When Kat Smutz was a child growing up in the mountains of Northeast Georgia, she often listened to her father talk about his childhood in Western North Carolina. In particular, he talked of his grandfather, a cavalryman in the Confederate army during the Civil War. While attending college in Missouri, Kat visited a Civil War battlefield for the first time and has been a history addict ever since.
That was over thirty years ago. Since then, Kat has relived history through her participation with reenactment groups, improved her research skills as a genealogist, and been a volunteer for federal, state and local historic sites. Life has taken her over most of the United States, into Mexico and Canada, and from one end of Britain to the other. Her most recent adventure was joining her husband on a business trip to the UAE.
Her travels usually include a side trip to whatever places of historic significance might be nearby. That practice proved its value when she began work on American Slavery In An Hour. Kat tagged along with husband Mark on a business trip to Washington, DC, where she was able to visit several historic sites closely associated with the history of slavery, including the home of Frederick Douglass.
Professionally, Kat had been a law enforcement officer, a teacher, and spent twenty years as a journalist. Her love of history and writing have gone into three installments for the History In An Hour series, a work of historical fiction called Silent Tears, and more than sixty rough drafts composed over the past forty years or so. Someday, a few of them might make it to publication. In the meantime, she and husband Mark live wherever his post with US Customs lands them.
At present, that’s Maryland, practically the epicenter for American Civil War history. With Washington, DC to the south and Gettysburg to the north, can another civil war book be far behind?
