"Spanning 30 years of American history, from the twilight of Kennedy's Camelot to the days leading up to Bill Clinton's election, We Are All Good People Here explores the intimate and complex friendship between Eve Whalen and Daniella Strum. Eve, privileged child of an old Atlanta family, meets Daniella in the fall of 1962, on their first day at the all-girls Belmont College in Virginia, where the two are paired as roommates and become fast friends....

As African American women left slavery and the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed in white employers' homes, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert...

"In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes later for the crime of putting his hand on the arm of a white child. Rather than accepting his fate, Duncan found Richard Sobol, a brilliant, 29-year-old lawyer from New York who was the only white attorney at "the most radical law firm" in New Orleans. Against them stood one of the most powerful...

The fates of two unforgettable women--one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life's last vital act--intertwine at the terminus of the Underground Railroad.