Non-fiction
| Good Fellows: The Walpole Society | The Walpole Society, a small, all-male, and very exclusive group of collectors and scholars of Americana, was founded in 1910. From the beginning the men decided their purpose was to share knowledge and enjoy one another’s company while visiting private and public collections together. And they have continued to do that, publishing since 1926 in their annual Note Book the record of their journeys. |
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| Grief Ephemeral | More about Grief Ephemeral is available on Wendy Call's website. |
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| Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism | ||
| Inventing Niagara | Americans call Niagara Falls a natural wonder, but the Falls aren't very natural anymore. Water diverted, riverbed reshaped, landscape redesigned, stabilized and flanked with cheap thrills, the Falls are more a monument to man's meddling than to nature's strength. Seamlessly weaving together science, history, aesthetics, and personal narrative, Inventing Niagara traces the path of America's best-loved natural wonder from sublime icon to engineering marvel to camp spectacle. |
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| Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed | Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed |
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| Red House: Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England's Oldest Continuously Lived-In House | Red House explores the history of her family home in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Her parents had purchased the home in 1965 from the Hatch family, the same family who had built and lived in the house for 325 years. |
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| I am a Stranger Here Myself | Part history, part memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself taps the deepest dimensions of human yearning: the need to belong, the snarl of family history, and embracing womanhood in the patriarchal American West. Debra Gwartney becomes fascinated with the missionary Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, the first Caucasian woman to cross the Rocky Mountains and one of fourteen people killed at the Whitman Mission in 1847 by a band of Cayuse. Whitman’s role as a white woman drawn in to “settle” the West reflects the tough-as-nails women in Gwartney’s own family. |
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| Hope is the Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds | When I was an undergraduate at Indiana University I was awed by the size and scope of the Main Library. I marveled at the huge foyer and the sprawling card-catalog. After I graduated, I had a couple of jobs in the library system and briefly considered a library science degree. Turns out, I loved libraries. Even after moving to Kansas, I returned to use the IU Library while I began to research the curious natural histories of extinct North American birds. That journey had started along the Kansas River when I saw what turned out to be a pair of black-hooded conures being chased by a hawk. |