Adept at spinning historical events into gripping narratives, Erik Larson couldn't resist the storytelling potential of the Lusitania. 

You started reading about the Lusitania on a whim. What was the discovery that led you to decide to write a book about its last crossing?
What drew me, really, was not so much any single discovery, but rather my realization that the array of archival materials available on the subject—the palette of narrative elements—would allow me to tell the story in a way it had not yet been told. Telegrams, codebooks, love letters, the submarine commander’s war log, depositions, interrogation reports—all of it. For me it’s like heroin.

You’ve always been a remarkable researcher, finding amazing details to tell your story. What were your biggest research scores for Dead Wake?
The best elements are the telegrams to and from the German U-boat that were intercepted and decoded by the British. It was kind of thrilling to see the actual paper decodes in the National Archives of the UK. Probably my favorite moment was when one box yielded the immense German codebook that opened the way for the British to begin reading all of Germany’s naval communications, with Germany utterly unaware. This was the actual book—the one that, according to one account, was recovered from the arms of a drowned German sailor.

Do you have a personal favorite among the passengers whose lives you so vividly describe?
Well, I’d have to say I particularly like Dwight Harris. His account, first of all, was very detailed—that’s why I chose him. That’s also why I chose my other central characters; I swoon for detail. But what I loved most was the charm of Harris’ story, which he told in a letter to his mother. He was a young guy, and was clearly tickled to have gone through this nightmare and survived. I also very much liked Theodate Pope. She too left a detailed account. But I especially liked her backstory. She was one of the country’s first licensed female architects; she was an early feminist, at a time when the term itself was brand new; and she was deeply interested in exploring the mysteries of the mind and the possibility that there just might be an after-life. She was a character with a lot of nuance, and I love nuance. Heroes, frankly, are boring. 

In your telling, the Lusitania itself has a kind of personality, “conceived out of hubris and anxiety.” Are there things you learned about the ship that you found particularly compelling?
Everything. At heart I’m still a little boy. But, what I found most compelling was the sheer physical effort needed to power the ship—the volumes of coal, the innumerable furnaces, all fed by men with shovels, 24 hours a day. One of the amazing things about the ship, and the era’s emphasis on speed, was that with all boilers operating it could move at 25 knots, or nearly 30 miles an hour, and cross the Atlantic in five days—faster than a typical crossing on the Queen Mary 2 today. No wonder its passengers, and captain, believed it to be invulnerable. 

Walter Schwieger, who commanded the U-boat that sank the Lusitania, was beloved by his crew and ruthless in his willingness “to torpedo a liner full of civilians.” Was he typical of U-boat captains during World War I?
One of my favorite archival finds was a collection of interrogation reports done by British intelligence agents who had questioned captured German submariners. These reports convey a vivid sense of the dangers of U-boat life, and of the character of U-boat commanders. All U-boat captains were achingly young, with wide variation in personality. Some were ruthless, some chivalrous, some kind, some brutal. At least one was renowned for his inability to hit anything with a torpedo.

Your portrait of President Wilson in emotional turmoil was fascinating. To what extent do you think his grief over the loss of his first wife and his later passionate pursuit of Edith Galt colored his responses to international affairs? 
It’s hard to say. Clearly at the time the Lusitania was sunk, Wilson’s emotional self was in an uproar, thanks to his incredibly passionate love for Edith, and this doubtless contributed to a remark he made in a speech in Philadelphia that fell flat. Like dead. He said America was “too proud to fight,” which utterly missed the point, and drew ridicule from his opponents. 

Capt. William Thomas Turner, whom you wonderfully describe as a man “with the physique of a bank safe,” ends up being scapegoated by the British Admiralty for the Lusitania sinking. Seems pretty outrageous, doesn’t it?
Seems outrageous to me, but the Admiralty had ample incentive to try laying the blame entirely on Turner. Too many secrets needed protecting. 

Winston Churchill, as head of the British Admiralty, has a behind-the-scenes role in the saga of the Lusitania. Did your research into his role in any way change your opinion of Churchill?
Not really. I love Churchill as a historic character. Always have, always will. He was a brilliant man imbued with a reckless energy, and he was utterly ruthless. What I hadn’t fully appreciated, however, was his role in the disastrous Gallipoli affair. His mad energy and ego cost him dearly in WWI, but served him very well in the war that followed.  

Do you believe, as some have suggested, that the British Admiralty’s failure to protect the Lusitania in spite of its secret intelligence of the whereabouts of German U-boats, was a deliberate gamble to bring the U.S. into the war?
There’s no smoking memo or letter or telegram to confirm it. And certainly, at first glance, you’d have to be skeptical that any agency would deliberately allow 2,000 people to be killed. On the other hand, the fact the Lusitania was left to itself, without escort, and with only the most cursory of warnings, is utterly mystifying. For one prominent naval historian, whom I quote in my book, the circumstances were profoundly perplexing. Late in life he found himself forced to conclude that some sort of conspiracy likely occurred. But, again, that’s only speculation. I lay out a collection of evidence; readers can do with it what they will. 

Why was it important for your narrative to include the details of an autopsy that you warn squeamish readers about in your introductory note?
First of all, the mere fact that someone would want an autopsy done on a body that had been in the water for 75 days struck me as incredible—the likely artifact of deep, shattering grief. But the whole saga of finding that gentleman’s body, and all that happened afterward, struck me as something that offered a brand new view of the era and its customs. Further, it’s new; I stumbled across it by accident in files in the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Md. And new is good—though finding new things was certainly not my goal. Story was my goal. 

You write that false facts about the sinking of the Lusitania have sort of entered the DNA of the history of this event. What are the most egregious errors, and how have you tried to counteract them?
The most significant misapprehension is that the sinking of the Lusitania immediately dragged America into World War I. It did not. During my work on the book I would ask friends and family how long they thought it took for America to enter the war after the sinking. Estimates ranged from two days to several months. But in fact, America did not declare war for two full years, and when Wilson gave his speech to Congress asking for such a declaration he never once mentioned the Lusitania.  

Finally, what are the unresolved mysteries about the sinking of the Lusitania that plague you the most?
By the time I finished my research I was pretty satisfied with my understanding of the event. It’s very clear that one commonly claimed “fact”—that the ship was armed with naval guns—was utterly untrue. There were no guns aboard the Lusitania. Another body of rumor holds that there was a secret cache of explosives in its cargo holds, possibly disguised as shipments of cheese or oysters, and that this accounted for why the ship sank so quickly. There may indeed have been a secret cargo, but whether such a shipment existed or not is irrelevant. Explosive cargo had nothing to with the sinking. The Lusitania sank that fine May afternoon because of the chance convergence of a multitude of forces. A single variation in any vector could have saved the Lusitania.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Dead Wake.

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Judy, a purebred English pointer born in Shanghai in 1936, was clearly one special dog: The only canine POW of World War II, she survived the grueling experience thanks to her friend and protector, Royal Air Force technician Frank Williams. When the transport ship on which the two were being moved came under attack, Frank pushed Judy through a porthole into the South China Sea to save her life. It was one of many close calls she would endure during more than three years in captivity.

Robert Weintraub, an author (The Victory Season) and sportswriter for Slate, the New York Times and other publications, tells the duo’s amazing story in No Better Friend: One Man, One Dog, and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage and Survival in WWII.

How did you first find out about Judy and get interested in this story?
Total serendipity. I happened to be flipping through the pages of a collection of lists and arcana called The People’s Almanac, which I’ve loved since I was a boy. I was just idly looking, but of course the writer in me was subconsciously on the lookout for a story. So when I saw a couple of paragraphs under the heading “The Pooch POW,” I knew I had to investigate further. The more I dug into Judy’s story after that, the more amazed I became. I knew I had to write about her.

His main priority was not his own survival but the safety of a dog he had just met. That’s pretty amazing stuff.

While No Better Friend focuses on Frank Williams and his partnership with Judy, it is also a fabulous explication of lesser-known aspects of WWII. Did you know much about this time period before beginning your research?
I’ve always been a WWII buff, so I knew the broad strokes, but I certainly had no idea about the incredible details of the evacuation of Singapore, the building of the “Death Railway” in Sumatra, and many of the other smaller but amazing stories in that corner of the Pacific theater.

The details of life in a WWII POW camp are riveting. How did you conduct your research? Were you able to visit any historic sites?
I was all set to go to Sumatra to visit the POW camps, but then I discovered that virtually nothing remains of them. Instead, I spent a lot of time in the U.K. National Archives and the research rooms at the Imperial War Museum, both in London, and I hired a professional researcher based there to further assist me. I visited Frank’s hometown of Portsmouth, and hunted through the files at the Merchant Navy Archives in Southampton. Many accounts, including some of Frank’s personal memories, were in Dutch, so I had to get those translated before using them. And of course, I read memoirs and histories and accounts of the camps by the dozens.

What impressed you most about Frank's story?
Probably the way he gave himself over so completely to the protection of an animal while he was so far gone physically in the camps. He suffered from severe hunger, malnutrition, malaria, dysentery and beriberi, along with physical punishment from the guards and the endless, punishing work. Yet his main priority was not his own survival but the safety of a dog he had just met. That’s pretty amazing stuff.

This must have been an immersion. How long did the book take to write?
Yes, it did take over my life for a good year and a half or more. It could have been more, of course, but at a certain point the publisher says that’s enough already, we’re printing this as is.

What surprised you the most as you uncovered the details of Judy and Frank's ordeal?
Several things—Judy’s ability to stay alive in the camps and along the railway was extraordinary, and how she managed to elude the guards through her uncanny communication system with Frank. How the other men along the railway took strength from Judy’s survival, and the inspiration they drew from her every day she wasn’t shot by the Japanese. And of course the very idea that Frank talked the Japanese commander into actually making Judy an official POW, with a serial number and everything, was historic and sets her story apart even from other stories of canine heroics during the war.

Do you have a dog? How does he/she compare to Judy?
I grew up with a great golden retriever named Rookie, who wasn’t nearly as intelligent or brave as Judy, but was great in his own way. I have a pair of young children, so we are waiting until they are able to take care of the dog (at least a little) to get one now. When I do, I’m sure it will be an English pointer!

What are you working on now?
I’m in the midst of a couple of longform pieces about sports for Grantland/ESPN and Sports Illustrated, and of course I’m busy publicizing No Better Friend!

If readers become interested in WWII after reading your book, what other reading recommendations might you have?
Boy, there are so many aspects of the war, so many titles. I’d say off the top of my head Hiroshima by John Hersey, D-Day by Stephen Ambrose, With The Old Bree: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge, and A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan are must-reads.

And even though they are fiction, novels like War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut do a great job of capturing what the war was like.

Deborah Hopkinson is an award-winning children's author whose many books for young readers include Sky Boys and the forthcoming Courage & Defiance: Stories of Spies, Saboteurs, and Survivors in World War II Denmark (Scholastic).

RELATED CONTENT: Read a review of No Better Friend.

Author photo: Liz Stubbs

Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches, a brilliant, exceptionally well-researched account of the 1692 Salem witch trials, says her number one requirement when writing her prize-winning nonfiction books is “a big desk, an enormous desk!”

“You’re synthesizing massive amounts of raw material,” she explains during a call to her home just north of the grand, Beaux-Arts main branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, a favorite haunt. Schiff speaks rapidly and with enthusiasm. “For whatever reason, I physically like to have the maps, my notes, the articles and the books all on my desk while I’m working. I just can’t do that on a small-size desk.”

In fact, Schiff works at two enormous desks—one in Manhattan and one in Canada. Throughout her married life, Schiff and her husband, a Canadian businessman, have had a commuter marriage. “He’s the one who does the commuting. The kids [two sons, 15 and 24, and a daughter, 21] went to school in the U.S. So for the school year we’ve always been here. He goes back and forth. Then in the summer and holidays, when I get a huge amount of writing done, we decamp to Canada.” Her husband, she adds, is “an incredibly astute reader,” one of two trusted first-readers of her work.

Admiring readers of Schiff’s Cleopatra, her widely hailed 2010 biography of the Egyptian ruler, or Vera, her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, know her to be a remarkable researcher. 

“I like to feel documents,” Schiff says, when asked about her methods. “I like to touch them, I like to smell them, I like to read them in the original!”

Schiff’s passion for primary documents proved particularly important in piecing together the story of a disturbing chapter in early American history.

“This is an episode we go to over and over again and can’t quite seem to resolve. It gets under the skin and enchants,” she says. “It’s a chapter that everyone thinks they know well but truthfully have great misconceptions about. Most people think the witches were burned. [They were hanged.] Most people have no idea that it included 19 people. Or that it took place over nine months. Or that men were also victims, including a minister! People aren’t sure about when it took place. Halfway between Plymouth Rock and Paul Revere, there’s this sort of strange wasteland in American history. You forget that there was this very different early America.”

Much of what is so compelling about The Witches is how vividly Schiff brings this very different era to life. 

Schiff offers a nearly day-by-day account of the conflagration that is tactile in its detail.

The Puritans lived in near-constant dread of Native-American attacks. They contended with starvation during long, arduous winters in tightly enclosed spaces. Little wonder, Schiff notes, that it was in January and February that the overworked, sensory-deprived adolescent girls in the household of Salem’s minister were overtaken by fits of twitching and barking. The affliction spread.

Add to the mix the foreboding Puritan sensibility, and a skeptical modern reader can almost begin to understand the diagnoses of witchcraft. Of her four years of working on the book, of “disappearing into another century,” Schiff says, “It was a pretty dark and chilly place to live. This is a very bleak religion, in which you are meant to feel at all times off-kilter and inadequate. You are haunted by that horrible Puritan riddle—am I going to be saved or am I going to be damned? At some point I thought the first line should have been, ’This is a book about anxiety.’ ”

The Puritans were also a highly literate and highly litigious people. Neighbor sued neighbor for trespass or pigs in the garden seemingly at the drop of a hat. Carefully kept court records bloomed. And the Puritan elite—political leaders, court officials and ministers—wrote voluminous letters and kept personal journals. But the records of the nine-month witchcraft mania are curiously spotty, perhaps deliberately so.

Nevertheless, by keeping a careful chronology and uncovering “the interesting coincidences, the patterns”—by reading between the lines—Schiff offers a nearly day-by-day account of the conflagration that is tactile in its detail. Building on an account by John Alden, an eminent community member who was one of more than 100 people jailed in the widening gyre of accusations before finally being released, Schiff offers an astonishing description of the packed, smelly, raucous courtroom in which the teenage girls writhed and flitted between judges and accused, pointing to witches in the rafters. And she shrewdly reverse-engineers the hazy record to help us understand the charges against George Burroughs, the little-known, Harvard-educated minister who was hanged for being the supposed leader of this confederacy of witches.

Schiff’s account also draws deeply on Cotton Mather, a young, charismatic, spiritual and intellectual leader of the colony, who was often equivocal as events unfolded. “He’s so fascinating, so unctuous, so prolific, so all over the place and so desperate for the spotlight,” Schiff says. “He shouldn’t be blamed, but he’s at the white-hot center every step of the way. Looking at [the originals of] his letters, I was able to see where he crossed out, what he had trouble with, what he stalled on, what he emphasized. It gives you a strong sense of what everyone was listening to because he’s among the top authorities on the subject.”

Noting that earlier books about the witch trials “are very thesis driven,” Schiff felt her book “could only work if you just tell the story.” While she does sow seeds along the way, only in the final chapters of The Witches does Schiff offer her own fascinating analysis of the complex set of causes that probably underlie the witchcraft charges, the sudden passing of the storm and the years of denial about the persecution of innocents. In Schiff’s telling, this is an old story with contemporary implications.

This narrative approach works so well because Schiff just happens to be a superb and witty writer. Asked about her sometimes droll humor, she says that after reading an early draft of the book, one Yale scholar told her he didn’t know the Puritans could be this much fun.

“I do feel,” she explains, “that at some point you can only write in your own voice. I was aware that I had to be careful with this book—it’s a very sobering subject. On the one hand, you need to feel sympathy for all of these people, including the ones who are driving the prosecution forward for what they consider to be their own good reasons. On the other hand, you need to be interesting and you need to be vivid and you need to be lively. I decided that even while I told this relatively dark story, there was no reason why I couldn’t sparkle on the page.”

And The Witches definitely sparkles.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

"It’s the best story in town, but no one has been able to get it,” a photographer told journalist Beth Macy soon after she arrived in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1989 to write for the Roanoke Times. 

He was referring to the tale of George and Willie Muse, young albino African-American brothers from a sharecropping family who had reportedly been kidnapped in 1899 from the tiny tobacco-farming community of Truevine, then displayed for decades as sideshow freaks by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. They were billed under various stage names, including “Eko and Iko, Sheepheaded Cannibals from Equador” and “Ambassadors from Mars.”

It took Macy 25 years to unearth the brothers’ sad saga, requiring painstaking research on multiple fronts to try to “untangle a century of whispers from truth.” The result is a deeply moving and endlessly compelling book, such an intricate tale that it’s worthy of not one but two subtitles—Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South.

Thankfully, Macy had the much-needed investigative chops, having been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and written an award-winning bestseller, Factory Man. Still, she ran into plenty of dead ends, she says by phone from her home in Roanoke.

George Muse died in 1971, but Willie lived out his last years in Roanoke, cared for by his great-niece Nancy Saunders, the proprietor of a popular soul-food restaurant. As the family gatekeeper, Saunders wouldn’t let reporters anywhere near her beloved uncle.

“You’re too curious,” Saunders told Macy when she began inquiring, pointing to a sign that said, “SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP.” After dealing with decades of people knocking on her family’s doors, demanding to see “the savages,” Saunders had developed what Macy calls an “exterior toughness . . . so that people wouldn’t ask rude questions about her uncle.”

After Willie died in 2001, Macy was allowed to co-write a series of articles about the Muse brothers for the Roanoke Times, although Saunders remained guarded. Finally, on Christmas morning 2013, Saunders gave Macy her blessing to write a book, with one proviso: “No matter what you find out or what your research turns up, you have to remember: In the end, they came out on top.” 

The going was anything but easy; even seemingly simple facts proved to be roadblocks. “It’s so frustrating,” Macy explains. “George was born anytime between 1890 and 1901, and that’s a pretty big span.”

Macy began interviewing older African Americans who had grown up with the story. “Some of them just thought it was a hoax,” Macy says. “Some of them thought it was true; some of them lived near George and Willie in their later years and were scared of them like a Boo Radley figure.”

Macy drove the elders around town, listening eagerly as they shared memories sparked by passing landmarks. “Trying to figure out what happened was a challenge,” Macy recalls, “but also trying to figure out what the lore meant to people in the community as well as the family was a whole other layer of meaning to the story.”

In Truevine, Macy has created a vivid portrait of two men whose lives were forever upended one earth-shattering day in 1899.

Their observations and insights soon led to another revelation. “I don’t think I knew how much the book would be about race when I started,” Macy says. “The circus is such a whiz-bang thing, you think most of the book will be about that. But to me, those really palpable, gritty, daily experiences that African Americans had during Jim Crow, those were the most powerful things. I felt like it was an honor that people would tell me these stories and trust me to get it right.”

In Truevine, Macy has created a vivid portrait of two men whose lives were forever upended one earth-shattering day in 1899. Sideshow exhibits for decades, they became excellent musicians, playing multiple instruments and singing.

The boys were told their mother was dead, but in truth, she never stopped looking for them. Harriett Muse finally tracked them down and brought them home in 1927, after a truly heart-stopping showdown. This illiterate maid stood up to eight policemen at the circus, as well as the Commonwealth’s attorney, who happened to be the founder of the local Ku Klux Klan. Then she had the gumption to sue the Greatest Show on Earth, claiming it owed the family $100,000 in damages and back pay.

“How did she do it?” Macy wonders. “How did she bring them home, not get arrested, not get hurt? She had no protection; there’s never any mention that her husband was with her. It was her alone.”

Despite Macy’s exhaustive research, many questions remain unanswered. At one point she commiserated with Canadian historian Jane Nicholas, who urged her to keep digging. If we only wrote the histories of the people who left detailed records, Nicholas told her, “we would only get to know about the really privileged people. You have to piece together your evidence with empathy and conjecture.”

Even now, months later, Macy remains moved by this wisdom. “That’s my favorite quote of the whole thing,” she says. “That’s the heart and soul of this book. Because George and Willie’s history wasn’t just erased, it was never written down to begin with.”

Now it finally is, ready for the world to read.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Learn more about Beth Macy and Truevine in Alice Cary’s Behind the Interview post.

RELATED: Watch the CSPAN Book TV broadcast of Alice Cary's interview with Beth Macy at the 2016 Southern Festival of Books.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Charleston, South Carolina, played a central role in the state’s headlong rush toward secession in December 1860, an act that led to the outbreak of the Civil War four months later. Journalist Paul Starobin explores the "mania" for war that gripped the city in Madness Rules the Hour, a lively and informative look at the political leaders, preachers and propagandists who inflamed Charleston in 1860—with dire consequences for the Union.

A former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week, Starobin has been a contributor to The Atlantic, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal and other publications. We asked him to tell us more about Charleston's pivotal role in the lead-up to war and the parallels between the pre-Civil War era and our current political climate of polarization.

What drew you to the subject of Charleston and the lead-up to the Civil War?
I have always been fascinated by the Civil War. When I lived in the Washington, D.C. area, I made walking tours of battlefields like Gettysburg and Antietam. So much has been written about the battles—I found myself drawn to the time before the shooting started. It started, of course, at Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, and as I began to dig deeper, I came to realize that Charleston, the people who lived there, played a crucial role in launching the war. How did that happen? I felt driven to answer that question.

Why did Charleston have such an influential position in the South at that time?
Charleston had long played a dominant role in the slave trade and was more belligerent on the matter of protecting slavery than was any other city in the South. So radicals on secession, all over the South, were drawn to Charleston as a kind of lodestar on secession. The city personified the Old South—more so than Richmond or New Orleans, on a par with Savannah. Charleston also seemed to have a naturally immoderate personality—it tended towards extremes in its politics, in its revelries, in its opinion of itself. There seemed to be no middle ground in Charleston.

"I did find some people who feared the confrontation—but not as many as I expected. Charleston was on a bender."

Shed some light on your research process. Where did you start and what were your most rewarding sources?
I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that the best way to do the book would be in the form of a concentrated, granular narrative—so a reader could feel the pace, the urgency of the moment, as it was felt in Charleston at the time. I established a timeline for the year 1860 and by the time I was done with my research I had entries for just about every day and a file nearly 500 pages long. I needed to feel the year myself—the sights, sounds, smells, rhythms, all of it. Raw materials were crucial—I think to write history, you need also to feel your characters, to try to put yourself in their shoes, as hard as that can be for the more noxious characters. I put their portraits on my wall. Also maps, images of Charleston, pungent quotes, went on the wall. My best sources were in the archives of South Carolina's wonderful libraries—mainly in Charleston but also in Columbia, the state capital. They are a treasure trove of letters and diaries. And through the Google news archive, I was able to read on my home office desktop computer a full year's worth of The Charleston Mercury newspaper—an essential source for the book. I often began my day by reading a few days' worth of The Mercury. In my mind, at least, I was inhabiting a different time and place. Which was sometimes a welcome refuge from the present day.

What was the most surprising piece of information you unearthed while researching this book?
How joyful the secession cause was for so many ordinary citizens—the mechanics, the shopkeepers, the firemen, the ladies of all ages. It was like a party—the men marched through the streets singing martial songs and they drank innumerable toasts to the coming liberation of the South, the ladies wrote gushing poems to the bravery of their lads and stitched 'secession bonnets' and flags. White Charleston was so eager for a confrontation with the North, that when Lincoln's election was announced, in November, 1860, folks ran about the streets shouting, 'Hurra for Lincoln!' I did find some people who feared the confrontation—but not as many as I expected. Charleston was on a bender.

You catalog many forces that supported the rush to war. Is there one person or entity that deserves the most blame for leading the city of Charleston down this path?
It was a joint effort by a group of radical secessionists—really a collective more than any one person. In this group was a newspaper propagandist and his son, a gentleman merchant, a planter, and a federal judge. They are all to blame. So were the pastors who preached the gospel of secession from the pulpit. And more broadly, the white community of Charleston, which was overwhelmingly for secession—the community is also to blame. It somehow lost its capacity to think clearly.

Why were the citizens of Charleston so receptive to the calls for secession?
White Charleston experienced a crisis of fear and also what might be called a crisis of false hope. Fear in the sense that they believed, as they were told by the propaganda merchants, that their world was about to collapse with the election of Lincoln, the 'abolitionist' Republican, as President. So they had to break away from the Union. Immediately. False hope in the sense that they believed the fable that secession could be peaceful—because the cowardly Yankees would back away from a fight—and would lead to prosperity and security with the South taking its proud place as an independent nation of the world. I suppose they wanted to believe that very badly, so they did.

You write about many key figures in Charleston and in the Civil War. If you could sit down to dinner with one of the people in your book, who would it be?
I love this question! The answer is James Louis Petigru, a lawyer and town Elder—really a kind of social institution in Charleston. He was on the right side of the issue—he believed secession was utter folly, and told all of Charleston that, over and over—and he came up with with wonderfully barbed quips, like "South Carolina is too small for a Republic, but too large for an insane asylum." A man of immense charm, wit and vision. Ideal dinner companion.

What parallels do you see between our current political climate and the atmosphere in Charleston before the war?
Our current time, sadly, also is one of intense partisanship and polarization and venomous rhetoric. There is a lot of propaganda, on social media, on cable television—which was true of the highly partisan print press back then. Each side saying, thinking, the worst of each other. I don't think we are in a civil war at this point—we are obviously not in a shooting civil war. But are we on the threshold of such a moment? How would we know? I am keeping a running file called, New Civil War, to help me figure matters out.

As you describe in the final chapter of your book, Charleston was utterly devastated by the war—shelled daily by Union forces for 587 days and left in ruins. Did the people who pushed the city toward supporting secession pay a personal price for their actions?
Some of them did. The gentleman merchant, Robert Newman Gourdin, who organized a secret group to take the South out of the Union—he lost everything in the war and by life's end didn't even have the money to pay the laundress. The federal judge who tore off his robe and demanded 'secession now' after Lincoln's election—he was arrested by Union forces and thrown into jail. The editor of the pro-secession Mercury, Robert Barnwell Rhett Jr.—his newspaper collapsed. The planter-propagandist, John Ferrars Townsend—his magnificent mansion burned to the ground and at the war's end he was living in a shed.

What lessons can we take today from what happened in Charleston in 1860?
There is a popular saying that the crowd can be wise—in this case, the crowd was mad. Reason took flight and existed in only a few sturdy individuals, who were not vulnerable to the wild passion of the masses. People must learn to think for themselves—to sift and sort what the media and politicians and pastors are saying and take nothing at face value. If you are in a media bubble, listening to all the same sources, pop it and find some contrary ones. Do your own homework, don't just go with the flow. To be a responsible citizen is not to be a sheep!

In Damnation Island, Stacy Horn explores the horrific past of a small island in New York City’s East River, where the “criminally insane” were imprisoned in the 19th century.

How did Blackwell’s Island capture your attention and inspire you to write this book?
I had a vague awareness that the island had a dark past—that something terrible had happened there—but I didn’t know the details. This is irresistible to me. A horrific but forgotten story? I had to recover it.

You researched so many individuals for this book—can you briefly share one story that you find the most affecting?
Adelaide Irving, a mixed-up, headstrong 15-year-old who was sent to the penitentiary for two years for her first offense: picking someone’s pocket. It was an outrageous sentence, and she never recovered. She was dead by the time she turned 23. They buried her in a convict-built coffin on a hill. I was once a mixed-up, headstrong 15-year-old, and I was acting out in all sorts of ways. But I come from a background of relative privilege. There are million safety nets for people like me, and people like me don’t usually go to jail. It was true in the 19th century, it was true in the 20th, and it’s still true now.

Blackwell’s Island was founded with very positive intentions. How and why did things go so far awry?
They wanted to save money. To reduce overhead, they starved the inmates, didn’t properly clothe or house them, and instead of hiring paid nurses and attendants, the administrators employed convicts from the workhouse to look after the inmates in the lunatic asylum and other institutions on the island. (The workhouse was a prison for people convicted of minor crimes.) It was not a secret. The abuses on Blackwell’s Island were regularly reported in the papers, and grand juries would visit and issue damning reports. Priests attending to the spiritual needs of the inmates would alert their superiors. But nothing ever happened. I recognize this paralysis. There isn’t a day that I don’t hear about some horrible miscarriage of justice in America. If I pay attention to the papers and my Twitter feed, I’m reading about fresh new cases every few minutes. We all are. And just what are most of us doing about it? Why is extreme injustice allowed to continue?

What did undercover reporters find when they visited the island?
To use an expression of Emma Goldman, an anarchist who was sent to the penitentiary, they found patients who were “legally murdered,” either by the lack of food, improper hygiene, careless attendants, murderous roommates or by succumbing to lethal epidemics. Police courts would continue to send people to the island even when they knew there was an active disease outbreak.

In what way does the history of Blackwell Island continue to haunt us—either in terms of contemporary New York City or in terms of misguided ideas about the relationship between mental illness and crime?
By throwing the poor, the mad and the convicted altogether on one narrow island they unwittingly reinforced a devastating association which persists to this day. That the mentally ill are dangerous and poor people are thieves in disguise. The priest featured in my book wrote, “The dark shadow of crime spreads right and left, from the Penitentiary and the Workhouse, over all the institutions, the Asylum, the Alms-House and Charity Hospital, so that, in the minds of the people at large, all suffer alike from an evil repute. . . .” Being poor had become a character trait that needed “correction,” like the impulse to steal or cheat. If they were poor it was due to their own moral failing and laziness. The Christian impulse to help the needy had been tamped down and replaced with an inclination to punish them.  

There were so many aspects of Blackwell’s Island that inspire disgust—the food, the shelter, the hygiene, the quickness with which disease spread. What do you think was the worst aspect for those living there?
I always go back to what could I have withstood. Have you ever had an anxiety or panic attack, or suffered from depression? Imagine that instead of kindness you’re thrown into a chair, strapped in so you can’t move or get up, and you have to stay there hour after hour, all day long, without talking, and if you go to the bathroom in your chair because no one will unstrap you, an attendant will likely come along and beat you or drag you to a tub of used bathwater and hold your head under until you’re near death. People could do whatever they wanted to these helpless inmates because they were out of the public eye on this now off-limits island. It’s the same today. Look how long it took people to acknowledge that what goes on in the facilities on Rikers Island is immoral, and to start talking about change. I cried reading a Justice Department report of what happened to teenagers on Rikers Island. What they describe has been going on for centuries. What took us so long?

Why did the people who suffered from the abuses of Blackwell’s Island so rarely have a chance to be heard by people in authority?
I read through a 900-page report from a Senate investigation of the conditions inside asylums in New York. In all those pages there was not one single testimony from an inmate. It’s hard for the poor, the mentally ill and the convicted to have a voice and to be heard and not dismissed today. It was almost impossible then.

Who are the heroes of Blackwell’s Island, if there are any? 
Even though most did not succeed in effecting change, I came across many wardens who tried. They showed up every week, day after day, doing what they could. I don’t know if I could have faced inmates crying to me for help, inmates dying, knowing that so much of their suffering was preventable. I think it would have destroyed me. But they showed up.  

What do you hope readers take away from this book?
I didn’t want to force it down anyone’s throats, but I hope people pick up on the fact that in many ways the same things, and worse, are taking place today. The idea that some people are unworthy and they have all these terrible things coming to them is still prevalent, as is the conviction that the poor are entirely responsible for their financial struggles and that we should not help them.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Damnation Island.