Unspeakable is a social history of sex between adults and children, told through the life of one man, the 20th-century writer Norman Douglas, an unrepentant pederast. How could Douglas’s countless fans and friends have admired a man who wrote so openly about his sexual encounters with children? This book explores how attitudes toward intergenerational sex in the recent past differed sharply from our own.
Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage during the early nineteenth century.
* 2015 James C. Bradford Biography Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
* 2015 Stonewall Honor, American Library Association
* 2015 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize finalist, Canadian Historical Association
* 2015 LGBT Studies, Lambda Literary Award finalist
* 2015 New England Society prize finalist
* Journal Sentinel top 10 book for 2014
* Reader’s Lane top 10 non-fiction book for 2014
* Boston Globe Top 10 Ideas column for 2014
* Book of the week at salon.com
* Featured in The Washington Post and The Guardian
The Reign of Terror in America explores how the United States reacted to the violence of the French Revolution. Fears of Jacobin violence drove new social conservatives to embrace new humanitarian movements including antislavery, antiwar, and support for public education.
* 2010 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Institut français de Washington
Rachel Hope Cleves 
