Board of Education-which affirmed that segregated schools-across the land–were unconstitutional. He was the nation’s first African American Supreme Court Justice, best known for arguing the historic 1954’s Brown v. The website of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People remembers Thurgood Marshall as “a civil rights lawyer who used the courts to fight Jim Crow and dismantle segregation in the U.S.” The Grateful American Book Prize recommends Lincoln’s Spymaster: Allan Pinkerton, America’s First Private Eye by Samantha Seiple. She was detained, imprisoned briefly, and deported to Virginia, with her daughter, “Little Rose.” Shortly before the beginning of the Civil War, the sleuth was hired to protect President Lincoln-and later–to supervise the Union’s new secret service agency working to detain Confederate agents by August 23, 1861, he had unveiled a Washington DC espionage network operated by the widowed socialite, Rose O’Neal Greenhow. Its motto was ‘We never sleep’ and its logo – a prominent, unblinking eye – came to be associated with all future ‘private eyes.’ According to the National Park Service, “Around 1850, organized America’s first private detective agency specializing in railway thefts. War and other crises beget snooping, scrutinizing, and spying. The Grateful American Book Prize recommends Roanoke: A Novel of the Lost Colony by Sonia Levitin.

Roanoke by Sonia Levitin