Author Spotlight

Dave Tabler

My body of work is built around a single place: Delaware. Six books so far, all of them centered on this small state that most people associate with corporate filings and the I-95 corridor. Delaware has a reputation as a footnote—wedged between bigger, louder neighbors, easily bypassed. But European settlers have been living continuously on this patch of land since 1638, nearly four centuries on a very small piece of ground. That compression is actually a gift to a historian. When the stage is this small, the patterns are harder to hide. I work from the bottom up. Diaries, court records, letters, contemporary newspapers—the kind of primary sources that put you next to the person who lived through the moment, rather than the historian who later tidied it. I'm not interested in flattering the past. Ecclesiastes has a line I keep coming back to: "Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these?" That's the test I apply to every chapter. Human struggle and institutional failure have always been with us, and so have the imperfect responses to both. Honest history holds both at once. If there's a unifying thread, it's that ordinary people carry the weight. Delaware just happens to be where I watch them do it.

I wrote Delaware Keepers—a history of the men and women who kept Delaware''s lights burning from 1769 to the automation era of the 1940s—because the picture in everyone's head was wrong, and the truth was more interesting. The picture in everyone's head—the bearded hermit losing his sanity in the haze, the lonely tower keeper slowly going mad—has shaped American imagination about lighthouse keeping since at least 1800. It's romantic, gothic, and deeply familiar. It's also dead wrong, at least for Delaware. What got me started was a fragment in an old Delaware newspaper. On October 27, 1907, the keeper George W. Duncan and his wife Annie celebrated their 37th wedding anniversary at the Port Penn Range Light. Forty guests crowded into the keeper's dwelling. The Citizens' Cornet Band played into the evening. Duncan was toasted as "the famous 'boy' drummer"—not for storm heroics, but as the neighbor and bandmate he had been all his life. That same year, the local paper recorded him petitioning for better roads and chairing a baseball fundraiser. He kept the light. He also kept the community. The more I dug, the more keepers I found like him. John and Elizabeth Dickerson, who tended the first beacon at Cape Henlopen—which Elizabeth eventually burned in 1777 to keep out of British hands. Abraham Hargis, writing desperate letters to Thomas Jefferson about his salary. Hannah Hill, dragging a boat across broken ice to find a doctor for her sick husband. Irvin and Janie Lynch, who raised eight children at Mahon's Light. None of them were the bearded hermit. So that's the surface answer: I wrote it to take down a myth. But the deeper answer is that the myth was protecting us from a harder question. When technology made lighthouse keepers obsolete in the 1940s, nobody mourned. Progress meant efficiency, and efficiency meant eliminating the human element. What we lost in the bargain was a model in which technical work strengthened community bonds rather than replacing them. That trade-off is happening in our own century, in our own occupations. The keepers' story isn't really about lighthouses. It's about what disappears when we stop noticing the people inside the institutions.

I'm in final pre-press production on Delaware's Forgotten Cavalry: A Failure of Command, due out January 1, 2027—the story of a small Delaware cavalry unit that faced off against Confederate legend J.E.B. Stuart at Westminster, Maryland in June 1863, only to be betrayed by its own commanding officer. Major Napoleon Bonaparte Knight was a political appointee with no military experience—a Confederate deserter who took a Union commission when the winds shifted. When his cowardice at Westminster threatened to become a scandal, courts-martial were quashed. Witnesses were silenced. Official reports were rewritten. The cover-up had powerful allies in Washington. But three of Knight's sergeants—Harrison Vandegrift, Spencer Hitch, and Townsend Downes—kept diaries. For 160 years, those firsthand accounts sat in separate archives, telling pieces of a story that Civil War historians had never assembled. Cross-correlating them with official records and personal correspondence turned out to be the key to recovering what really happened. The book reveals how ordinary soldiers responded when their leadership failed catastrophically—and how they quietly chose honor over hierarchy.

After that, I'm deep into research for Delaware Innkeeping: An American Hotel History, From Colonial Tavern to Corporate Brand—a history of public lodging in Delaware from the colonial tavern through the grand hotel to the postwar motor court. The thesis is about contraction: how the social and civic functions of the inn slowly got unbundled and outsourced until what we now call a "hotel" barely resembles what travelers stayed in for the first three centuries. Same bottom-up approach. Different century. Same kind of story.

Finally I'd like to share a few things, none of them about Delaware in particular. First, a thank you. Every reader who finds these books does so through curiosity, word of mouth, or the kindness of a librarian. That's a humbling chain to be on the receiving end of, and I'm grateful for it. Second, a pact. I work hard to trust the reader with the full force of the material—including the parts that are uncomfortable, ambiguous, or that resist a clean moral. I don't tidy up the past to make it more palatable, and I don't pretend that the people I write about were simpler than they were. What I ask in return is patience. The kind of history I write doesn't move at the pace of a sixty-second TikTok or an Instagram reel. It rewards the reader who slows down. Finally, an invitation. The stories I tell are deliberately local—but local is not parochial. Local customs and inventions are how the broader American story actually unfolds. Wilmington's Emily Bissell, in 1907, sketched the first Christmas Seal to fund a single local tuberculosis sanatorium; it grew into a national campaign that still raises money for public health today. Engineers at the University of Delaware helped build the Network Time Protocol—the timing infrastructure that synchronizes the modern internet. Italian immigrants in Wilmington brought the Feast of the Seven Fishes to Delaware kitchens, where it has spread into households with no Italian ancestry at all. None of those people were preserving anything. Each was adapting an inheritance and adding something new. What I'd ask is that you see yourself in the same line. The customs you inherit, the ones you adapt, the ones you invent and pass on—that's how history actually works. It's not a museum. It's a relay.

My experience eith The US Review of Books has been positive—and meaningful in a particular way. When U.S. Review of Books reviewed Delaware at Christmas in 2025, what struck me was that the reviewer engaged with the book on its own terms, as a work of cultural history rather than a seasonal title. The review traced the threads I'd built the book around—the Dutch, Swedish, French Huguenot, German, Black, Polish, Italian, and Hispanic communities whose customs braid together into Delaware's Christmas—and noted both my source citations and the role of the visual material. That's careful reading. It's also rarer than it should be for the kind of work I do, which sits outside the major-press review economy. A regional history from a self-publishing author can vanish into the cracks pretty easily. Publications like U.S. Review of Books help close those cracks—they take seriously work that larger institutions often overlook. I'm grateful that the team has now turned its attention to Delaware Keepers as well, and I look forward to many more years of doing this work.

About the Author: Dave Tabler grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, but spent long stretches of his early childhood with his paternal grandparents in Martinsburg, West Virginia, absorbing an Appalachian storytelling culture he then had to code-switch out of every time he came home. That outsider-on-the-inside posture, he says, is the pitchfork driving the writing. His mother—a Chicago-born librarian who loved John Dos Passos—kept the house stocked with books treated as things to be read, not displayed. Tabler earned his BS in art history and photojournalism from the University of Maryland, publishes the long-running AppalachianHistory.net (375,000 annual readers), and lives in Dover, Delaware with his wife Edy. He self-publishes by choice, which lets him follow the primary sources wherever they lead.

Books:

Delaware Before the Railroads
Delaware from Railways to Freeways
Delaware from Freeways to E-Ways
Delaware at Christmas
Delaware Keepers
Delaware Behaving Badly: First State, True Crimes