With an endorsement from the incredible writer Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina), noting that Anne Royall, the subject of The Trials of a Scold, is "a role model for those of us living in the age of Trump," how can you not want to read this?

This book is a biography of Royall, one of the pioneering American muckraking journalists, who also endured a circus of a trial convicting her of being a "common scold," basically because she spoke her mind and spoke it freely, taking full advantage of the rights of freedom of speech, thought, and press.

Royall has been mostly lost in the annals of history, and we get some insight into why that is here, but she's quite a fascinating character whose biography was long overdue. Widowed after a marriage that had already drawn its fair share of raised eyebrows and scandal (her older husband was a wealthy landowner, she'd worked as his servant, AND they'd cohabited before marriage) she began writing and pursuing her political interests.

She spoke out about having a clear separation between church and state, this during a rising tide of evangelicalism in 1820s America. She drew quite a lot of ire as those lines became increasingly blurred.

Historian and American Book Award winner Jeff Biggers writes a thoroughly researched account of her life, trial, and the wonderful work she went on to do even after her conviction. Anne's story is fit neatly into the context of this era of American history, and it's a mostly engaging biography and history, if at times the history does become a little thick.

A necessity for reading especially in the current American moment, when the government has waged war and sown seeds of distrust against large swaths of the media and individual journalists. Prescient, thought-provoking, and very relevant today.

In 1829, politicians in DC were so angry with Anne Royall that they revived an archaic law allowing them to try her as a "common scold" and punish her with a dunking stool. How had things come to this point? Royall was the daughter of frontier settlers, whose experience seeing the treatment of Native Americans in the American Revolution made her a defender of their rights the rest of her life. He subsequent marriage to William Royall, American Revolutionary hero, Freemason and enlightenment deist pissed off his Tidewater family (who hated her frontier origins and fear a heir to dilute their share of the estate) and gave her access to his library, where she became a brilliant autodidact. Royall's death in 1812 let his family evict her, whereupon she became a travel writer, focusing on the newly opened lands in Alabama, and writing with wit and scathing social commentary that prefigures both muckraking and blogging, especially in the public management of her "Brand". Her inability to coddle religious leaders of the Second Great Awakening and laser-guided sense for finding corruption led to the 1829 trial (which she lost, although she considered the $10 fine good publicity in lieu of a dunking), but she promptly founded an independent newspaper, staffed it with orphans she trained to set type and do investigative journalism, and dug in. Anecdotally, she may have secured the first Presidential interview by a woman after she found JQ Adams swimming naked in the Potomoc and confiscated his clothes until he agreed to talk. This one is ripe for a biopic.