Study Your History

The past couple weeks have been a bit of a blur for me. American Revolution 2056 became available to the public and it's been wild. Friends and family have been supportive and buying my book. I've even signed autographs! You can still get those for free, by the way.

I may have been "a little excited" when I first held AR56. Maybe. A little. (See picture). I doubted myself and my ability to finish this project. I doubt that anyone is more amazed than I am that it's a real thing. As always, I can't say "thank you" enough to everyone who helped and supported me along the way.

One of the more interesting questions I've received is, "When did you write this?" Their point being that they thought I was watching the news recently and went off of that. Actually, I started writing the American Revolution series in January 2017. I'd been cranky about some ideas things and they boiled over out of my head and into my laptop. 

At heart, I'm a history geek. Reading non-fiction stories of the past brings the past to life for me. It also educates me on the world in general. Whoever first said "Those who fail to study the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them" was right on. From that premise, I took some ideas from the past and hot button issues of today and started writing.

Sometimes it's a little scene. Early in AR56, Penny watches a news report on a water riot in Arizona. I watched a PBS piece on water rights in the southwest and it made me think, how bad could it really get? If you're not familiar, a lot of the water in Arizona/southern California comes from the Colorado River, which is fed by melt-off from the Rocky Mountains. What would happen, I thought, if the population in that region continues to grow and there's less and less snow in the mountains (which means less water down the line)? Rioting is not out of the question.

Sometimes it's a bigger concept. The division of the population by wealth and a popular uprising by the people. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? The French Revolution! Once the people were fed up enough to believe they had nothing left to lose, well, heads rolled.  Not that I'm advocating violent revolution, I'm just citing it as a historical inspiration.

From there, yes, some current events obviously impacted me. What if they all took their worst possible route all at once? To quote a young friend of mine, "We'd be f*cked!" I couldn't disagree with her. From there, I took some of those ideas and here we are. 

What's my point? People need to study their history and learn from it! Then extrapolate the information into the future so we can all live and work together in peace.

Favorite non-fiction, historical books (in no particular order) 

- In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson about the US Ambassador to Germany in 1933.

- Endurance by Alfred Lansing about the Shackleton expedition of 1914.

- Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley about the men in the flag raising photo on Iwo Jima. Shockingly great story!

- Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody about growing up a black person in rural Mississippi and the civil rights movement.

- The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe about the development of the US space program.

- Night by Elie Wiesel about living through the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Not many books give me nightmares, but...