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The Maryland connection
As the title says, Condemned for Love is a Virginia story. But after preparing for last night’s talk in Hagerstown, I realized how much it is also a Maryland story. I revised my deck of PowerPoint slides before appearing at the Washington County Free Library. I was part of its McCauley Lecture Program, and I
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Elvira? To her, only one possibility
I tried, goodness knows I tried. I spent months if not years trying to figure out what happened to Elvira Corder. The best I could do was an educated guess, speculation born of all that research. That’s why I’m so surprised when I meet someone who speaks with certainty about Elvira’s fate. It’s happened twice,
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Discomfort? Yes, that was a goal
When a friend suggested that Condemned for Love might be banned, I didn’t think much about it. When a second person said the same thing about a week later, I took note. “It struck me again and again how your book would be banned in several states because it tells an ugly truth,” my friend
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‘Night and Fog’ and Elvira Corder
When Steve Watkins described the German terror tactic, “Night and Fog,” I snapped to attention. Steve is a retired professor at the University of Mary Washington, the author of 12 books and a longtime friend. I sat beside his wife, Janet Watkins, for many years in the newsroom at the Free Lance-Star. Steve and I
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Two takeaways from the book’s launch
Sometimes I circle a distant date on my calendar, and it seems to never arrive. Monday, July 17, was such a date, and, praise be, it finally came. History Press has officially published my new book, Condemned for Love in Old Virginia: The Lynching of Arthur Jordan, and it’s now available from your favorite seller.
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Recipe for this book: Gather, write, bleed
I think of my new book as unique since it is the only writing project for which I spilled blood. It happened in western Maryland on a cold Sunday in December 2019. I was on a scouting trip for what would become Condemned for Love in Old Virginia, my new book. I had visited the
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Hoping readers enjoy a good mystery
One of the uncomfortable moments in a newspaper reporter’s life is when you’re out somewhere, say grocery shopping at Giant, and a reader approaches. “I liked your story about my mother,” the reader might say. When this happened to me, I braced because I could hear a “but” coming. “I liked your story about my
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Slavery and Nathan Corder
Nathan Corder was the person most responsible for Arthur Jordan’s murder. He was also an enslaver from a long line of enslavers. Was there a link between the two? Did Corder’s past lead to his later cruelty? In his 1845 autobiography, Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved person, said that slavery was harmful to both enslaver
Author & Lecturer
Jim Hall 