Regulated for Murder Summer Solstice Deep Discount

Regulated for Murder book coverFor ten years, an execution hid murder. Then Michael Stoddard came to town.

Bearing a dispatch from his commander in coastal Wilmington, North Carolina, redcoat Lieutenant Michael Stoddard arrives in Hillsborough in February 1781 in civilian garb. He expects to hand a letter to a courier working for Lord Cornwallis, then ride back to Wilmington the next day. Instead, Michael is greeted by the courier’s freshly murdered corpse, a chilling trail of clues leading back to an execution ten years earlier, and a sheriff with a fondness for framing innocents—and plans to deliver Michael up to his nemesis, a psychopathic British officer.

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The eBook version of Regulated for Murder, award-winning fourth novel in my historical crime fiction series, is on sale today and Saturday for 99 cents in Kindle, Nook, and Apple iBooks formats. Enjoy!

A big thanks to the folks at eReader News Today!

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Boston History Lives On The Freedom Trail

Denise Price author photoRelevant History welcomes Denise D. Price, creator of The Freedom Trail Pop-Up Book. Having seen twenty countries on five continents, Denise has a certified case of wanderlust. Inspiring a love of history, architecture, and world culture, her travels have been a major influence on how she views the world, reacts, interacts, designs and breathes. Denise was introduced to the paper arts over twenty years ago at a summer arts intensive. Her passion for the paper was stoked and has burned ever since. Holding an MBA in International Business, she combines her astuteness for business and her eye for detail to create marketable and interesting art. For more information, check her web site, and look for her on Facebook and Twitter.

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Established in 1951, The Freedom Trail® is a 2.5-mile footpath running through Boston, Massachusetts. The trail highlights sixteen nationally significant historic sites that tell the story of Boston’s role in the American Revolution. It includes sites like Old North Church (ever famous for hosting the two lanterns that spurred Paul Revere on his midnight ride), Bunker Hill Monument, Granary Burying Ground (where you’ll find such illustrious figures as Samuel Adams and the five victims the Boston Massacre), and Faneuil Hall. The trail, demarcated by a red trail line (sometimes painted and sometimes inlaid in brick on walkways), now attracts more than four million visitors annually.

It originated in 1951, a tumultuous time in the United States. The Korean War was ongoing, McCarthyism was emerging, and racial tensions were riding high. In Boston, the idea for The Freedom Trail was born as a way to preserve and promote the part of our history that is most unifying, our fight for liberty and justice. Through a series of charged newspaper columns, illustrious journalist Bill Scofield proposed organizing the numerous landmarks as a way to keep Boston tied to its patriotic past.

After reading the columns and finding subsequent public support for the project, then-mayor John Hynes took on the task of creating the footpath. Though many of the sixteen official historical sites located on The Freedom Trail had been operating as independent museums for decades, Mayor Hynes put together a committee of concerned citizens, business people, and other city leaders to create the network that became the official trail.

By 1954, The Freedom Trail (rejected names included Puritan Path and Liberty Loop) had more than 40,000 annual visitors. The telltale red path line appeared in 1958.

The Freedom Trail as Inspiration
Denise Price and USS ConstitutionIn 2010 I was one of the millions of Freedom Trail visitors. It was clear to me that there is no other place in the United States where you can take in the rich history of America’s Revolution than in Boston. I was captivated. I wanted something special to take home and share with family in Denver. I needed to share with them the beauty of the trail.

I began searching for a pop-up book. For years pop up books have been my souvenir of choice. More than a t-shirt or a mug that simply says, “I’ve been to this place,” a pop-up book is a way to share and relive the experience after the fact. They capture architecture, art, history, and culture in a way that no other printed material can, 3-D! They are educational as well as sentimental and fun to share with family and friends.

But I never did find such a book on my trip, and I left Boston disappointed. However, I didn’t give up my quest. Through extensive online research I found there were no pop-up books about Boston’s historic sites except Fenway Park. When I moved to neighboring Cambridge, MA later that year, I decided to create one. And what better way to share the city than to share the story of The Freedom Trail?

Making History Pop Off the Page
Denise Price and Old North ChurchThe research phase of the book was extensive. I spent hours at each site examining architectural detail, talking to staff, volunteer guides, and other trail scholars about minute details of the buildings, restoration efforts, and hidden spaces within each site. Some of my favorite discoveries were the views of The Common atop Park Street Church, the mechanical workings of the historic clock on the Old South Meeting House, the one-ton Paul Revere Bell of King’s Chapel, and the crypt at Old North Church.

After the research was done, the paper-engineering and illustrating began. With notes, photos, and a love of the trail to guide me, I began the painstaking work of cutting, folding, pasting, drawing, and writing. The finished book includes sixteen architecturally and historically accurate pop-ups as well as hand-drawn illustrations and a succinct written history of the trail and its landmarks. In 2013, after three years of work, editing, fixing, and paper-cuts, the book was finished. I’m working now, to self-publish and produce a limited run of 5,000 books. I hope they’ll be used in homes, libraries, classrooms, and book collections from coast to coast. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to The Freedom Trail Scholars Program, a non-profit dedicated to bringing interactive history education into greater-Boston area classrooms.

Denise Price and Faneuil HallThe book is now available for pre-order ($45) on Kickstarter.com, where you’ll find more information on the book and fantastic Freedom Trail rewards, including private and behind the scenes tours. If I am funded, I will be able to obtain the final color dummy book from the assembly house. After any edits are completed, the book will go to press. Once printed, the book will be hand-assembled, piece-by-piece, and glued together. When the inside is complete, it will be mounted into the hard cover binding, boxed and shipped to Boston, where, with the help of The Freedom Trail® Foundation, The Freedom Trail® Pop Up book will be available to the public.

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Weather vane note cardA big thanks to Denise Price. She has created a limited-edition set of note cards featuring original illustrations of the five historic Freedom Trail weather vanes (shown with watermark), and she’ll give away a set of these note cards to three people who contribute a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery for the cards is available within the United States only.

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The Winner of Murder by Misrule

Lida Bushloper has won a copy of Murder by Misrule by Anna Castle. Congrats to Lida Bushloper!

Thanks to Anna Castle for that great story about the woman printer in Elizabethan London. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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Elizabeth Pickering Redman, an English Printer

Anna Castle author photoRelevant History welcomes Anna Castle, who lives in Austin, Texas and writes the Francis Bacon Mysteries. The first book in the series, Murder by Misrule, has been chosen as a Kirkus Indie Book of the Month for July. The book will be released everywhere June 8, 2014. For more information, check her web site, and look for her on Facebook.

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The monarchs and courtiers of the Tudor period are so well-known and so colorful, we tend to see the whole sixteenth century in terms of their tumultuous lives. But the nobility and gentry were only 2% of the population. There were three other classes: the citizens (merchants and professionals, like lawyers), yeomen (farmers with 100 acres or more), and the common folk. The middling sort—merchants and yeomen—interest me the most, perhaps because that’s where I imagine I would have been in those days.

We also tend to imagine that everyone except the ruling class was oppressed. Maybe that was true in some places, but it was most emphatically not the case in England. Women ran businesses, trained apprentices, and waged lawsuits on their own recognizance throughout the period. The laws concerning married women were very restrictive, but as with so many Tudor laws, there were ways around them (and ways to exploit them). Short life expectancies meant that many women became widows who could own, sell, sue, hire, and fire almost as freely as men. Then they could marry again and climb another rung up the social ladder.

One woman leaps into history
One woman who stepped in to manage a prosperous business between husbands was Elizabeth Pickering Redman. In 1540, she published the first book known to have been printed by a woman in England from her shop on Fleet Street. She took over the press after her husband, Robert Redman, died. We don’t know when she was born or married; she leaps into history at Robert’s death, when she is named as the executrix of his will. She inherited the customary widow’s third of his estate. The first portion went to bequests and funeral expenses, the second to the children, two daughters. Redman was worth about £300, so Elizabeth would have gotten something less than £100, after expenses and debts were deducted, and the contents of the “widow’s chamber”: clothing, jewelry, and furniture.

A bed in Shakespeare's birthplace[Photo by author: A bed in Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon.] Translating sums is always ticklish. All I know is that a gentleman could live decently at the fashionable Inns of Court on £60 later in the century, so that hundred pounds was a goodly sum. And beds were important status symbols as well as places to lay one’s head at night.

Redman left no specific instructions for his press. Elizabeth seems to have taken charge of the business on her own initiative. He had built a successful specialty in law books, his shop not far from the Inns of Court where dwelled his principal customers. She married a lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, William Chomeley, sometime in 1541. Did she meet him over the counter in her shop?

An Elizabethan townhouse[Photo by author: an Elizabethan town house. Stratford-upon-Avon.] Chomeley owned property on both sides of Fleet Street, including the house he and Elizabeth lived in. Chomeley became a member of the Stationers’ Guild in 1541, perhaps in anticipation of marrying a woman with a printers’ shop.

Elizabeth published at least ten books as mistress of her press. Printers usually identified themselves in the colophon at the bottom of the title page. Elizabeth identified herself variously as “Elisabeth late wyfe to Robert Redman”, “Elysabeth wydow of Robert Redman, or sometimes “Elisabethe Pykerynge, viduam R. Redmani.” She wasn’t the only woman publishing books at that time or using her maiden name to do so: three French women, also widows, used their maiden names to identify their printed works. (Apparently, the “better sort” of women in France and the Netherlands used their maiden names. I’m astonished to learn this curious fact and wondering how I can use it as a confounder in a future plot.) Elizabeth printed law books, an Herbal—and a book called Seynge of Urynes, about analyzing the colors of urine to diagnose disease, a centerpiece of medical practice at that time.

She can’t have just walked home from the funeral and started ordering the journeymen about. She must have been involved in the business for some time, long enough to know how to choose a marketable project, oversee the design of both interior pages and the all-important title page, arrange to have the pages assembled and bound, and then sell the finished product at a profit. Redman’s apprentices most likely lived with the family, under Elizabeth’s daily supervision. I think we can safely assume that she was involved in every aspect of the family business on a daily basis. We can also assume without risk of anachronism that she was a self-motivating woman of strong mind and character who wasn’t afraid to tell men what to do.

Elizabeth’s descendants
Robert Redman was her second husband. They had two daughters, Mildred and Alice. She and her first husband, a man named Jackson, also had two daughters, Lucy and Elizabeth. She and Chomeley had no children; he left his wealth to her daughters. Elizabeth died in 1562.

It’s a narrow glimpse into life for women in Tudor times, but I hope a revealing one. Elizabeth Pickering Jackson Redman Chomeley had charge of her own life in important ways. When her husband died, instead of flinging herself on the metaphorical funeral pyre, she stepped into his shoes and thus walked into the history books.

(Source: Kreps, Barbara. 2003. “Elizabeth Pickering: The first woman to print law-books in England and the community of Tudor London’s printers and lawyers,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 1053-1088.)

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Murder by Misrule book cover imageA big thanks to Anna Castle. She’ll give away an electronic copy, any format, of Murder by Misrule to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET.

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The Winner of Crying Blood

Gigi Pandian has won a copy of Crying Blood by Donis Casey. Congrats to Gigi Pandian!

Thanks to Donis Casey for a harrowing story of a deputy’s ordeal in 1924. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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Paper Woman Memorial Day Deep Discount

140524PaperWomanCoverShe expected the redcoats to solve her father’s murder. The redcoats and her father had other plans.

In early June 1780, the village of Alton, Georgia, is rocked by the triple murder of the town printer and one of his associates, both outspoken patriots, and a Spanish assassin. Alton’s redcoats are in no hurry to seek justice for the murdered men. The printer and his buddies have stirred up trouble for the garrison. But the printer’s widowed daughter, Sophie Barton, wants justice for her father. Under suspicion from the redcoats, Sophie sets out on a harrowing journey to find the truth about her father — a journey that plunges her into a hornet’s nest of terror, treachery, and international espionage.

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The eBook version of Paper Woman, award-winning first novel in my historical crime fiction series, is on sale through Sunday for 99 cents in Kindle, Nook, iTunes, and Kobo formats. Enjoy!

A big thanks to the folks at eReader News Today, Free Kindle Books & Tips, and Bargain eBook Hunter!

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Speed Traps Can Be Murder

Donis Casey author photoRelevant History welcomes Donis Casey, author of the Alafair Tucker historical mysteries. This award-winning series features a sleuthing mother of ten children and is set in Oklahoma and Arizona during the booming 1910s. Book seven, Hell With the Lid Blown Off, will be released June 2014. Enjoy the first chapter of each book on her web site, look for her on Facebook, and check her biweekly blog posts about writing.

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The Tucker family of my Alafair Tucker series is partially based on a branch of my own family by the name of Morgan, of whom there are gazillions in Muskogee County, Oklahoma. My great-grandmother was named Alafair Morgan. For the past 25 years, I have lived in Tempe, Arizona, twelve hundred miles from the place where my books are set.

John BargerFor my fifth novel, Crying Blood (2011), I was unable to find the name of the sheriff of Muskogee County in 1916. So I called the library in the city of Muskogee and asked the local history librarian to look it up and e-mail the answer to me. Later that afternoon, she sent me a wonderful campaign photograph of Sheriff J.S. Barger. Once I knew his name, I was able to find his obituary online. From this I discovered that it is indeed a small world, and time does not dim our connections to one another.

Sheriff John Barger lost his reelection bid in 1918. He became a county “Speed Officer,” whose job was to curb the then-growing automobile menace, and was given a county patrol car to cruise country roads and highways. In 1924, the county’s “speed patrol” car was stolen from the garage by the Lawrence brothers, “Babe” and Bill, young Muskogee desperadoes who were wanted for auto theft in several towns around Oklahoma.

After unsuccessful attempts to catch them in Oklahoma, the sheriff of Muskogee County was notified that the pair had been apprehended in El Paso, Texas. He sent Deputy Barger and his partner, Joe Morgan—a cousin of my grandmother’s—to pick them up and bring them back to Muskogee. After taking charge of the prisoners, Barger and Cousin Joe started back with them in the county car. Barger was driving and Morgan was in the rear seat with the Lawrence boys.

Barger heard a shot, looked around and found himself peering down the barrel of a gun in Babe Lawrence’s hand. Cousin Joe Morgan was on the floor, shot through the head with his own pistol. The car, going at a rate of at least 20 miles an hour, crashed into a fence, righted itself and mowed down fence posts for 40 yards before stopping.

The boys forced Barger to walk off the road into the woods and handcuffed him to a tree, before escaping again in the county car. Barger shouted until he attracted the attention of a ranch hand, who refused the help him. He was handcuffed to the tree for three hours, until officers arrived and rescued him. He then went back to Ft. Worth, where he organized a posse and went after the Lawrence boys.

They were apprehended in Tempe, Arizona. Bill was later hanged in Arizona, and Babe served a life term in Texas. Barger died in 1938 at the age of 77.

How could I make up anything better than that?

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Crying Blood book coverA big thanks to Donis Casey. She’ll give away a trade paperback or hardback copy of her fifth book, Crying Blood, to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available worldwide.

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The Winner of Poisoned Ground

Polly Iyer has won a copy of Poisoned Ground by Sandra Parshall. Congrats to Polly!

Thanks to Sandra Parshall for showing us the history of destruction in Appalachia. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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Appalachia’s Bitter Legacy

Sandra Parshall author photoRelevant History welcomes Sandra Parshall, the author of six Rachel Goddard mysteries, set in current-day Virginia. Her 2006 debut, The Heat of the Moon, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her latest title is Poisoned Ground (March 2014). A longtime member of Sisters in Crime, she has served on the national board and managed the SinC members online community for many years. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, Gerald Parshall, a veteran Washington journalist. For more information, visit her website.

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The fight over a development project in my latest novel, Poisoned Ground, mirrors events taking place throughout the U.S. today, but for Appalachia it’s nothing new. The history of the southern mountains—southwestern Virginia, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee—where my series is set, is a long, sad tale of exploitation and degradation, with large corporations protected by government as they forced people off their land and destroyed the environment in pursuit of natural gas, timber, and above all, coal.

When big companies moved into Appalachia in the nineteenth century to exploit its mineral wealth, they paid farmers and homesteaders a pittance for “mineral rights” and assured them they would continue to own the surface land. However, the contracts authorized the companies to do whatever was necessary to extract the minerals, and that usually meant making the surface land uninhabitable for its “owners.” Corporations, which literally owned entire towns, put friendly politicians into local and state offices, and legislatures traditionally defended the companies against complaints and attempts at regulation.

Until the mid-20th century, underground coal mining provided the most secure employment for the men of Appalachia, although those jobs came at a huge cost to personal health: lung disease, injured backs, the constant specter of possible death in a cave-in or a fire ignited by a gas explosion. As many deep underground mines played out, companies increasingly went after the coal in seams inside the towering mountains.

Mountaintop Removal(Photo credit: National Resources Defense Council) Strip mining had been practiced for a hundred years, but in the 1970s a method even more devastating was adopted: mountaintop removal mining (MTR). The tops of the mountains are blown apart with explosives, and the resulting rubble is bulldozed out of the way. Today more than a million acres and more than 500 mountains, once densely forested havens for wildlife and people alike, have been reduced to wasteland by MTR mining, surrounding homes are buried under rubble, and streams run red with toxic chemicals draining from mine sites.

Times have changed, and citizens have risen up in protest against this wholesale destruction of the region, but so much damage has been done that no hope remains of returning the mountains to anything resembling their former pristine beauty. The cherished jobs are vanishing along with the landscape as machines replace men. Only two percent of Appalachia’s population is now employed in mining.

In the past the Melungeon people—who would have been ancestors of some of my characters—suffered in additional ways. Because they were mixed race and denied the rights of pure Caucasians, Melungeons were unceremoniously relieved of their farmland by any whites who wanted it, and were pushed up onto the highest, poorest mountain ridges to eke out a living. Many left the region in hope of better lives elsewhere, and to a large extent the group lost its identity until recent years, when people of Melungeon heritage began to rediscover their roots.

In today’s world we have civil rights laws to protect racial minorities, but landowners are still in for a battle when a big company sets its sights on their property. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that local governments can take private land by imminent domain and turn it over to corporations if the planned development will benefit the larger community’s economy. Individual property owners have no choice but to yield.

The Blue Ridge(Photo credit: Sandra Parshall) The plot of Poisoned Ground was inspired by Disney’s attempt in the 1990s to turn 3,000 acres of Virginia countryside into a massive theme park and housing development. A little community named Haymarket was at the center of the controversy. Family farms still exist out that way, a short driving distance from Washington, DC, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge and within the Appalachian geographical region. Because of its proximity to the nation’s capital, Disney thought the Haymarket area was the ideal spot for “Disney’s America,” which would supposedly celebrate our history while providing the usual moneymaking components of an amusement park.

Like the community in my story, the people of Haymarket and the surrounding area were fiercely divided over Disney’s proposal. Many thought it was a great idea that would bring jobs and modern development to an area languishing in the past. An equal number were appalled by this threat to their peaceful way of life. They lived in the countryside because they loved it and wanted their children to experience it. Even if their own property were left untouched, the Disney theme park would bring millions of tourists into the county every year, clogging the narrow roads and destroying a cherished bucolic lifestyle. Committees were formed, raucous meetings took place, lawsuits were threatened. In the end it became obvious that a majority of the residents opposed the project, and Disney gave up.

The Disney battle tore the small community apart. To this day, anger and resentment persist, and when the press does follow-up stories, plenty of residents are willing to re-debate the issue.

An article in the Washington Post about lingering bad feelings made me wonder what would happen if a big company proposed an intrusive development in my fictional community, set in far southwestern Virginia where placid farms exist alongside surface mines and logging operations. In Poisoned Ground I explore the personal cost of such a controversy, as it tempts some residents with the promise of jobs or big payoffs for their land and threatens a way of life that others hold dear. Families are divided, neighbors become enemies, old grudges and bad memories rise to the surface again—and several people are murdered.

My story is fiction. But sometimes when I read the news I can easily imagine protest demonstrations and petitions turning violent as ordinary citizens try to hold back rampant development and keep what they thought was theirs.

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Poisoned Ground book coverA big thanks to Sandra Parshall. She’ll give away a hardcover copy of Poisoned Ground to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available within the United States and Canada.

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A Couple of Guest Posts in April

Before we charge into the lusty month of May, enjoy my guest posts during the last part of April:

On Le Couer de Artiste, I talk about “Losing Myself in the Past” and the importance of Revolutionary War reenacting for my writing.

A Day in the Life of Michael Stoddard” on Dru’s Book Musings recounts April Fools Day 1781 (A Hostage to Heritage) from Michael’s point of view, in his voice.

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