In this engrossing account, footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written form.

Arriving in America after World War II, Andrew Laszlo kept much of his Hungarian childhood a secret. Decades later, his wife Ann, convinced him to share the secret with his grown children. When Andrew was born in 1926, His middle-class family lived in Papa, a small town west of Budapest. It was a happy time. At age fifteen, Andrew was not allowed to join the Boy Scouts. His brother could not attend the university. The reason…. Their mother was Jewish. As Nazi inspired antisemitism grew, Andrew’s determination to survive was tested again and again. On March 19, 1944, Germany invaded Hungary. He wrote: “…as I warned you…Yes, from here on this account is going to get rough.” His family was relocated to the Ghetto and forced to wear the yellow Star of David. Andrew’s brother, Sandor, and then Andrew were conscripted into Hungarian Labor forces. His mother, father, grandmother and aunt were taken away. As the war dragged on, Andrew was sent to the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. Years later; his children learned that Anne Frank was a prisoner in the camp at the same time. She perished before the war ended. The loss of his family deeply affected Andrew. At 20 years old, having nothing left, he escaped Russian occupied Hungary and made his way to post-war Germany. There, he filed an emigration petition for the United States. He arrived in New York Harbor on January 17, 1947. He carried his secret past locked in his heart…for 50 years. Andrew Laszlo went on to have a distinguished motion picture career. He was a cinematographer for over 50 movies and televisions series, including Shogun and Rambo, First Blood. He worked with many of the movie stars of his time. He traveled the world doing pictures and teaching the next generation of film makers.

Humorous and witty recollections of the author's journey from insecure graduate student to noted activist/scholar.

Alternating Current's annual literary journal dedicated to historical and contemporary views on history contains poetry, maps and historical photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by various authors, both contemporary and historical, about various topics of history. Within these covers fantastically drawn by artist Terry Fan, you'll meet the Romanovs, Serbian poet Vojislav Ilic, Dr. Zhivago, Stephen Crane, Geronimo, Lord Strathcona, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You'll learn of the misprint in Herman Melville's obituary, the constellations in the Southern Planisphere mapped out by Nicolas de La Caille, what might have been exchanged between William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, how Laura Cereta thrived on insomnia, and who's buried in the cemeteries at Pere-Lachaise and Montparnasse. Our first Featured Writer, A. Jay. Adler -- an interviewee for a junior fellowship at Harvard Society of Fellows, Vermont Studio Center grant recipient, and Maui Writers Conference Screenwriting Competition prize winner -- will take you through Jewish life on the Lower East Side, Van Gogh's mental asylum, Route 66, and the bordello rooms of Old-West Tombstone. Our second Featured Writer, Jesseca Cornelson -- a Catskill Center's Platte Clove Preserve and a Sundress Academy for the Arts' Firefly Farms resident artist -- will take you through the Tablet of Daughters, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville's journals of the South, and a history of her home state of Alabama's unfortunate past with racial lynchings. Their work is showcased next to three of our Pushcart Prize nominees and the first, second, and third places, and nine notable-mention finalists, for our 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical. From the Wild West to the Holocaust to Lincoln's exhumation to the folk music of the sixties to the lost city of Atlantis, you'll discover entire past worlds between these covers and meet a cast of characters colorful enough to color every page.

Winner of the PEN/Open Book Award Winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award A kaleidoscopic portrait of five generations scattered across Asia and the United States, Inheritors is a heartbreakingly beautiful and brutal exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his wartime actions. His brother’s wife, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the shattering realities of life in Occupied Japan. Half a century later, her estranged American granddaughter winds her way back East, pursuing her absent father’s secrets. Decades into the future, two siblings face the consequences of their great-grandparents’ war as the world shimmers on the brink of an even more pervasive violence. Grappling with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war, Inheritors offers an intricate tapestry of stories illuminating the complex ways in which we live, interpret, and pass on our tangled histories.

The triumphant story of how an all-Black Broadway cast and crew changed musical theatre—and the world—forever. "This musical introduced Black excellence to the Great White Way. Broadway was forever changed and we, who stand on the shoulders of our brilliant ancestors, are charged with the very often elusive task of carrying that torch into our present."—Billy Porter, Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning actor If Hamilton, Rent, or West Side Story captured your heart, you'll love this in-depth look into the rise of the 1921 Broadway hit, Shuffle Along, the first all-Black musical to succeed on Broadway. No one was sure if America was ready for a show featuring nuanced, thoughtful portrayals of Black characters—and the potential fallout was terrifying. But from the first jazzy, syncopated beats of composers Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, New York audiences fell head over heels. Footnotes is the story of how Sissle and Blake, along with comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, overcame poverty, racism, and violence to harness the energy of the Harlem Renaissance and produce a runaway Broadway hit that launched the careers of many of the twentieth century's most beloved Black performers. Born in the shadow of slavery and establishing their careers at a time of increasing demands for racial justice and representation for people of color, they broke down innumerable barriers between Black and white communities at a crucial point in our history. Author and pop culture expert Caseen Gaines leads readers through the glitz and glamour of New York City during the Roaring Twenties to reveal the revolutionary impact one show had on generations of Americans, and how its legacy continues to resonate today. Praise for Footnotes: "A major contribution to culture."—Brian Jay Jones, New York Times bestselling author of Jim Henson: The Biography "With meticulous research and smooth storytelling, Caseen Gaines significantly deepens our understanding of one of the key cultural events that launched the Harlem Renaissance."—A Lelia Bundles, New York Times bestselling author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker "Absorbing..."—The Wall Street Journal

Literature has not always been written in the same ways, nor has it been received or read in the same ways over the course of Western civilization. Cavallo (Greek palaeography, U. of Rome La Sapienza), Chartier (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) and a number of other international contributors, address themes that highlight the transformation of reading methods and materials over the ages, such as the way texts in the Middle Ages were often written with the voice in mind, as they would have been read aloud, or even sung. Articles explore the innovations in the physical evolution of the book, as well as the growth and development of a broad-based reading public.

The fourth issue of Alternating Current Press' annual literary publication contains 48 works of poetry, photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by 33 authors about various historical topics. Within these pages, you will find contemporary outlooks on history right alongside little-known historical works that feel as fresh and as vibrant (and as scary) as if they were written today. Here, the old meets the new, and you'll discover fascinating history from a personal, accessible, non-scholarly literary approach. As we go through an age of accountability and social justice as a society, the writing we're seeing becomes more aware, more prominent in its voicing of history's ill treatment of certain subsets of people and ideas. We start right out with the gut punch of American slavery, hearing the voices of then and now, through Rev. Richard Allen, slavemasters, runaways, and Frederick Douglass, and leading up to Juneteenth, when enslaved workers in Texas finally learned that they'd already been free for two years. We'll meet Civil War zombies and cattle-hunting soldiers, and we'll go in search of the lost hoof of a famous fire horse. We'll explore the missionary failures of David Livingstone and Eleazar Wheelock and travel the seafaring journeys and shipwrecks of robber Joaquín Murrieta, arctic explorers, British lightermen, and one unfortunate girl in a rum keg. Women like Conchita Cintrón will have their firsts (and be arrested, naturally), and we'll unravel the dark mind of Virginia Woolf. We'll learn about the Brothertown Indians, the ill beginnings of Dartmouth College, and the massacres and stereotypes that Native Americans endured in the mid-to-late 1800s. We'll travel to England with Samson Occom, Dominic Fanning, Oliver Cromwell, nuclear bombs, and the erosion of the East Yorkshire coastline through the years. Art is explored through the eyes of Leda with her swan, Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, the photography of the Great Depression, and Victorian photographs with dead people. Featured Writer Kindra McDonald will take us through the Dismal Swamp and into the suicidal minds of Robert Frost and Meriwether Lewis, then through a history of salt, foot binding, and lost languages. Featured Writer Benjamin Goluboff examines the work and art curation of John Quinn and Walker Evans, the former responsible for the 1913 Armory Show that was the first exhibit of modern art, and the latter a renowned photographer of life in the 1930s. Their work is showcased next to the winners and finalists for the 2018 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical.