Azariah's Prayer. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Azariah's Prayer

Spring 1789: two men from the Deep South arrive in New York City, where the new federal government has just assembled. Neither Edmund Telfair nor his black manservant Abednego has ever been more than two days’ journey away from Savannah—or more than a few hours away from each other. Together they play politics by day . . . and lovers by night. But they enter this new world, with its vibrant African-American community and glittering “Republican Court,” only to discover the corrosive impact of a past that follows them—a past from which slaveholder and enslaved both reap a harvest of betrayal sown in the rice fields and battlefields of revolutionary Georgia. The freed slave Aaron’s chance encounter with the two strangers rekindles a secret vengeance against the Telfair family. Aided by the skillful manipulation of unsuspecting characters and unexpected opportunities, his plan ultimately converts Abednego into the rebellious “Azariah.” Edmund and Azariah’s relationship unravels against the backdrop of government crises, political maneuvering, and a city rapidly breaking free of its colonial past. When Edmund confronts the truth of Aaron’s secret by revealing a secret of his own, Azariah’s prayer turns into a curse that puts their own idyllic past forever out of reach. Flashbacks and alternating narrative voices reveal parallel versions of perception and memory, while actual historical documents tell the violent climax.

History is landscape, climate, and voices. William “Chuck” diGiacomantonio discovered this secret of the historian’s craft as a teenager during long bike rides throughout his native eastern Massachusetts, where “every Middlesex village and farm” was wildly celebrating the bicentennial of Paul Revere’s ride and other events of the American Revolution. This Yankee attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., intending to land a foreign service assignment in some plush European post. But while pursuing graduate studies deep in the American heartland, at the University of Chicago, he re-discovered his love of American history and returned to Washington to teach high school civics. In one of those serendipitous events that prove the existence of a divine plan, Chuck attended a museum exhibit where he happened to meet the staff of The George Washington University’s First Federal Congress Project—who have been his colleagues ever since. From that second great Bicentennial year of 1989, Chuck has been an editor of the The Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, 1789-1791. The (currently) 20-volume letterpress edition recreates the world of America’s Founding generation through their letters, diaries, speeches, and newspaper editorials—sources that have been the basis for several scholarly articles he has published on early congressional history, D.C. history, Quakerism, and the antislavery movement. It was in obscure references buried in two of those documentary sources that Chuck found the inspiration for re-imagining the mix of fact and fiction in Azariah’s Prayer. The facts are based on extensive research—from consulting eighteenth century maps and scholarly monographs, to exploring the ghostly remains of rice plantations in Georgia’s tidewater. He wrote most of the book in a vintage Washington, D.C. Victorian row house he shares with his two best friends, including his German Shepherd, “Gaius.”