Skip to main content

Brenda Wineapple

Biography

Brenda Wineapple

Born in Boston and raised in northern Massachusetts (on the New Hampshire border), Brenda Wineapple has lived in New York City for many years with her husband, the composer Michael Dellaira.

There, she does her writing. And most recently, in KEEPING THE FAITH, she has delved into a single momentous event in American history --- a trial momentous in its own time and important in ours, but largely unknown, forgotten or belittled.

Brenda Wineapple

Books by Brenda Wineapple

Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
by Brenda Wineapple - History, Nonfiction

“No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry and hate, and these fires are being lighted today in America.” So said legendary attorney Clarence Darrow as hundreds of people descended on the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of a schoolteacher named John T. Scopes, who was charged with breaking the law by teaching evolution to his biology class in a public school. In KEEPING THE FAITH, Brenda Wineapple explores how and why the Scopes trial quickly seemed a circus-like media sensation, drawing massive crowds and worldwide attention. She takes us into the early years of the 20th century --- years of racism, intolerance and world war --- to illuminate, through this pivotal legal showdown, a seismic period in American history.

Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877
by Brenda Wineapple - History, Nonfiction

For America, the mid-19th century was an era of vast expectation and expansion: the country dreamed big, craved new lands, developed new technologies, and after too long a delay, finally confronted its greatest moral failure: slavery. Brenda Wineapple explores these feverish, ecstatic, conflicted years when Americans began to live within new and ever-widening borders; fought a devastating war over parallel ideals of freedom and justice; and transformed their country, at tragic cost, from a confederation into one nation, indivisible.