As vast and varied as the storied vessels, the story of Murder on the Ohio Belle captures the clash of class and cultures between the North and the South, between wealthy southerners and those they deemed to be lower-class in living color.
~Cleveland Review of Books
[Stuart Sanders] has produced a carefully crafted microhistory of a riverboat and life on the Western rivers that reveals the tensions and realities of America on the eve of civil war. He handsomely succeeds in fulfilling his intention to show how 'a forgotten murder on a 19th-century steamboat can illuminate a more important broader narrative about our past.'... Sanders has crafted a complex story full of plot twists that, again, Agatha Christie and other mystery writers of her ilk would have greatly admired.
~America's Civil War Review
Stuart Sanders's meticulous unpacking of two notorious murders on the Ohio River dives deeply into the antebellum South's culture of honor and masculine violence. Deeply researched and wise, this is the best kind of microhistory.
~Kenneth W. Noe, author of Reluctant Rebels, The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861
In this lively, insightful read, Stuart Sanders follows the steamboat Ohio Belle as it transports tons of cargo, actresses, enslaved men and women, gamblers, dead men and their murderers, thieves, and Civil War soldiers. Like the vessel about which he writes, Sanders's book is full of fascinating characters. With his deft interweaving of historical context, he illuminates antebellum American attitudes about class, politics, slavery, southern honor, personal identity, and war.
~Anne Marshall, author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State
Few people know as much about the Civil War era in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley as Stuart Sanders. Viewing history through the lens of the Ohio Belle, Sanders shifts the story from an isolated murder to a much more complex series of events that speak directly to the sectional tensions already permeating the United States in 1856. Caught between these sections while plying the Ohio River, the Ohio Belle was the perfect host for issues involving slavery, honor, violence, and ultimately murder.
~Dr. Brian McKnight, author of Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia
