History Book Club

Let’s gather to explore America’s history together.

In 2024, Rocktown History and the Massanutton Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution invited the community to join a new history book club. Early attendees adopted the general rule to read titles related to American history—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or other writings.

Initial books included The Indigo Girl by Natasha Boyd, The War That Made America, by Fred Anderson, and Treacherous Beauty, by Mark Jacob and Stephen Case.

Book Club meets at 10:00 am on the first Wednesday of the month at Rocktown History (dates subject to change due to holidays and/or weather).

Our next reads:

February 4—Guardians of the Valley, by Dean King. King illuminates the friendship between John Muir and his editor Robert Underwood Johnson that saved Yosemite National Park and planted the seed of the American environmental movement.

March 4—West from Shenandoah: A Scotch-Irish Family Fights for America, 1729-1781, by Thomas A. Lewis. Rocktown History will add copies of this title to the bookstore inventory.

April 1—Washington’s Spies, by Alexander Rose. The story of the Revolution that didn’t make the history books; one of friendship and trust, fear and betrayal, amid the dark and silent world of the spy.

Our past reads:

Travels with George, by Nathaniel Philbrick
The Great Wagon Road: From Philadelphia to the South, by Parke Rouse
A Girl Called Samson: A Novel, by Amy Harmon
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, by Stephen E. Ambrose
Undaunted Courage, by Stephen E. Ambros.
Patriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans, by Winston Groom
The President’s Lady, by Irving Stone
Washington’s Spies: The Story of the First Spy Ring, by Alexander Rose
Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation, by Cokie Roberts
The Virginia Dynasty, by Lynne Cheney
Blood and Treasure, by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
Follow the River, by James Alexander Thom
Treacherous Beauty, by Mark Jacob and Stephen H. Case
The War That Made America, by Fred Anderson
The Indigo Girl, by Natasha Boyd