Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813–1884) was a prominent African American businesswoman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the longtime housekeeper, life companion, and collaborator of the state’s abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens. In his biography of this remarkable woman, Mark Kelley reveals how Smith served the cause of abolition, managed Stevens’s household, acquired property, and crossed racialized social boundaries. Born a free woman near Gettysburg, Smith began working for Stevens in 1844. Her relationship with Stevens fascinated and infuriated many, and it made Smith a highly recognizable figure both locally and nationally. The two walked side by side in Lancaster and in Washington, DC, as they worked to secure the rights of African Americans, sheltered people on the Underground Railroad, managed two households, raised her sons and his nephews, and built a real-estate business. In the last years of Stevens’s life, as his declining health threatened to short-circuit his work, Smith risked her own well-being to keep him alive while he led the drive to end slavery, impeach Andrew Johnson, and push for the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. An Uncommon Woman is a vital history that accords Lydia Hamilton Smith the recognition that she deserves. Every American should know Smith’s inspiring story.

The nuclear novel corporate publishers would not touch. Rain of Ruin tells the story of a young woman killed by the American atomic bomb. Based on a real-life experience, Rain of Ruin is as true as Girls of Atomic City but far more tragic. from the back cover: Military leaders and historians have told the story of the atomic bomb. But the official accounts never focus on the thousands of ordinary Americans who helped make it happen. Rain of Ruin tells the story from their point of view for the first time. It follows Agnes Jenkins Flaherty, an eighteen-year-old country girl, as she takes her devout religious faith and towering sense of responsibility to wartime Washington, D.C. to work with the Manhattan Project. She quickly finds love in the city, but her budding romance is overshadowed by a growing sense of terror when she learns, from the Top Secret documents crossing her desk, that project scientists think setting off the bomb might destroy the earth. Agnes escapes that prospect, but not the heartbreaking disappointment and tragedy that follow.