Shedding Grace

About the Book

It is the summer of 1769 and the Americans begin to push their conflict with the crown to the point of no return. Jonathan Hamrick, the son of a prominent Boston merchant, has begun his career in the law and is passionately committed to the colonial causes of liberty and freedom. When he is called upon to rescue the failing family business, he finds himself unwillingly engaged in a slave trading venture, which his ailing father believed to be their last hope for financial salvation. He makes a voyage to determine for himself the true nature of this human trafficking and what he learns causes him to question the most fundamental ethical assumptions of his time. Upon his return he finds the town in turmoil and is thrust once again, headlong, into the cauldron of confrontation that would quickly lead to war. But, what had once seemed almost self-evident to him was suddenly not so simple and he was no longer sure what was right or what he believed.

About the Author

I recently retired after 33 years as a teacher, and Social Studies Department Head, in the Mansfield, Massachusetts Public Schools. My special interest and expertise is in ethics education and in integrating ethics themes directly into established secondary school curriculums. It was within this context that I wrote Shedding Grace.

The history textbooks found in American schools today have been so excised of controversial content and so stripped of social conflict as to be rendered values neutral, and utterly useless for promoting meaningful discussion. Conforming to long lists of banned words and the perceived need to provide "equality" to every conceivable group, or event, has led to the creation of enormous bland encyclopedic tomes, with little or no narrative excitement or recognizable thematic purpose. In the end, this has become a nightmare for teachers trying to interest and engage young minds in the study of history.

Today, more than ever, it is necessary for teachers to supplement their classes constantly with compelling inputs or risk losing students to the mind-deadening drudgery of required textbook reading. Although there are some novels set in historic periods that are quite good, none that I have found are accurate enough, or rich enough in relevant historical detail, to coincide with and support comprehensive history curriculums.

As an educator facing this need for over thirty years, I began writing my own historical fiction and using it with my classes. These readings grew gradually from short stories, carefully set within real historical periods, to full novels suitable to support an entire term's work. I found that I could also structure my writing to illustrate ethical conflicts emerging from the events of the past and greatly strengthen my classes with values-rich reading material. I wrote them because they engaged and motivated my students and made my classes more meaningful and this made me a better teacher.