History Professor Named Target Emerging Author
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffmans Civil War novel is her first fiction book.
San Diego State University history professor Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman has been selected as a Target Emerging Author for her Civil War novel Broken Promises.
The book, which already received a San Diego Book Award for Best Historical Novel and a director’s mention by the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, is on sale at Target stores nationwide.
“I walked into the Grossmont Target store and saw my book on the shelf, what a thrill,” said Cobbs Hoffman. “I’ve written non-fiction history books before but it’s incredibly rewarding to do a novel that brings history to life and can attract a broader readership.”
Through the eyes of the Adams Family
Broken Promises, Cobbs Hoffman’s first novel, is based on the lives of the son and grandson of John Quincy Adams, as recorded in their memoirs and wartime correspondence. Broken Promises reveals how close America came to experiencing a very different future.
Published by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, the novel explores a little-known yet pivotal moment in the Civil War, which began 150 years ago this month.
In 1861, fearing that England would support the Confederate cause, President Abraham Lincoln sent Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, to London where he discovered that the English were already building warships for the South. Charles then spent the next three years on a high-stakes game of espionage and diplomacy in order to save our nation.
About Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, who holds the Dwight Stanford Chair in American Foreign Relations at SDSU, is a winner of the Allan Nevis Prize for literary distinction in the writing of history. She is presently at Stanford University, where she is a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution and is working on another book about the history of American foreign relations.
She also authored All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the 1960s (Harvard 2000), among other history books. Hoffman is a native Californian, graduate of Stanford, political commentator, mother and expert pie maker. She wrote Broken Promises while teaching in Dublin, Ireland, on a Fulbright award.
