Tike and Ella May Hamlin are struggling to plant roots in the arid land of the Texas panhandle. Thanks to a five-cent government pamphlet, Tike has the know-how to build a simple adobe dwelling, a structure made from the land itself—fireproof, windproof, Dust Bowl-proof.

Drawing on a famous Depression-era murder case—the 1935 “Skeleton Murder” in Greenville, Texas—Greaves extrapolates from the historical record to look inside the principals’ hearts and minds.

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, swept up by the tides of the Great Migration, flees Georgia and heads north to raise eleven children with grit and courage.

A high school English teacher travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination.

When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression.

Narrator Cal, an hermaphrodite, takes the reader back to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Cal's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set the narrator's life in motion.

Set against the tensions of Civil Rights era America, Dreamer tells the story of the last two years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, when the political and personal pressures on this country's preeminent moral leader were the greatest.

Mama Flora's Family is a sweeping epic of contemporary American history, from the unpublished works of award-winning writer Alex Haley. It is the story of three generations of an African-American family who start out as destitute sharecroppers in Tennessee in the 1920's.

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

When the body of Lydia Lee, a popular Chinese American girl living in 1970s small-town Ohio is found in a local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping her family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart.

A story that combines fairytale magic with the harsh realities of homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness in 1918.

Fourteen-year-old Audrey Martin knows she’ll never get out of Kentucky. That is, until a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem.

In 1918, as the deadly Spanish Flu claims victims nearby, a small town in the Pacific Northwest votes to quarantine itself.

A parable of the dark side of adolescence set in a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II.

Explores the seedy world of the "working stiff" and the socialist movement of the 1930s.

The horrifying conditions of the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the century are revealed through this narrative of a young immigrant's struggles in America.

Set in 1906 against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's, An American Tragedy.

Set in Chicago in the 1930s, the story of a young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a moment of panic.

When the United States finally enters World War I raging in Europe, a young and prosperous farmer decides to join the fight.

PaPa LaBas, a New Orleans "houngan," is trying to discover the source of a "psychic plague" called "Jes Grew" which is sweeping the nation in the 1920s (ragtime). Its "carriers" are overcome by a passionate desire to dance and have a good time. A multi-vocal and multi-ethnic jazz detective novel.

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane is an innovative literary work―part drama, part poetry, part fiction― evoking black life in the South.

A depression-era boarding house in Chicago plays host to "a game of emotional chairs" in a novel initially condemned for its frank depiction of abortion, homosexuality, and life on the margins of American society.

In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. See also Morrison's novel, Sula.

As the WWI stretches into its third year, Woodrow Wilson finally accepts the repeated challenges to his stance of nonalignment. Yet the Americans are woefully unprepared and ill equipped to enter a war that has become worldwide in scope.

Three novels, Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and Ironweed, mostly about depression-era Albany.

When a new member of the dust-bowl era club stirs up a dark secret, the women must band together to support and protect one another.

Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, and Sigmund Freud cross paths with Doctorow's imagined characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

Tells the story of two Native American families and how their destinies intertwine over the course of fifty years on a North Dakota reservation.

Set in Texas in the 1950's, a story of power, love, cattle barons, and oil tycoons.

In 1930, the Gibbsville social circuit is electrified with parties and dances. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English. But in one rash moment, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction.

In 1940s Brooklyn, New York, an accident throws Reuven Malther and Danny Saunders together where they negotiate adolescence, family conflicts, and the crisis of faith when Holocaust stories begin to emerge in the U.S. See also Potok's, In the Beginning.

Tells the story of the 1912 West Virginia coal miners' strike.

The story of migrant agricultural workers in California during the Depression.

The conflict between president Theodore Roosevelt and newspaper mogul, William Randolph Hearst.

The rise and fall of Willie Stark, a political boss and governor in the south in the 1930's.

Captures the tide of world events even as they unfold for a single American family drawn into the very center of the World War I's maelstrom.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, the dead body of a dance girl is found, and an investigation opens. Assigned to the case is Police Lieutenant Wesley Horner,

Matthew Townes is a medical student expelled because his race bars him from the required course in obstetrics in a white hospital. Self-exiled in Berlin after his political idealism is corrupted, Townes falls in love with Princess Kautilya, daughter of a maharajah, and joins her international team in which people of color unite against white imperialism.

When a Native American soldier returns home from Vietnam, he finds his remote seaside tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival.

Takes place over four days in the life of Bob Jones, the only black foreman in a shipyard during World War II. Jones lives in a society literally drenched in race consciousness-- a slight mistake can spell disaster for a black man--a beating over a game of craps, or an arrest, or termination from a job, or an accusation of rape.

Originally published in 1928, the story of a lesbian couple's struggle to be accepted by "polite" society.

A coming-of-age tale unfolds in 1930s rural Kansas.

Two novels written during the Harlem Renaissance. Quicksand addresses the racial issues faced by a post-Civil War, post-Reconstructionist America while telling the story of a young, intelligent woman growing up in a society where not only is her ethnicity an issue, but her gender is as well.

Babbit is set in the early 1900s and illustrates how a person's value is measured in terms of the money he makes.

Kansas City, 1925. Ivoe Williams is a black lesbian journalist and has been elected secretary of the Association of Journalists Representing African Diaspora. When no paper will hire her, she and her partner establish their own.

In this multifaceted novel, four distinct lives a railroad barons valet, Hollywoods first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption capture over a century of American history while showing the strength of a community even as family connections are tested. Ordered.

Beginning in 1968, a motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs from San Francisco's Chinatown make their way through the history of the day, becoming caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil that culminate in their effort to save the International Hotel--epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement.

For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his tribe, the Ojibwe. Now, nearing the end of his life, he dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. To further complicate his existence, a troubled colleague comes to the reservation to investigate the life of the possibly false saint Sister Leopolda. Father Damien alone knows the strange truth of Leopolda's piety, but these facts are bound up in his own secret.

Luz "Little Light" Lopez, a tea leaf reader is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory.

Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator, whose life takes an unexpected turn when he calls for Alonzo Hickman, a Black minister to be by his side as he faces a mortal wound. As the two men share their stories and memories, the true shape and substance of the past begin to emerge