Uncategorized
Who Should California Honor?
Father Junipero Serra. Christopher Columbus. Sir Francis Drake. Even Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the national anthem. What do most of the statues being toppled across California have in common? They’re figures from history who supported white supremacy. And they’re all men. So here’s a timely proposal. Why don’t we replace them…
Read More“Are you wearing a mask…?”
Donaldina Cameron and Tien Fuh Wu, two of the women whose life stories I weave together in The White Devil’s Daughters, lived through the terrible flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed upwards of 50 million people worldwide. Just as today’s Covid-19 pandemic has taken its steepest toll to date at nursing homes and other…
Read MoreAwarded Two Golden Poppies!
Each year, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) presents its Golden Poppy Book Awards “to recognize the most distinguished books written by writers and artists who make Northern California their home.” I learned yesterday that The White Devil’s Daughters, my history of a pioneering group of women in Chinatown that fought human trafficking at…
Read MoreFive Books of Narrative History
As a teen, I fell in love with narrative history — the use of classic storytelling techniques, such as characters, scenes, and dialogue — to write compelling histories. My first crush was on Barbara Tuchman, a journalist-turned-author who won the Pulitzer Prize for her books The Guns of August and Stillwell and the American Experience…
Read MoreThe local settings of my latest book…
The women who ran the Mission Home in THE WHITE DEVIL’S DAUGHTERS crossed the country for their work. They pursued sex trafficking cases and checked up on former residents in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Sacramento, Fresno, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. The charitable organization that supported them, the Occidental Board, was founded in the San…
Read MoreDisrupting the Business of Human Trafficking – Then and Now
In 1874, a group of women opened a “safe house” on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Because their work disrupted the thriving trade in women between China and America, they faced endless legal challenges and even sticks of dynamite placed on their doorstep. By offering a place for survivors of sex slavery and other…
Read MoreRemembering 1882
On Saturday, May 6th, several hundred protestors gathered in San Francisco’s historic Portsmouth Square in Chinatown carrying such signs as “Remember 1882” and “2017 Has Become 1882.” They were there to mark the 135th anniversary of the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law implemented to exclude a specific ethnic group…
Read MoreThe end of the library (as we know it?)
A few months ago, San Francisco’s venerable Mechanics’ Institute hosted a discussion titled “The End of the Library (As We Know It)?” As the oldest library in the city of San Francisco, the Mechanics’ Institute founded in 1854 and opened a year later with a grand total of four books, a chess room, and a…
Read MoreDevotees of the Bancroft Library: “We’re archive rats!”
This past Saturday, I went to the annual meeting of the Friends of the Bancroft Library. I love this University of California campus and especially U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, which houses some of the most precious and rare manuscripts of the American West. That day, I met other people — historians, authors, and avid readers…
Read MoreDispatches From Squaw’s Annual High-Altititude Literary Gathering
Almost a decade ago, I joined the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley for an intensive, week-long non-fiction workshop. It was a summer camp-like experience in the high Sierras. Each morning, about a dozen of us in the non-fiction workshop gathered around a table to critique each other’s manuscripts — usually discussing two submissions each…
Read More