By Frederic F. Van de Water. Introduction by Graeme R. Newman

When Grey Riders appeared in 1922, Frederic F. Van de Water was already emerging as one of the most capable interpreters of American frontier mythology. A journalist, historian, and novelist, he had spent years documenting the enduring tensions between law, order, memory, and violence in the development of the Atlantic seaboard. Grey Riders stands as one of his most vivid contributions to that project: a narrative history and interpretive reconstruction of the Border Riders—Vermont and New York militiamen, irregulars, and informal vigilante bands who policed, contested, and sometimes exploited the wilderness regions between the American colonies and British Canada during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Van de Water had a journalist’s fascination with complexity, and Grey Riders is at its strongest when it illuminates the contradictions inherent in a frontier culture that simultaneously demanded firmness of justice and tolerated the improvisational violence of irregular policing. In his account, the riders are men shaped by hardship—farmers, Loyalists, deserters, Yankee patriots, trappers, smugglers, and opportunists—who alternately defended and defied the emerging legal structures of the early United States. Their world was one where the line between protector and predator was always negotiable.

The book’s historical frame—stretching most visibly from the late Revolutionary era through the War of 1812—allows Van de Water to explore how unresolved grievances, economic scarcity, and geopolitical rivalry produced a frontier culture that did not neatly conform to the nation-state boundaries we take for granted today. The riders themselves were products of this ambiguity. While some acted as scouts and auxiliaries for the Continental Army or state militias, others drifted into banditry, smuggling, or private vengeance. Van de Water refuses to simplify this ambiguity; instead, he constructs a narrative that emphasizes how the frontier’s conditions forged men who were, by necessity, adaptable to both moral clarity and moral shade.

For the modern reader, Grey Riders also holds value as part of the broader early-twentieth-century reconsideration of American origins. The 1920s were a period of heightened nostalgia, cultural nationalism, and renewed interest in the country’s formative conflicts. Van de Water, however, avoids sentimentalism. His frontier is not a place of heroic inevitability but a zone of tension where identity, loyalty, and legitimacy are constantly renegotiated. In this respect, the book anticipates the more critical frontier historiography that would emerge later in the century.

Contemporary scholars may also find in Grey Riders an instructive account of how local communities develop security practices when state institutions are weak, distant, or contested—an issue that remains resonant in discussions of borderlands worldwide. The riders, as Van de Water portrays them, are precursors to many modern forms of irregular security actors: militias, local auxiliaries, self-appointed protectors, and armed community defense groups. Their actions demonstrate both the necessity and danger of such formations, especially when scarcity and political friction define daily life.

This new edition returns readers to a moment when questions of national boundaries, informal justice, and community resilience are central to global debate. Van de Water’s riders, moving through a grey zone of legality and identity, offer a powerful reminder that the frontier has never been a simple place—and that the forces shaping it never truly disappeared.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. p.188.

By Frances Parkinson Keyes

Came a Cavalier by Frances Parkinson Keyes is a sweeping historical romance set against the backdrop of two world wars. The novel explores themes of resilience, identity, and the transformative power of love. At its heart is Constance “Connie” Galt, a young woman whose life is reshaped by personal betrayal and the chaos of global conflict. Her journey begins with heartbreak, which propels her into service with the American Red Cross in France during World War I. This experience becomes a crucible for her character, forcing her to confront suffering and loss while discovering inner strength and purpose.

The story delves deeply into the theme of personal growth through adversity. Connie’s evolution from a disillusioned college student to a confident, compassionate woman mirrors the broader societal shifts of the early twentieth century. Her relationships—first with Duncan Craig, an American doctor, and later with Tristan de Fremond, a French cavalry officer—highlight the tension between security and passion, as well as the cultural contrasts between America and Europe during wartime.

Historically, the novel captures the atmosphere of wartime France with vivid detail, from the scarcity and danger of the front lines to the elegance and traditions of the French aristocracy. It reflects the impact of war on both individuals and nations, portraying how global upheaval can dismantle old social orders while creating new opportunities for connection and renewal. The narrative also touches on themes of honor and duty, embodied in Tristan’s role within the prestigious Cadre Noir, and contrasts these ideals with the pragmatic realities of survival and love in times of uncertainty.

Ultimately, Came a Cavalier is not just a romance but a meditation on courage, endurance, and the human capacity for reinvention. It situates personal drama within the grand sweep of history, offering readers both an intimate love story and a rich portrait of a world in transition.

Julian Messner, Inc. NY. 1947. Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 437p.

By Erskine Caldwell. Designed and Edited with an Introduction  by Colin Heston

When All Night Long appeared in 1942, Erskine Caldwell was already one of the most widely read—and most controversial—American novelists of his generation. Known primarily for his unsparing portrayals of poverty, violence, and moral stress in the American South, Caldwell here turned his attention outward, to a global conflict unfolding at unprecedented scale. Subtitled A Novel of Guerrilla Warfare in Russia, All Night Long represents Caldwell’s direct literary engagement with the Second World War at the moment when its outcome remained deeply uncertain and when the Soviet Union, newly allied with the United States, had become a central symbol of resistance to fascist aggression.

Caldwell’s Russia is not a romanticized abstraction nor a detailed ethnographic portrait. Instead, it functions as a stark moral landscape shaped by occupation, deprivation, and constant threat. Villages, forests, and frozen terrain become arenas of endurance rather than scenery. The emphasis falls on night operations, secrecy, hunger, exhaustion, and the psychological toll of living in a perpetual state of danger. The title itself—All Night Long—signals this temporal and emotional register: war as an unbroken vigil, a continuous strain that erodes the boundary between action and survival.

For modern readers, the novel occupies an intriguing position in Caldwell’s body of work and in twentieth-century war literature more broadly. It stands apart from his Southern novels in geography but not in theme. As in Tobacco Road or God’s Little Acre, Caldwell examines how extreme conditions strip life down to its essentials and expose the structures—economic, political, or military—that govern human behavior. In All Night Long, the setting is international, but the underlying concerns remain consistent: power, exploitation, resilience, and the cost of endurance.

Read today, All Night Long also invites reflection on the evolving representation of guerrilla warfare itself. Long before such conflicts became a dominant feature of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century military discourse, Caldwell recognized the strategic and moral complexity of irregular resistance. His novel anticipates later debates about asymmetrical warfare, civilian involvement, and the blurred lines between combatant and noncombatant—issues that continue to shape global conflicts.

Ultimately, All Night Long is less a novel about Russia per se than a novel about resistance under occupation. It captures a historical moment when global war demanded new forms of solidarity and new narrative frameworks to explain them. Caldwell’s achievement lies in his ability to translate that vast struggle into an intimate, unrelenting account of human persistence, sustained through darkness, danger, and the long hours of night.

NY.Book League of America. 1942. Read-Me.Org Inc. Australia, New York & Philadelphia. 2025. 161p.

Edited by Tamari Kitossa

This collection invites us to think about how African-descended men are seen as both appealing and appalling, and exposed to eroticized hatred and violence and how some resist, accommodate, and capitalize on their eroticization. Drawing on James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon, the contributors examine the contradictions, paradoxes, and politico-psychosexual implications of Black men as objects of sexual desire, fear, and loathing. Kitossa and the contributing authors use Baldwin’s and Fanon’s cultural and psychoanalytic interpretations of Black masculinities to demonstrate their neglected contributions to thinking about and beyond colonialist and Western gender and masculinity studies. This innovative and sophisticated work will be of interest to scholars and students of cultural and media studies, gender and masculinities studies, sociology, political science, history, and critical race and racialization. Foreword by Tommy J. Curry.

Contributors: Katerina Deliovsky, Delroy Hall, Dennis O. Howard, Elishma Khokhar, Tamari Kitossa, Kemar McIntosh, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Watufani M. Poe, Satwinder Rehal, John G. Russell, Mohan Siddi

Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2021

By David de Boer

For victims of persecution, attracting international awareness of their plight is often a matter of life and death. This book uncovers how in seventeenth-century Europe, persecuted minorities first learned how to use the press as a weapon to combat religious persecution. To mobilize foreign audiences, they faced an acute dilemma: how to make people care about distant suffering? This study argues that by answering this question, they laid the foundations of a humanitarian culture in Europe. The book reveals how, as consuming news became an everyday practice for many Europeans, the Dutch Republic emerged as an international hub of printed protest against religious violence. It traces how a diverse group of people, including Waldensian refugees, Huguenot ministers, Savoyard officeholders, and many others, all sought access to the Dutch printing presses to raise transnational solidarity for their cause. By examining their publicity strategies, this study deepens our understanding of how people tried to confront the specter of religious violence that had haunted them for generations.

UA Open. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023. 225p.

By Hsuan L. Hsu

Perhaps the most popular of all canonical American authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirize American formations of race and empire. While many scholars have explored Twain’s work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and Asian Americans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsu examines Twain’s career-long archive of writings about United States relations with China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain’s early writings about Chinese immigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery and anti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain’s ideas about race were not limited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully crafted assessments of racialization that drew connections between groups, including African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial populations. Drawing on recent legal scholarship, comparative ethnic studies, and transnational and American studies, Sitting in Darkness engages Twain’s best-known novels such as Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as well as his lesser-known Chinese and trans-Pacific inflected writings, such as the allegorical tale “A Fable of the Yellow Terror” and the yellow face play Ah Sin. Sitting in Darkness reveals how within intersectional contexts of Chinese Exclusion and Jim Crow, these writings registered fluctuating connections between immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and racism.

New York: NYU Press.2015.

By Markus Nehl

Markus Nehl focuses on black authors who, from a 21st-century perspective, revisit slavery in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa, Canada and Jamaica. Nehl’s provocative readings of Toni Morrison’s »A Mercy«, Saidiya Hartman’s »Lose Your Mother«, Yvette Christiansë’s »Unconfessed«, Lawrence Hill’s »The Book of Negroes« and Marlon James’ »The Book of Night Women« delineate how these texts engage in a fruitful dialogue with African diaspora theory about the complex relation between the local and transnational and the enduring effects of slavery. Reflecting on the ethics of narration, this study is particularly attentive to the risks of representing anti-black violence and to the intricacies involved in (re-)appropriating slavery's archive.

Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, 2016. 213p.