Category Archives: American history

Epidemics – Yellow Fever

Posted on by

ellow fever

Yellow fever is a viral disease spread by an infected female mosquito. It began in Africa and was transported to the New World via the slave trade. Because it was so prevalent in Africa, many Africans had some immunity to it. But so many white men died in what is now Nigeria, it was called ‘white man’s grave.’

In most cases, symptoms include the usual: fever, chills, loss of appetite, muscle pains particularly in the back, and headaches, exactly like other diseases such as the flu. Symptoms typically improve within five days. In about 15% of people, within a day of improving the fever comes back, abdominal pain occurs, and liverdamage causes jaundice. Because of this, yellow fever has been nicknamed Yellow Jack and Bronze John. Death occurs in up to half of those who get severe disease. A vaccine exists for yellow fever and some countries require it before travel.

 Although yellow fever is most prevalent in tropical-like climates, major epidemics have occurred in Africa, Europe and the Americas.  New York City had an outbreak in 1668 and other cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore had outbreaks in 1669. All three saw other occurrences in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1793, Philadelphia, which was then the capital of the country saw an epidemic. Several thousand people died. (The government at that time fled the city.)  Dr. Benjamin Rush gained fame during this disaster. A great book to read about this episode in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793.

Since the disease traveled along steamboat routes, New Orleans suffered many major epidemics during the 19th centuries, causing 100,000 – 150,000 deaths in total. It was greatly feared and the wealthy abandoned the city to summer homes to escape the disease. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series refers to Yellow fever throughout.

More about voting -elections 1796-1800

Posted on by

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, a quote ascribed to writer and philosopher George Santayana. Variations have been popularized by different speakers.

Well, whoever created this saying was right.

I thought of this as I did research for my next book (after Death in the Great Dismal) which is tentatively titled Murder on Principle. I happened to come across a number of interesting factoids about the election in 1800; a contest between John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (This was the fourth election but since George Washington basically ran unopposed in the first two, in actual fact it was the second contest.) 

When George Washington had opted not to run again for a third term, both 

Adams and Jefferson ran to replace him. Adams won, narrowly, in this third election. Since there were no parties, the candidate with the next highest number of votes became the vice president. So, while Adams became the President, Thomas Jefferson became his vice-president. (The chasm between the beliefs of these two men was deep; Think Trump as President and Hillary Clinton as his vice-president.) The two men faced off in the following election cycle -1800 – causing a constitutional crisis. To solve it, Adams ran as a Federalist and Jefferson as a Republican.

The Federalists were more akin to our current Republican party while Jefferson was like our modern day Democrats. (Just to illustrate the difference between them, Jefferson worried that without term limits the President could serve for a lifetime. Adams thought that was a fine idea.) 

The Electoral College had been already formed. (I leave the discussion to whether it is still needed now to another day.) Jefferson and Adams won an equal number of votes, a result that threw the election into the hands of the House.

For people who believe our current politics are nasty, here are a few examples of what was happening then.

Alexander Hamilton claimed that if Adams was reelected, Virginians (like Jefferson) would resort to physical force to keep the Federalists out of office. Further, he tried to persuade John Jay to change the rules so that the legislature would not be able to choose the Jefferson electoral delegates, saying that it would ‘prevent an atheist in Religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of state.” Jay refused.

Adams, furthermore, as one of his last acts, chose John Marshall as Chief Justice, thereby giving control of the courts to the Federalists.

Jefferson, meanwhile, believed that Adams and the Federalists would seek to change the laws so that a President could serve for life.

Sound familiar?

Voting -in 1800

Posted on by

Some fun facts about 1800 election

The voters did not elect the president. They chose instead their representatives for the House. This caused a problem (more than one IMHO). If Congress chose the President, that violated the principle of separation of powers. So how to do it?

The Electoral College was set up to address this; the voters elected the delegates who chose the President. (Sounds unnecessarily complicated to me.) Each delegate had two votes, one for President, and one for VP. (In the previous election, Adams won the Presidency and Jefferson the vice-presidency so the top officials were of different parties. (And the men disliked each other and disagreed on almost every point. Imagine if this were Trump and Hillary Clinton?) If the delegates had chosen to use their votes for Burr, instead of becoming Jefferson’s VP he would have become president. He was pressured to remove his name in the event he received more votes; he declined to do so.

The candidates themselves did not campaign. The supporters did the campaigning, and the newspapers were every bit as passionate in declaring for their favored candidate as they are now.

Fun fact: the meeting they held to decide this was called a caucus. This is an Algonquian word meaning advisor.

The polls that our current candidates live and die on had a totally different meaning back then.

Since poll meant the top of a head, polling meant counting heads.

Maryland was the first state to require voting on paper (in 1799).

Ballots meant tossing a ball into a box, usually a pea, a pebble, or commonly, a bullet. It was not secret at all.

Out of a total U.S. population of 5.23 million, only 600,000 were eligible to vote. Only in Maryland could a black man vote and then only until 1802 when the law was changed. Only in New Jersey could a white woman vote, and that was changed in 1807. Generally speaking, the only citizens who could vote were white landowning males.

Finally, the House was set up in such a way that the number of representatives is based on population. (That is one reason why a census is taken every ten years.) But the southern states had large populations of slaves, which skewed the number, especially since the enslaved people could not vote. So it was decided that each enslaved person should count as three fifths of a white person. (The law caused a lot of resentment in the North since a state like Virginia, that had a lot of slaves, had much more political power based on a non-voting population.)

It just boggles the imagination.

Goodreads Giveaway

Posted on by

A Circle of Dead Girls was just formally released on March 3rd. (I say formally because Amazon had it in mid-February.)

Death in the Great Dismal will come out October 7.

These titles are eight and nine, respectively.

Since it has been many years since the publication of the first three in the Will Rees saga, (and also because with people kept at home because of the corona virus – COVID-19, they have more time to read) I am offering a Goodreads giveaway of A Simple Murder:

Yes, I will be giving away three books to three lucky winners. Go to Goodreads to sign on.

More about the Tarot

Posted on by

Why did I include the Tarot in A Circle of Dead Girls? The short answer is I wanted to be able to comment on the action and on Rees’s investigation in an oblique way. Although Bambola is the character who believes in the cards, she also does not listen to what they are saying to her. And Rees, although he is skeptical of anything that is not concrete, is surprised by the accuracy of some of the readings.

Do I believe? Well, I have friends who do. The readings they have done for me have sometimes been surprisingly accurate. So how does one align something that purports to foretell the future with the practicalities of the here and now?

I believe that some people are unusually intuitive. We all use non-verbal clues to understand another person’s distress, anger or joy. Some of us are amazingly good at that. I suspect that the cards allow this intuitive reader to focus and, in doing so, really hone in on the person sitting on the other side of the table and understand far more about them than they might consciously.

One further note about the tarot my mystery. Bambola associates justice with Rees. I would postulate that most of the protagonists in mystery novels have that passion. They don’t give up even when threatened with death. And a good thing for those of us who love reading mystery novels.

The Tarot – and Will Rees

Posted on by

In A Circle of Dead Girls, Will Rees meets a character who uses tarot cards for divination.

I’ve gotten a couple of questions about whether Tarot cards were even around then. Weren’t they all the rage in the sixties?

The cards were actually popularized (for the first time!) in the 1400s and were used as, well, playing cards. There were four suits. The ‘trump’ cards were added later. It is thought that tarot cards came from Egypt.

From the deck I used.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the tarot cards were being used for divination. The first deck specifically created for divination was produced in 1789. There have been successive waves of interest since then and yes, the late sixties saw saw a surge.

So it is perfectly possible that Rees would have seen a deck of tarot cards, especially from someone of Italian extraction.

Why did I choose to use the tarot and the more occult use of tarot? Will Rees, after all, is a character with his feet firmly rooted in the practical. Did I include a supernatural element to this mystery? After all, Rees is astonished by the accuracy of some of Bambola’s readings. Although I left the door open for that interpretation, I chose that mechanism to show something of Bambola’s character. She believes in the readings but ignores what they say to her.

The Feral Chicken

Posted on by

In the interests of accuracy, I research many many things for inclusion into my books. I’ve dyed with indigo, for example . (And what an adventure that was; it smells like rancid pee.) I’ve gone interesting places, such as Salem (for Death in Salem) and the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia (for Death in the Great Dismal).

And I try different recipes and eat things I might not otherwise eat, such as a Shaker pie made of heavily sugared sliced fresh lemons (so sour it could not be eaten) or ployes (a kind of pancake made from buckwheat and not bad.)

My latest experiment – a free range chicken. My husband and I belong to a CSA. They have a chicken share but this offering was not from the share. It was a hen past her egg laying days. So, in the spirit of adventure – and tasting a chicken as our ancestors might have, I took a chicken.

I was warned to stew it gently which I did. I have tasted venison that was more flavorful and tenderer than this chicken. In addition, the chicken was so small it would not have fed a hungry man. The drumsticks had about an oz of meat on them. If this was an example of the chickens available back then, it is no wonder the early colonists relied on hunting.

Death in the Great Dismal

Posted on by

Very excited to reveal the cover for my next Will Rees mystery: Death in the Great Dismal. It will be released early fall. In this book, Will and Lydia travel to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia to rescue a free black woman, taken from Maine and enslaved, who has fled to the swamp. One of the other maroons is murdered – but Will and Lydia are on the case.

I have had many wonderful covers but this one is exceptional.

Goodreads Giveaway – A Circle of Dead Girls

Posted on by

Although I planned to schedule the giveaway to hit just before the release date – March 3 – the book is available now!

So sign up for you copy on Goodreads.

The circus has come to town. Rees drives in to see a performance but sees his old nemesis, Magistrate Hanson, instead. Returning home, Rees meets up with a group of Shakers who are searching for a missing girl. Rees agrees to help search – and they find the girl’s murdered body in a field.

The Great Dismal Swamp, Again

Posted on by

Next March, A Circle of Dead Girls will be released. It has already been released in the UK.

The Will Rees Mystery that will come out after, probably next summer, is titled Death in the Great Dismal. As one may guess, this mystery takes Will and Lydia to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia.

Since I always find it easier to imagine my characters in the location in which the mystery takes place, I have visited the swamp again. What an amazing place!

Loblolly pines. Even in the winter, when the leaves have dropped, it is difficult to see through the vegetation. The pines grow on drier islands in the swamp. This is where the maroons, the escaped slaves, would have set up camps.
One of the many streams in the swamp. The water is black. Tannin leaches from the roots of the cypress. Although the water is safe to drink, any fabric or lighter surface will be dyed brown by the water. Look closely. All the water ways are edges with the stubs of trees where the beavers have gnawed them down.
Downed trees are everywhere. I describe this scene in my book, although Rees finds a clue at the water’s edge.