Hampton Sides | |
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Born | Wade Hampton Sides [1] [2] 1962 (age 61–62) Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. |
Pen name | W. Hampton Sides (formerly) [1] [3] |
Occupation | Historian/Author/Journalist |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Yale University (BA) |
Period | 2001–present |
Genre | Nonfiction, history, american history |
Notable works | Americana Blood and Thunder Ghost Soldiers Hellhound on His Trail In the Kingdom of Ice |
Spouse | Anne Goodwin |
Children | 3 sons |
Wade Hampton Sides (born 1962) is an American historian, author and journalist. He is the author of Hellhound on His Trail, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder , On Desperate Ground, and other bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction.
Sides is editor-at-large for Outside magazine and has written for such periodicals as National Geographic , The Wall Street Journal , The New Yorker , Esquire , Men's Journal , The American Scholar , Smithsonian , and The Washington Post . His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing. [4]
A native of Memphis, Sides attended PDS Memphis [2] and Memphis University School, and graduated from Yale with a BA in history. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Colorado College. [5] Sides lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife Anne Goodwin Sides, a journalist and former NPR editor.
Sides is a past fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Japan Society, and has been an Edwards Media Fellow at Stanford University.
He is a member of the Society of American Historians and serves on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Sides has guest-lectured at Columbia, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech, the Autry National Center of the American West, the American Embassy in Manila, the National World War II Museum, the Chautauqua Institution, the Explorers Club, the Sun Valley Writers' Conference, and the Google campus, among other venues and institutions. He has appeared as a guest on such national broadcasts as the American Experience , the Today show, Book TV, the History Channel, Fresh Air , CNN, CBS Sunday Morning , The Colbert Report , and NPR's All Things Considered .
Ghost Soldiers (Doubleday, 2001), a World War II narrative about the rescue of Bataan Death March survivors, has sold slightly over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen foreign languages. Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City , praised Ghost Soldiers as a "Great Escape for the Pacific Theater," and Esquire called it "the greatest World War II story never told." The book was the subject of documentaries on PBS and The History Channel, and was partially the basis for the 2005 Miramax film, The Great Raid (along with William Breuer's The Great Raid on Cabanatuan). Ghost Soldiers won the 2002 PEN USA Award for non-fiction and the Discover Award from Barnes & Noble. The book's success led Sides to create The Ghost Soldiers Endowment Fund, a non-profit foundation dedicated to preserving the memory of the sacrifices made by Bataan and Corregidor veterans by funding relevant archives, museums, and memorials.
Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier is a 2004 collection of non-fiction essays. [6] The book was published in paperback on April 13, 2004, through Doubleday. [7] [8] The book consists of several essays that Sides wrote while traveling through the United States and examining American cultures during a period of 15 years. Sides pays specific attention to subcultures that would fall under the topic of "Americana". [9]
Blood and Thunder (Doubleday, 2006) focuses on the life and times of controversial frontiersman Kit Carson, and his role in the conquest of the American West. A critic for the Los Angeles Times described Blood and Thunder as "stunning, haunting, and lyrical," while The Washington Post called it "riveting, monumental...authoritative and masterfully told." Blood and Thunder was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by Time magazine, and was selected as that year's best history title by the History Book Club and the Western Writers of America. Blood and Thunder was the subject of a major documentary on the PBS program American Experience and is currently under development for the screen.
Hellhound on His Trail (Doubleday 2010) is about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the largest manhunt in American history to capture James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty in 1969 and served the rest of his life in prison. Sides, who is a native of Memphis, is the first historian to make use of a new digital archive in that city, called the B. Venson Hughes Collection, which contains more than 20,000 documents and photos, many of them rare or never before published. Sides' research forms much of the basis for PBS's documentary "Roads to Memphis", which originally aired May 3, 2010, on the award-winning program, American Experience.
Hellhound on His Trail reached #6 on The New York Times Best Seller list and was a finalist for the 2011 Edgar Awards as the year’s best non-fiction mystery. Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the book "spellbinding...bold, dynamic, unusually vivid," while a reviewer in The New York Times Book Review suggested that Hellhound "may be the first book on King that owes less to Taylor Branch than Robert Ludlum." Time magazine said Hellhound "unfolds like a mystery—one read not for the ending but for all the missteps and near misses along the way." Critic Laura Miller, writing on Salon.com, described Hellhound as a "meticulous yet driving account that is in essence a true-crime story and a splendid specimen of the genre." David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer-winning biography of King, wrote in The Washington Post that Hellhound was "a carefully constructed true-crime narrative" and "a memorable and persuasive portrait" that "makes a valuable contribution to the historical record."
Black Label Media will produce and direct a film adaption, with a spring 2018 target for start of production. The script will be adapted by Scott Cooper who will also direct the film. [10]
In the Kingdom of Ice (2014, Doubleday) recounts the tragic true story of the first official American attempt on the North Pole, the voyage of the USS Jeannette led by Navy captain George DeLong in 1879. Key historical figures in the book include James Gordon Bennett, Jr., owner of the New York Herald newspaper and financier, and August Heinrich Petermann, a German cartographer whose theory helped spawn the polar expedition. [11]
The book has been translated into French, German, Chinese, Polish, and Russian, among other languages. Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, called In the Kingdom of Ice "the most dramatic polar mission you’ve never heard of. Once you start, you won’t stop." S.C. Gwynne, author of Empire of the Summer Moon called it "an Arctic thriller . . . an authentic narrative masterpiece." Efforts to locate the wreck of the USS Jeannette have been led by the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, for which Sides has served as a consultant. In the Kingdom of Ice is reportedly being developed for the small screen by Emmy Award winning screenwriter Kirk Ellis (John Adams).
On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle, was published on October 2, 2018. It is a multifaceted retelling of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir through the experiences of marines, commanders, pilots, Korean citizens and the Chinese. It also acts an indictment of the overweening hubris of General of the Army, Douglas MacArthur. Through MacArthur's self-proclaimed expertise on the "Oriental mind" and what Sides referred to as MacArthur's "solemn regard for his own mind", MacArthur was thoroughly convinced of American victory; instead, and while completely ignoring the advice of leaders on the ground, MacArthur sent American troops into what could only result into a massacre. [12] Historian Douglas Brinkley called the book "a heart-pounding, fiercely written . . . one of the finest battle books ever." A reviewer for Bloomberg, calling the book " superb," wrote that On Desperate Ground "should be required reading for negotiators on both sides of the DMZ." The Washington Post named On Desperate Ground one of the ten best books of 2018, and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation named it the year's best non-fiction book.
Considerable parts of the narrative follow aviator Jesse L. Brown, who is also the subject of the 2022 film Devotion.
Americana artifacts are related to the history, geography, folklore, and cultural heritage of the United States of America. Americana is any collection of materials and things concerning or characteristic of the United States or of the American people, and is representative or even stereotypical of American culture as a whole.
James Gordon Bennett Jr. was publisher of the New York Herald, founded by his father, James Gordon Bennett Sr. (1795–1872), who emigrated from Scotland. He was generally known as Gordon Bennett to distinguish him from his father. Among his many sports-related accomplishments he organized both the first polo match and the first tennis match in the United States, and he won the first trans-oceanic yacht race. He sponsored explorers including Henry Morton Stanley's trip to Africa to find David Livingstone, and the ill-fated USS Jeannette attempt on the North Pole.
George Washington De Long was a United States Navy officer and explorer who led the ill-fated Jeannette expedition of 1879–1881, in search of the Open Polar Sea.
The De Long Islands are an uninhabited archipelago often included as part of the New Siberian Islands, lying north east of Novaya Sibir.
The Open Polar Sea was a conjectured ice-free body of water that was believed to encircle the North Pole. Although this theory was widely accepted and served as a basis for many exploratory expeditions aimed at reaching the North Pole by sea or discovering a navigable route between Europe and the Pacific via the North Pole, it was ultimately proven to be untrue.
Henrietta Island is the northernmost island of the De Long archipelago in the East Siberian Sea. Administratively it belongs to Yakutia of the Russian Federation.
USSJeannette was a naval exploration vessel which, commanded by George W. De Long, undertook the Jeannette expedition of 1879–1881 to the Arctic. After being trapped in the ice and drifting for almost two years, the ship and her crew of 33 were released from the ice, then trapped again, crushed and sunk some 300 nautical miles north of the Siberian coast. The entire crew survived the sinking, but eight died while sailing towards land in a small cutter. The others reached Siberia, but 12 subsequently perished in the Lena Delta, including De Long.
Bent's Old Fort is a fort located in Otero County in southeastern Colorado, United States. A company owned by Charles Bent and William Bent and Ceran St. Vrain built the fort in 1833 to trade with Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Plains Indians and trappers for buffalo robes. For much of its 16-year history, the fort was the only major white American permanent settlement on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Mexican settlements. It was destroyed in 1849.
George Wallace Melville was a United States Navy officer, engineer and Arctic explorer.
The People's Grocery lynchings of 1892 occurred on March 9, 1892, in Memphis, Tennessee, when black grocery owner Thomas Moss and two of his workers, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell, were lynched by a white mob while in police custody. The lynchings occurred in the aftermath of a fight between whites and blacks and two subsequent shooting altercations in which two white police officers were wounded.
John Wilson Danenhower was a United States Navy officer best known for his participation in the Jeannette expedition.
William Frederick Carl Nindemann was a German-born American Arctic explorer and recipient of the Congressional Silver Jeannette Medal.
The New Journal is a magazine at Yale University that publishes creative nonfiction about Yale and New Haven. Inspired by New Journalism writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, the student-run publication was established by Daniel Yergin and Peter Yeager in 1967 to publish investigative pieces and in-depth interviews. It publishes five issues per year. The magazine is distributed free of charge at Yale and in New Haven and was among the first university publications not to charge a subscription fee.
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, is a non-fiction book written by American historian and author, Hampton Sides. It focuses on the transformation of the American West during the 19th Century.
In The Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette (Doubleday), 2014, is a nonfiction book written by the author and historian Hampton Sides. The book tells the true story of the 1879–1881 arctic voyage of the USS Jeannette and the crew's struggle to survive after having to abandon their ship in the polar ice.
Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier is a 2004 collection of non-fiction essays compiled by American historian and author Hampton Sides. The book was published in paperback on April 13, 2004, through Doubleday.
The Jeannetteexpedition of 1879–1881, officially called the U.S. Arctic Expedition, was an attempt led by George W. De Long to reach the North Pole by pioneering a route from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait. The premise was that a temperate current, the Kuro Siwo, flowed northwards into the strait, providing a gateway to the hypothesized Open Polar Sea and thus to the pole.
Hellhound on His Trail (Doubleday), 2010, is a nonfiction book written by author Hampton Sides, focusing on the characters and events surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Using multiple narratives, Hellhound is an attempt at exploring the psychology and emotion that dominated and divided the United States during the Civil Rights Movement.
The Bear Spring Treaty was signed on November 22, 1846 between Chief Narbona and 13 other Navajo leaders and Colonel Alexander Doniphan representing the US Government at Bear Springs, New Mexico in the Navajo country, near the future site of Fort Wingate. It was the first of many treaties signed between the Navajo and the US Government. It was never ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Petermann Fjord is a fjord in northwestern Greenland. Administratively it marks the boundary between the Avannaata municipality and the Northeast Greenland National Park.
"Blood and Thunder" is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice... By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.
Sides' book is a masterful work of history and storytelling, and it rewards patient readers with scenes of human strength and frailty they will long remember.
Thanks to Sides's copious mining of primary and first-person sources — including memoirs, official Navy documents, and De Long's journals and private correspondence — readers get to experience at close range the Jeannette crew's trek across the melting ice, this "sorry-looking set" in ignominious retreat from a nonexistent warm-water sea.
External media | |
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Audio | |
"In 1879, Explorers Set Sail To Solve Arctic Mystery, Once And For All", NPR, August 2, 2014 | |
Hampton Sides: "In the Kingdom of Ice", Diane Rehm Show, August 14, 2014 | |
Interview with NPR's Fresh Air, 10-28 | |
Video | |
Booknotes interview with Sides on Ghost Soldiers, September 30, 2001. |