Each week, Now and Then Reader publishes original nonfiction books and essays for Kindle, Nook, iPad and other popular e-readers. We concentrate on writings that are historically based but also have relevance for present day events with a focus on American History and European History.
Available for purchase through Kindle Books, Nook Books, iPad Books and other popular e-bookstores, Now and Then nonfiction titles range from 5,000 to 25,000 words or approximately 15 to 60 pages in length.
Nonfiction Books
Walker Evans, Ellie Mae Burroughs, and the Great Depression
Images of rural poverty and despair remain the most searing memories of the Great Depression. This is largely due to the small band of photographers who recorded the miseries of the poor, under the auspices of the New Deal’s Farm ...
Selections from her Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838-1839
Her enduring Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation has secured Fanny Kemble’s reputation as a prescient observer of the plantation world of the antebellum South. Married to a wealthy American slaveholder with vast holdings in Georgia’s Sea Islands, Kemble ...
An Outmoded Concept Is Sapping America's Strength
Can Washington continue to act as the world’s policeman at the expense of mounting domestic problems? The distinguished national security historian John Prados calls for a total rethinking of our concept of national security. As we now view it, Prados ...
How a Couple of Bungling Sociopaths Became Bonnie and Clyde
Throughout the Great Depression, most Americans especially admired gangland criminals—especially as portrayed in the new motion pictures—who succeeded by doing business outside the failed system. Among the real-life models for the celluloid images, none are more glamorous than Clyde Barrow ...
The oral history of Siskel and Ebert
Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and Gene Siskel, film critic for the Chicago Tribune, started out as newspaper enemies, each one trying to bludgeon the other in print. The competition continued when someone had the bright idea ...
Where does vengeance end and justice begin? The question is no easier to resolve today than when Simone de Beauvoir wrote this compelling essay in the aftermath of World War II. Beauvoir had witnessed the trial of Robert Brasillach, a ...
Getting Connected
Early-20th-century electrification affected the daily lives of millions of ordinary Americans. Electric lights lengthened days and reshaped nights. As its use expanded, electricity prepared the way for radio and the movies, new marvels of the age.
An Eye for an Eye
Where does vengeance end and justice begin? In Simone de Beauvoir’s compelling essay, written in the aftermath of World War II, she explains why she refused to call for the pardon of a prominent right-wing collaborator with the Nazis.
Holy Cow 2000: The Strange Election of George W. Bush
The contested election of 2000 that brought George W. Bush to the White House was filled with a strange sort of drama. But, as historian Kenneth O’Reilly shows in this fresh recounting, it was even stranger than we know.
Paris Under the Occupation
After France fell to Hitler’s armies in 1940, for more than four years the country lived under a German occupation that reinforced its shame and sapped its energies. Afterward, Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to explain France's experience and repair the nation's tarnished reputation.
Bonnie Parker Writes a Poem
In their time, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker attracted much less attention than star criminals like John Dillinger. Steven Biel plots the strange path by which this pair of ne’er-do-wells became the stuff of myth and legend.
High and Tight
When Hank Greenberg challenged Babe Ruth’s home run record he became a hero to American Jews. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, Ray Robinson remembers the man, the player, and the prejudice he overcame.
