonia.edu/convocation/gibbsbio.asp