Nighthawkers

About the Book

It was the summer of 1828. New Englanders were flooding into western New York; the population was burgeoning and the commerce on the Hudson was booming. Like his father and grandfather before him, Josiah Hamrick's vessels sailed in the coastal trade, as they had since well before the Revolution and, while he knew precious little about steamboats, shipping was shipping he told himself. He had discussed this with his own father, Jonathan, now eighty-one, the retired patriarch of the Hamrick family, and was encouraged. Even the old man could see that it was time to seek new directions, to make a new beginning, just as the nation itself was about to do. The west was blossoming before their eyes, as his own son Tom so often said, offering opportunity beyond their dreams. All of this urged him to go and see for himself.

He had been away for nearly a month when the news arrived and Thomas knew instantly that his father would be gone forever. The envelope held the few things that had been recovered, his small notebook and some other papers, a letter, and his pocket watch, smashed and stopped at 3:45.

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 Nighthawkers.

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.