Demon Copperhead: Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction

The resorts and golf courses and budget luxury—a hotel style first innovated on Tybee Island, Georgia—have creeped up on Sea Island after Sea Island. This was where the forty acres and a mule were promised. And where, after emancipation, the formerly enslaved tried out a collective model of ownership, something that we clunkily call “socialism,” be

... See more

Cherokees would exchange their homeland for new land west of the Mississippi. At least that was the idea. Around two thousand left voluntarily, as per the agreement. But the rest, some sixteen thousand, refused. The government sent seven thousand militiamen and volunteers to round them up at bayonet point and imprison them. The incarcerated Cheroke

... See more

when the United States one-upped the Soviet Union in the moon landing, from farther south, on Florida’s Space Coast, it wasn’t a victory in everyone’s eyes. The event was protested by an Alabaman civil rights leader. Ralph Abernathy arrived outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center with five hundred people a few days before the launch. They bro

... See more

Yet Boone’s path was strewn with obstacles. The British had set the ridge of the Appalachians as the boundary to white settlement, making Boone’s journey west a crime. The end of British rule did little to improve Boone’s standing. The founders viewed frontiersmen like him with open suspicion. They were the nation’s “refuse” (wrote Ben Franklin), “

... See more