cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

As I scramble to meet my next deadline, I thought I'd share this with my fellow hoydens and our readers: As of March 1, my third nonfiction title about scandalous royals, ROYAL PAINS: A Rogues’ Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds is now available wherever books (and e-books) are sold! In a world where sibling rivalry knows no bounds and excess is never enough, meet some of history’s boldest, baddest, and bawdiest royals The bad seeds on the family trees of the most powerful royal houses of Europe often became the rottenest of apples. In an effort to stave off wrinkles, sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory bathed in the blood of virgins, and for kicks and giggles devised even more ingenious forms of torture than the über-violent autocrats Vlad (the Impaler) Dracula and Ivan the Terrible had ever imagined. Lettice Knollys strove to mimic the appearance of her cousin Elizabeth I and even stole her man. The Duke of Cumberland’s sexcapades and subsequent clandestine...

My latest book, Mr. Bishop and the Actress , is about servants, more or less. The hero and heroine are upper servants, and their relationship with their employers is almost as strong as their relationship with each other. In her fabulous review at Dear Author , Jennie said, * It’s a strange world we live in where romances featuring vampires, angels and werewolves (or possibly even a vampire/angel/werewolf hybrid) are de rigeur , but a simple historical romance between two commoners has to be hunted down or purchased from international sources. I'm much more interested in commoners than dukes, and I've been researching servants for several years; servants were the largest workforce in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Just recently, from an entry in the 1901 census, I found out that my maternal grandmother was in service before she married. But today I want to talk about a truly extraordinary master-servant relationship that historians have tiptoed around a bit, and with ...

The Buchanan House 1242 Bagley Street, Detroit (Renovation in progress!) The next house to be profiled was built by the upper-middle-class Irish family in 1896. It is now owned by my brother and myself as a rental property, and the renovation is ongoing. The following is the history of the land on which the house was built. Dominique Labrosse The first owner of the ribbon farm on which the Buchanan house stands was Dominique Jourdain dit Labrosse. Although he was probably granted the land by the government of New France, Silas Farmer wrote that "no evidence of the kind was presented to the Commissioners of Claims" when Labrosse applied for a land patent from the new United States government. Dominique Labrosse was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1730. He was the son of master sculptor and wood carver Paul Jourdain dit Labrosse . Dominique Labrosse settled in Detroit where he married Jeannette Cardinal, also from Montreal, in 1755. On July 21, 1808, the United States governm...

 Powell Ford's 1946 marriage certificate  I think this is a first here on this site -- a post that grew directly out of a discussion in comments of another post. In the post about the Kiamensi Woolen Mill, a series of comments ended up on the subject of Powell Ford. The county park that bears his name is (more or less) across Kiamensi Road from the old mill site, and a large old house that has some sort of connection to the mill also may or may not be associated with him. With some help from readers Bill Harris and Donna Peters, I was able to tack down a little information about Mr. Powell, but I haven't quite found the answers to a few of our questions. Here, though, is a quick rundown of what I was able to find. Powell Miller Ford was born in Church Hill, MD on March 24, 1888, the son of Merrit and Hester Ford. The elder Mr. Ford was originally from Delaware, and was living in Kenton, DE in 1880. By the 1900 census, the Ford family was living in Galena, MD, also on the Eas...

 Justa Justis' grave, St. James Church  In the first part of this post , we traced the Justis family all the way from the immigrant soldier/farmer Johan Gustafsson, who arrived in 1642, through his grandson Gustaf Gustafsson, Jr. (Justa Justis) who first moved to Mill Creek Hundred, down to his grandson Jacob Justis. As I wrote in that post, my feeling is that Jacob's home, and probably that of his father and grandfather, was located just south of The Cedars neighborhood on Newport Gap Pike. After Jacob died in 1802, his land was divided between his three sons -- Joseph, Justa, and David. This generation had a very visible impact on our corner of Delaware, but the genesis of that impact may have lain in another, somewhat enigmatic, member of the Justis clan. Whether or not any of the other local Justises had worked as builders or carpenters before is unclear, but the first local builder in the Justis family that we're aware of was Thomas Justis (c.1770-1841). He...

   Recently, I wrote a post (The Hadley-Dennison House) that featured the Hadley family, some of the first English-speaking settlers in Mill Creek Hundred. But as you're probably aware, the actual first Europeans to settle in what would become Delaware were not English-speaking. Aside from the short-lived Dutch Zwaanendael colony near Lewes, the first European residents of the First State were Swedes (and a few Finns) who arrived in 1638. They set up a fort and settlement called Fort Christina near "The Rocks" in Wilmington, as well as a number of others in the Delaware River Valley. They held control over the region for less than 20 years, before being ousted by the Dutch, who were overtaken themselves by the English just a few years later. Even though New Sweden was a thing of the past, many of the original Swedish families remained in the region and prospered under their conquerors. One of the most prominent of the early Swedish families was the Justises. When...

As I've blogged about before my attitude toward writing love scenes has evolved in the twenty some years I've been writing. When I first began co-writing Regency romances with my mom, under the name Anthea Malcolm, my friends teased me that our books started very chaste and slowly got more explicit. In our first book, The Widow’s Gambit, the characters barely embraced. In the second, The Courting of Philippa , there were more detailed kisses. In the third, Frivolous Pretence , which focused on an estranged married couple, there was an actual sex scene, though it faded to black. Our fifth book, A Touch of Scandal , had ex-lovers who resumed an illicit affair. Sex scenes were part of the story. I told my mom she had to write them. Our sixth book, An Improper Proposal , was a marriage of convenience story. My mom said, “You have to write one of the sex scenes this time.” I wrote my first draft of the scene on a day when my mom was out shopping. And (this is true, thought it sound...