From the Melting of the Snow to the Greening of the Fields is my sixth book. It is the story of the St. Patrick’s Day Flood of 1936 as seen through the experiences of the fictitious Claymoore family and their friends and acquaintances. The fictional Reverend Claymoore is a coal miner and a Presbyterian preacher who lives in the coal patch of the Back Bench Mining Company disparagingly known as Bed Bug Row. The story takes place in just a few months during the year of 1936. It is about the flood, yes, and about love and courtship and about the people of southwest Pennsylvania who constantly find themselves, as the speech goes, opposing a sea of troubles in an effort to end them. The things they do to rise above their circumstances are simple, unselfconscious, and even at times heroic. However you see their actions, whether audacious and noble, sad or comical, you must know that they are always, to my knowledge, typical. The facts of the flood are true as reported in the 1936 issues of The Pittsburgh Press, which was my primary source of information. Also included in the accounts of the flood are personal recollections from the few people I could find who lived through it.

When Judge Ernest N. "Dutch" Modal was elected "the first black mayor" of this South Coast city November 13,1977, political observers all around the country sat up to take notice. New Orleans is the nation's fourth blackest city (relative to percent of total population), and the largest and most powerful city in the third blackest state in the country. When he took over the reins of the nation's second largest port — the Southern terminus of the mid continent grain export/oil import traffic carried by the Mississippi River — Dutch Morial became perhaps the country's most powerful elected black official. The true significance of Morial's November victory can really be understood only in the context of the history of Afro-American involvement in the city's political and cultural life. African slaves were first imported into the state of Louisiana, then a French colony, after Indian slavery was abolished in 1719. By 1724, colonial administrators had finished compiling the Code Noir, a document outlining the mutual rights and obligations of Louisiana's masters and slaves. By Bill Rushton's first book, on the French speaking Cajuns of South Louisiana, will be issued this fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. comparison to conditions in Anglo- American colonial areas, the results of the Code Noir were relatively progressive. All slaves were required to be baptized in the Catholic Church, establishing common cultural ties between blacks and whites in Louisiana that were closer than those anywhere else in the South — ties that were preserved through the Civil War until separate, black Catholic parishes began to be formed with the consent of the Archbishop of New Orleans in 1897. Colonial-era slaves were permitted to retain a good many of their own cultural traditions as well, and in New Orleans they were allowed Sunday afternoons off to gather in what was then called Congo Square to dance the bamboula to their own music, forming a unique milieu which helps explain why jazz originated here rather than in, say, Savannah or Charleston.

Workin' Good covers the continuing development of the union and its leadership and the current crises of the coal mining and steel making industry and the National Labor Union. Edna and Charlie and their friends are still there to tell the story and take you with them on a journey through the second part of the century with all of the ups and downs that Mon Valley families were required to deal with during that time.

Fire in My Bones is a fictional account of facts based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, two Italian immigrants accused---many to this day believe wrongfully---of a crime they did not commit. Sacco, a shoemaker, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were self-proclaimed anarchists. More specifically, they were workers' rights advocates during the time of the Great War and soon after when the Red Scare was sweeping the country and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer was making raids on and deporting suspected radical immigrants. The novel builds on details of unfortunate coincidences. The bad timing of their arrest (blatantly wrongful to begin with?) that suddenly thrusts them in the public eye, leads to their subsequent trials, convictions and executions at midnight August 22, 1927 among a maelstrom of raging protests and riots throughout the world.