Charles Pitts asked Sara Whitford:

How come you're not a school teach too? You're a natural :)

Sara Whitford Thank you, Charles! I take that as high praise. :)

Actually, I do homeschool my son, so in that respect I am a teacher. I've also done a great deal of speaking in public schools over the years on regional history. One of my goals in writing the Adam Fletcher series is to make them both entertaining and educational, but not in any sort of beat-you-over-the-head-with-history kind of way.

I especially love writing about little known, or often misunderstood, things in history. One example in "The Smuggler's Gambit" is the candid presentation of apprenticeships in the colonial era, which unfortunately were often little more than a means to cheap labor. When Adam gets forced into his apprenticeship, the concerns his mother had would have been all too real at the time.

Another example would be the history that gets revealed to Adam about the pirate Blackbeard. Other than the fact that the person who tells that story is a fictional character, everything he tells Adam in that conversation is true—and yet vastly different from the commonly held legends surrounding that notorious sea rogue.

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