Boston Book Festival

Each of the astonishing books discussed in this session tells America’s origin stories by examining the histories of specific families. In Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier, Robert Parkinson describes the decidedly unheroic, bloody savagery of the frontier through the tragic story of an Iroquois clan and a family of frontiersmen. John Kaag follows the fortunes of the Blood family from their involvement in the British Civil Wars of the seventeenth century through the founding of the colonies, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and first-wave feminism in American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation. Lori Ginzberg, in Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History, traces the descendants of one slave, whose complicated blood kin relationships demonstrate the impact of Black life on every aspect of American history. The conversation among these stellar scholars will be led by Megan Marshall, whose biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.