Charlotte Hinger
Novelist and Kansas Historian
Historical Fiction and Non-fiction
Nicodemus: Post-Reconstruction Politics and Racial Justice in Western Kansas
2017 Award of Merit--Solomon Valley Hwy 24 Alliance
A new history of the most prominent all-black town on the Great Plains.
Rich in detail and carefully researched, Charlotte Hinger's fine study reveals the paradoxical race relations that African Americans experienced, the voice of ordinary people, the role that American Indians played in assisting the earlist black settlers, and their quest for full equality and civil rights.
Albert S. Broussard--author of Expectations of Equality: A History of Black Westerners
In this unprecedented full=length scholarly study of Nicodemus, Charlotte Hinger shows that the experiences of obtaining land, recruiting residents, building communities, protecting economic and political interests, grappling with the moral headace of helping refugees--all on the harsh, lonely prairies of Western Kansas--drew African Americans into the same divergent patterns of racial uplift, social just, and radicalism with which the would contend in the century and a half that followed.
James N. Leiker--author of Racial Borders: Black Soldiers Along the Rio Grande
Come Spring
Medicine Pipe-Bearers Award--Western Writers of America
Spur Award Finalist-Western Writers of America
A powerful drama about the conflict between the homesteaders hewing a perilous existence from the stubborn sod and the ambitious and often unscrupulous town builders with their secret ties to the burgeoning railroads. Amid this backdrop is the passionate love story of a fragile aristocratic newly wed Aura Lee, who is shocked by the rigor of the Kansas plains and her strong but dangerously self-righteous husband, Daniel. Together they stand against the challenges of the land, determined to stay together and retain their property. But there are those who are just as determined to tear the couple apart and gain their land.