I have never thought of 13 as a particularly unlucky number, but in the wee hours of April 14, 2015, I found out just how inauspicious it could be. I was peacefully asleep in London when the phone rang.

Beverly Louise Brown (left) with her late sister, Elizabeth Brown Pyror.

After a few seconds, I comatosely pulled myself out of bed to answer it, assuming that my 92-year-old mother had taken a turn for the worse. The voice at the other end of the line was sobbing, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” “Is it mother?” I asked. “No,” came the reply, “Elizabeth has been killed.”

On the afternoon of April 13, my sister, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, had been driving home from the dentist down a quiet street in Richmond, Virginia, when a manic-​depressive driver, who thought he could fly his car, rear-ended her beloved Audi TT at 107 miles per hour. She was killed instantly. He walked away unscathed. 

When I arrived in Richmond, I found her study stacked high with books on Abraham Lincoln, piles of the corrected pages of Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons and a phalanx of flash drives, where she had backed up each chapter and painstakingly stored her transcriptions of original documents. 

The previous January she had jubilantly called me in London to announce that she had finally finished her work on “the tyrant Lincoln.” It had been a long, slow gestation that had begun with a chance discovery in 2008. On the day she received the Lincoln Prize for Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, she had spent the morning doing research at the New-York Historical Society. When she arrived back at the flat where we were staying to change for dinner (into my new Armani jacket), she was ecstatic. Not in anticipation of receiving such a singular honor—although she was, of course, delighted to receive it—but because she had just discovered an unpublished drawing of Abraham Lincoln sketched in a letter written home during the Civil War. As she put it, “There sits Abraham Lincoln, with a familiarity almost unimaginable today, legs folded and tall hat in place, looking for all the world like a cricket perched on the nation’s front porch.” 

What had been a brief encounter in 1862 between the president and one of his military guards turned out to not only be a fascinating tale, but a springboard for investigating a neglected but significant aspect of Lincoln’s administration. Over the next seven years Elizabeth submerged herself in the letters, diaries and newspaper articles of the 1860s, carefully piecing together six episodes that explored Lincoln’s difficulty in managing a republic. Her own quarter-century career in the State Department gave her a unique perspective on how slowly the wheels of government turn and how our Founding Fathers’ insistence on a balance of power could cause the cogs of those wheels to lock in an unwelcome impasse. Few other Civil War historians could marry personal experience with scholarly insight in such a compelling way. As she was fond of saying, she had lived “-real-time” history. It was her unique ability to tie the various threads of her life experience together and reflect upon the lessons that she had learned which allowed her to render such a vivid picture of 19th-century American history.  

When I found the manuscript of Six Encounters after her death, the text, footnotes and bibliography were virtually ready for publication. She had meticulously highlighted in yellow any quotations or page numbers that needed to be rechecked. Only the preface was missing. I undertook the task of checking the footnotes, quotations and bibliography. She had ordered four or five photographs, but left no list of illustrations. I only knew that she had once told me that she wanted “a lot of pictures.” Luckily, as an art historian, ordering photographs is one thing I know how to do. As I read through the manuscript, I tried to visualize what she was describing and set about to find appropriate images. She may have never intended to illustrate the party given at the White House in February 1862, but when I found an illustration of it in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, I knew that it would be the perfect accompaniment to her account of the event. I was also able to unearth several drawings of Lincoln that were virtually unknown in the great canon of Lincoln scholarship. 

Elizabeth and I and our sister, Peggy, grew up listening to my mother’s tales of the Civil War with rapt attention. Not that mother herself had been around then, but as a child she spent hours sitting on the front porch in Terre Haute, Indiana, listening to the tales of her great-grandfather, John J. Kenley, who saw action at the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg and Mobile. The house was full of Civil War heirlooms, including the walnut bookcase made for his wedding in 1863, the fork from his mess kit and a pile of letters, one of which Elizabeth quotes in Six Encounters. Yet, as she often said, it was not the “stuff” that got her hooked on the Civil War, but mother’s storytelling ability. Mother died just four months after Elizabeth, but for seven years she had been able to follow the progress of the book from beginning to end, listening to the chapters as they were written. 

Taking on the task of polishing Elizabeth’s manuscript and seeing it through publication was a labor of love that took me outside my own comfort zone of Italian Renaissance art. For a year I gave up my own scholarship as I grappled with learning an entirely new field of history and cast of characters. I was acutely aware of needing to stay true to Elizabeth’s vision and not imposing my own views. I simply wanted to make certain the facts were correct and do her hard work justice. I have no words to express adequately my admiration for her achievement as a historian. I only know that more than once the sheer beauty of her prose brought tears to my eyes and that I miss her with all my heart every hour of every day.

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you think you know about the mob just because you've seen The Godfather, think again. Russell Shorto, author of Smalltime, about the little-known history of mobs in small-town America—and in his own family—dishes on eight things about the mob that might be unbelievable if they weren't true.

1. The mob was originally Arabic (sort of).

I knew practically nothing about the Mafia when I started looking into my grandfather’s life. I was aware from childhood that he was some kind of mob honcho in our town, and I think it was precisely this awareness that kept me from wanting to explore the subject: There was a kind of blanket of silence on the subject in my family, a tacit understanding that we don’t go there. Once I broke through that and began digging into Russ’ life (I was named after my grandfather), I was amazed at my ignorance of the topic. As for the name, nobody knows for sure where the term Mafia came from, but the best guess is that it originated from an Arabic word, mu'afa. Sicily, where the Mafia originated, was invaded countless times over the centuries, including by Arabs. The Sicilian language, which is actually classified as distinct from Italian, thus has elements of Greek, French, Catalan and many other languages, including some I’d never heard of (“Old Occitan”). In Sicilian, the term Mafia originally meant "a place of refuge." It seemed to relate to peasants' need to protect themselves against the many outside threats.

2. The mob came to America thanks to Italian unification.

For most of history, “Italy” wasn’t a thing. The Italian peninsula was broken up into many independent or vassal states, such as the Duchy of Lucca and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Risorgimento, or Italian Unification, was a long series of wars and crises, the end result of which was an independent nation called Italy in 1861. Many Italians celebrated, but those in the south mostly did not. There was a bitter and long-standing divide between north and south, with northerners believing that they represented the ideals of the Roman Empire and that southerners were backward, lazy and stupid. When independence came, it was northern Italians who ran the country, and they proceeded to crack down viciously on the south, worsening the region’s already disastrous economic plight. That forced millions of southern Italians to migrate.

3. Abraham Lincoln played a role—OK, an indirect one—in the establishment of the Mafia in America.

Italian unification coincided with the American Civil War, during which Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Once the war was over and formerly enslaved people were free, plantation owners looked elsewhere for people willing to pick cotton and do other backbreaking work. They looked to Sicily, where people were facing starvation, and began advertising for workers. Coal mines, especially in Pennsylvania and New York, soon began doing the same thing. My great-grandfather was one of those who answered the call. He boarded a boat in Messina, Italy, and landed in New York, where a company rep gave him lunch and a train ticket to Pennsylvania to work in the mines.

4. The mob was a reaction to American racism.

Racism was strong and matter-of-fact in the version of America to which southern Italians immigrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. People of African origin, who had until recently been viewed as property, were essentially considered subhuman by many white Protestants. Sicilians were soon ranked at the same level. (By one reckoning, Sicilians were paid slightly less per day than Black Americans.) In my family, I heard stories of abuse and extreme poverty. Southern Italians weren’t able to open bank accounts, let alone hold good jobs.

5. The mob grew out of Prohibition.

My great-grandmother brewed moonshine in a still in her living room during Prohibition, and my grandfather, the future mobster, went out on the streets and sold Coke bottles filled with the stuff. They were both working for a neighborhood leader, a kind of proto-mob figure. This was typical around the country: Poor Italian immigrants took advantage of the opportunity that the ban on alcohol provided. Once Prohibition ended, those same Italians shifted from booze to gambling, and the mob as we know it came into being. When my grandfather was a young man, he was blocked from mainstream businesses, so he started a gambling operation, which grew into what one old-timer estimated was a $2 million-a-year enterprise.

6. The mob was crazy about American capitalism.

The men who founded the American mob admired the country’s titans of industry—people like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and J.P. Morgan. The fact that those robber barons were a law unto themselves, bending the government to their will, only made them more admirable. The mob saw capitalism for what it was in the days before regulation took hold—a ruthless free market enterprise—and loved it. They were barred from participating themselves because of their ethnicity, so they copied it as much as they could, including doing things like opening branches around the country. My grandfather and his brother-in-law opened a gambling franchise in my hometown, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. His brother-in-law had two aliases he occasionally used: Ford and Forbes, which I think speaks to his admiration for American capitalists.

7. The mob was everywhere.

Most people know the Chicago mob, the Philadelphia mob and of course the New York mob. But in its heyday, the mob spread to virtually every small- to medium-size city in the country. The Freedom of Information Act requests I filed with the FBI yielded accounts of mob activity in places as far-flung as Butte, Montana, and Anchorage, Alaska. In big cities the mob got into all kinds of activity—drugs, prostitution, garbage, construction—but in most smaller cities, it restricted itself to gambling. In my hometown, I found no references to drugs or prostitution, and in fact the old boys I interviewed said that my grandfather and his partner had a firm rule against getting involved in drugs. That was one of the main differences between small-town mobs and mobs operating in big cities. Another was the intimacy. Everyone above a certain age whom I interviewed in Johnstown knew what my grandfather was up to, even people who weren't involved with it themselves. That's because everyone played the numbers. People thought of the mob as a kind of public utility, providing entertainment to the masses.

8. A lot of people made their living from the mob.

You didn’t have to be in the mob to make a living from it back in the day. My grandfather and his partner ran a numbers game that virtually the whole town played, which employed about a hundred people. Some had day jobs and ran numbers on the side; others were full-time bookies. Most of them were essentially self-employed, and they paid a portion of their proceeds to “the boys.” Hundreds of others were likewise employed by the mob, directly or indirectly, in pool halls, bars and cafes. Numbers runners made the small-town mob a feature of midcentury American life. You could meet up and do business with them at your favorite hangout. Or they would even come to your door. Most people experienced it as a regular feature of the neighborhood. Or, you might say, as part of the American experience.