Daystar Retirement Village in West Seattle will host author Cindy Safronoff on Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016, 2:30PM as part of a history and civics-related event series leading up to the election. Safronoff will discuss her award-winning historical biography CROSSING SWORDS: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage recently featured in the Boston Globe. Daystar Seattle residents, guests, and visitors are all welcome to attend the event in the Activities Room.  Copies of the book will be available at the event.

Daystar Retirement Village is located at 2615 SW Barton Street, just across the street from Westwood Village shopping center in West Seattle. To attend the event, please RSVP to Daystar at 206-937-6122.

Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Peyser Safronoff is available on Amazon, by special order from your favorite local bookstore, or through a growing number of public libraries, including Seattle Public Library. 

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Harvard Book Store is offering it at 20% this week. They take phone orders (617-661-1515) and will ship anywhere in the USA. 

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The Tuesday August 2, 2016, in-store event, which included reading, discussion, and book signing, was part of Harvard Book Store’s well-known author events at the landmark independent book store in Cambridge, just across Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard University campus.

Harvard Book Store event staff introduced Cindy Safronoff to the audience as the author of Climbing Mount Rainier with the Chicks and as having a professional certificate in Genealogy & Family History from the University of Washington. Crossing Swords was introduced as an award-winning book, having won first place in Regional Literature from New England Book Festival and in Religious Nonfiction from Next Generation Indie Book Awards, among other awards.

Safronoff selected readings that showed a variety of pundits responding to Eddy’s and Woodhull’s career activities, making waves and making headlines in nineteenth-century America. Safronoff explained that these sections were added to the book after early manuscript readers found it hard to believe that Eddy and/or Woodhull were among America’s most famous and influential women. The readings included commendation and criticism about Eddy’s religious career by humorist Mark Twain, women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony, and journalist Author Brisbane, and attack’s on Woodhull’s political career by author Harriet Beecher Stowe, political cartoonist Thomas Nast, and others.

In addition to the 50 or more people packed into the event room seating area at the store, staff throughout the store and shoppers browsing the book aisles could see and hear Safronoff’s  presentation through the in-store video broadcast system.

Harvard Book Store offered paperback copies of Crossing Swords at a special 20% discount for the event. More than 30 copies of the book sold at the Aug. 2 event. In addition, more copies sold in the days leading up to the event in the store or by phone order.

After the book talk, Safronoff met with people individually and signed copies of books. Later Harvard Book Store asked Safronoff to sign copies of books for people who were unable to attend the event but ordered book by phone to be picked up in the store or shipped. 

The several remaining copies purchased by the store for the event will be sold in the store as autographed copies. So run, don’t walk to Harvard Book Store to pick up one of the last autographed copies of Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Safronoff.

Thank you Harvard Book Store for a wonderful event!

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The Boston Globe coincidentally was founded in 1872, the year of Victoria Woodhull’s famous run for US President and the year of her famous “free love” campaign. It is also the year Mary Baker Eddy began writing her most famous book Science and Health, including a chapter called “Marriage,” which included a response to the ideas about sexuality that Woodhull advocated.

The focus of the article is the book’s tag line, “The untold story of America’s nineteenth-century culture war,” as a description for the marriage debate within the early women’s rights movement, which Cindy Safronoff discovered and is bringing forward with the book Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage. This historical biography about this history of the institution of marriage in America has won 10 book awards in 7 contests, in categories ranging from women’s issues, to US history, to nonfiction drama.

The Boston Globe feature is also excellent timing, as Safronoff will be doing an author event at Harvard Book Store on Tuesday August 2 at 7PM. This extra exposure should help draw more people from the Boston area to the event.  

Thank you Kate Tuttle, and thank you Boston Globe!

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Located at 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, the landmark Cambridge, Massachusetts, bookstore hosts frequent events in the store with authors, many of whom have published bestsellers and won awards for their books. Safronoff has won ten book awards for Crossing Swords in categories ranging from Nonfiction Drama to U.S. History, most recently in Women’s Issues from Independent Publisher Book Awards and Next Generation Indie Book Awards, plus first in Regional Literature from New England Book Festival in addition to awards from Readers’ Favorite, USA Best Book, National Indie Excellence, and Illumination Book Awards.

Crossing Swords will be on the Women’s Studies shelf at Harvard Book Store by the second week of July through the Aug 2 event, which will include a book signing. For anyone unable to attend the event, autographed copies can be ordered through the Harvard.com website or by calling the bookstore at (617) 661-1515 and then picked up at the store or shipped anywhere in the USA.

Harvard Book Store is an independent bookstore, but is adjacent to Harvard University, which was originally founded in 1636 shortly after the arrival of the first Puritan settlers. This has special significance to Safronoff’s book, since the culture of these early settlements is described in Safronoff’s book Crossing Swords as it relates to the history of the institution of marriage in America.

Crossing Swords has additional relevance to the Boston area because both Mary Baker Eddy and Victoria Woodhull have their historical archrives in Boston — Eddy at the Mary Baker Eddy Library at the Christian Science Center, and Woodhull in Special Collections at the Central Library of the Boston Public Library.  This is what brings Cindy Safronoff to Boston — research for a Crossing Swords sequel. Consequently, readers in the Boston area have the opportunity to hear her speak, ask questions, and have her sign their books on Tuesday, Aug 2, 2016, at 7:00PM at Harvard Book Store.      

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The newly restored St. Louis Central Library

Originally founded in 1865, the St. Louis Public Library built the marble palace called the Central Library after receiving a substantial gift from Andrew Carnegie in 1901, including the magnificent historic art inspired by artists of the Italian Renaissance period.

Today the St. Louis Public Library downtown Central library, where Crossing Swords will reside, is the region’s premier library for research and general library services–a newly revitalized building, artfully blending what was state-of-the art a century ago (but is now a stately historical landmark), with the latest modern innovation. 

The perfect place for Crossing Swords, which likewise artfully revitalizes the story of two of the most dynamic female pioneers of the nineteenth century.  

Local relevance of Crossing Swords

This copy of Crossing Swords just acquired will not be in circulation for check-out. Instead, the book will be kept in pristine condition, available for reading only to visitors to the Central Library. It is being archived in the Rare Books and Special Collection department because of its relevance to St. Louis local history.   

The two leading ladies of Crossing Swords, Mary Baker Eddy and Victoria Woodhull, both have connections to St. Louis. Likewise does the author Cindy Safronoff, who has made St. Louis County her primary home for the past ten years. St. Louis County Public Library, St. Louis Public Library, as well as other St. Louis area libraries were used for most of the research for Crossing Swords.   

Woodhull’s connections to Spiritualism in St. Louis

Victoria Woodhull lived and worked as Spiritualist medium in St. Louis for several years around the time of the Civil War. There she married her second husband, Colonel James Harvey Blood, a Civil War hero who had just been elected as Auditor for the City of St. Louis, a prominent and well-paid public office. Woodhull and Blood met through their mutual interest in Spiritualism. Years later Woodhull returned to lecture in St. Louis when she became the first woman to run for US President and her husband helped run her national campaign. All of these St. Louis events are mentioned in Crossing Swords.

Séances, Ouija boards, and other Spiritualist communications with the Spirit World were very popular in the mid-nineteenth century, with strong interest by millions of Americans. Today Spiritualism is no longer such a major American religious movement, but it quietly persists. St. Louis is still an active organizational center for Spiritualism, with a Spiritualist church located on South Kingshighway Boulevard.

Eddy’s connections to Christian Science in St. Louis

Although Mary Baker Eddy never visited St. Louis, she also has significant historical connections. On the other side of Kingshighway Boulevard, on a section of North Kingshighway nicknamed “Holy Ground” due to the concentration of historic Christian churches, is one of the first branches of the Church of Christ, Scientist, Eddy founded in Boston that eventually became a world-wide organization.

This St. Louis church, founded in 1894, is still active today. A letter Eddy wrote to the St. Louis church when it was newly formed is included in one of her primary published books, Prose Works.

Today there are many Christian Science churches in the St. Louis metro area. In fact, St. Louis is a hub for Eddy’s denomination, primarily because The Principia, a private school for pre-school through college Christian Science children, attracts students and visitors from all over the world. The school was originally in St. Louis city and now is in St. Louis County with a second campus in nearby Elsah, Illinois.

Eddy vs. Woodhull: The Battle for the Soul of Marriage

There is some spiritual and religious content in Crossing Swords, highlighting the different and in some ways opposite theological beliefs of Eddy and Woodhull, but the book is cataloged as primarily being on the history of marriage in America and secondarily as a book about cultural conflict in America, as well as biographical for Mary Baker Eddy and Victoria C. Woodhull. If the book were available for check-out, it would have a call number under Dewey decimal system of 306.8109.

Eddy and Woodhull were both among the most famous women in America during the early women’s rights movement, and they took polar opposite political positions on how empowering women should impact the institution of marriage in America. This American values conflict, spiritual and political, this nineteenth-century culture war, hints at the influences of Eddy and Woodhull in creating present American culture.  

Historic Restoration

Both Eddy and Woodhull were front page news in their day, blazing trails in the mid-nineteenth century that are impressive even by today’s standards. They were far ahead of their time. Yet somehow over the course of the past century, both Eddy and Woodhull have been essentially left out of the telling of American history. Crossing Swords sets them both into historic context of the American civic dialog, and shows their place in history and their relevance to today’s culture, and even our divisive social issues. How appropriate then, for St. Louis Public Library to include their story in its extensive collection of top quality books at its newly revitalized St. Louis Central Library. 

Next time you are in downtown St. Louis, be sure to take a tour of the St. Louis Central Library. And while you are there, go up the stairs up to the Third Floor, past the magnificent stain glass windows, to the Rare Books and Special Collections room to take a look at 400-year old rare books, and a recently published literary nonfiction drama called Crossing Swords by Cindy Safronoff.

Crossing Swords: Mary Baker Eddy vs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull and the Battle for the Soul of Marriage by Cindy Peyser Safronoff is available on Amazon, by special order from your favorite local bookstore, or through a growing number of public libraries, including St. Louis Public Library. 

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• Belmont Public Library, in Belmont, MA, along with the Minuteman Library Network, which serves 62 library locations including 7 colleges in the Metrowest region of Massachusetts. 
• The Principia School and College, in Town and Country, MO, and Elsah, IL.
• The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, has also recently added Crossing Swords to its library catalog.  
• The Indie Washington anthology in the Seattle Public Library online catalog (available as e-book). 

Also coming soon to:

•  The Mary Baker Eddy Library at the Christian Science center in Boston, MA. 
• The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, for its catalog of 18 million items. 

Special request to one and all:

Check to see if your library has Crossing Swords in its catalog and if not, please consider making a request to the library staff to acquire it for their collection. Library websites usually have a form for suggesting new books. Most typically, you need to have a library membership to make the request. The author can’t always do this, because acquisition requests made by the author of the book are not given the same priority as requests from others. 

The more libraries that have the book, the more people will have free, convenient access.   

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But really, this is not the end of this journey. It is only the beginning. Now my work shifts to promotion. These first advance copies will be sent to book review editors at book trade magazines and other publications that might be interested in writing a review of this historical biography. A few will also be sent to authors of books on related topics, with the hope of getting a their endorsements.

I have no idea how many months or years I will put into the promotion for this book. All I can do is approach this next phase the way I have from the very beginning: keeping my focus on the next immediate step. That way, all I ever need to do, is just this one thing.

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