Willard Thompson

I love History. And you will too.

I love to research and write history, and most of all I love sharing history with others.

I’ve always wondered about the men and women who came before me. I have a deep appreciation for what they said and did in the past that forged the American nation we live in today. I like to share those stories in The History You Missed, my Kindle Eboook series of brief historic biographies. In a way, they remind me of the late Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story, old radio broadcasts in which Paul Harvey revealed something surprising about the person he was telling about.

In the same way, my Ebook, Dividing California tells how carpetbagger California Senator Willian Gwin had a bill on the floor of the U.S. Congress to split California into a free state and a slave state on the eve of the Civil Way.

Or how Jessie Benton Frémont insulted two different U.S. Presidents in her efforts to promote her husband the Pathfinder, John Charles Frémont.

Or again how Sam Brannon, a Mormon missionary became California’s first millionaire and yet died a pauper.

These and my 13 other Ebooks in The History You Missed series are all historically accurate stories you can read in an hour or less at the lowest Kindle price of $2.99. In each, I provide a further reading list for those who want to read more. I hope you will pick out a couple of them and enjoy the history.

My love of history also led me to write historical fiction where I can superimpose my own story on a historically based setting. I began with the history of California which easily separates into three parts: The Spanish Period, The Mexican Period and the Yankee Gold Rush Period. I’ve written an historical novel about each historical period, collectively called The Chronicles of California.

The first title, Dream Helper won a Gold Medal from the Independent Book Publishers Association. It tells the real story of the life of a Chumash Indian woman at the Santa Barbara Mission. She overcomes the hardships that stand in the way of her marrying the Indian man she loves and raising her daughter., Delfina. It comes to a climax when the Chumash revolt to achieve their freedom.

The second novel, titled Delfina’s Gold, follows her daughter, Delfina through the conflicts of the Mexican period, when Yankee traders come to settle in California and learn to live with the Californios. Delfina falls in love with a Boston trader named Will Thornton, but their romance is a difficult one of many highs and some lows.

In the final book, Their Golden Dreams, we see California in the Gold Rush period, where men and women from the U.S. and around the world come to the Golden State seeing their fortunes. Some make it big, some do not, but they all have stories to tell.

The Girl from the Lighthouse is a different kind of historical novel. In it, a young American girl who grew up in the Lighthouse at Point Conception, California, goes to Paris to follow an art career. She meets the young men and women who become the Impressionist artists of the 1860s-1870, has a love affair with one of them who is killed in the Franco-Prussian War and searches for the forger of her lover’s lost art. The history of this volatile period in French History and the lives of the artists portrayed in the story are historically accurate and paint a memorable picture of that period in French history.

My Final novel, La Paloma, is an adventure/romance that takes place in California and Mexico when a young undocumented alien woman from Los Angeles goes to Mexico in search of her missing father. She enters a dark world of illegal enterprises to find her dad and her new lover. This novel is based on my own travels in Mexico.

I hope you will find something in my historical writings that you find interesting and entertaining. If you do, I hope you write a strongly positive review on Amazon for me.

Good history,

Willard