"The story follows Hetty "Handful" Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid. "The Invention of Wings" follows the next thirty-five years of their lives. Inspired in part by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke (a feminist, suffragist and, importantly, an abolitionist), Kidd allows herself to go...

Retreat from the constant buzz of the television, the invasion of privacy resulting from the cell phone, and the pestering notion that “men have become the tools of their tools,” with Walden and Other Writings. On July 4, 1845, Thoreau left behind the hustle and bustle of contemporary American life for a solitary existence in a cabin in Massachusetts. Free from societal constraints – though not free from imprisonment, as evidenced by...

"In the decades before the Civil War effectively ended the institution of slavery in the United States, many people risked their lives to rescue Southern African Americans from the shackles of slavery and shepherd them to the safety of the Northern states and Canada. Thousands of slaves made the journey under cover of night. Once free, some became agents of the railroad while others educated those in the North about the horrors of slavery. The remarkable...

Based on the life of William Wilberforce--his passion and perseverance to pass a law ending the slave trade in the late 18th Century--and the people, including his minister, who pushed him to pursue it to the end.

"Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple John Frémont grew upamid family tragedy and shame. Born out of wedlock in 1813, he went to work at age thirteen to help support his family in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a nobody. Yet, by the 1840s, he rose to...

Season 1: Ross Poldark rides again in a swashbuckling new adaptation of the hit series that helped launch Masterpiece in the 1970s. Captain Poldark is a redcoat who returns to Cornwall after the American Revolution and finds that his fighting days are far from over. Season 2: Poldark, the drama that has become a cultural phenomenon, continues for a second season on the stunning beaches of Cornwall. It's 1790 and there is riot and revolution in...