PUBLISHED! School's Out and Empire and Frontier

For reasons I’ve never entirely understood, publishers have collectively decided that Tuesday is the day books should be published. This past Tuesday was an especially good one for Sinsheimer Literary: Mickey Revenaugh’s School’s Out and Samuel Marquis’s Empire and Frontier both officially hit shelves!

School’s Out: Why Families Are Choosing Unconventional Education, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, explores the millions of American families who are increasingly looking beyond the traditional classroom.

Homeschooling has continued to grow well beyond the pandemic spike: Johns Hopkins' Homeschool Research Lab reports that homeschool participation increased an average of 4.9% in the 2024-25 school year—more than twice its pre-pandemic growth rate—and 36% of reporting states reached record homeschool enrollment. But the numbers only tell you so much. Mickey spent years traveling the country to understand what this movement actually looks like. She joins Black homeschoolers in Georgia, goes unschooling off the grid in Illinois, catalogs tortoises with a roadschooling family in the Arizona high desert, attends an all-ages “pod prom” outside Boston, and explores microschools, forest schools, online learning, and other experiments in unconventional education.

The families she meets also scramble the usual political assumptions around homeschooling: one considers pulling a trans daughter from school for her safety, while another homeschools to avoid “pronouns.” It’s a complicated, rapidly changing world, and Mickey approaches it with real curiosity about what these choices mean not just for individual families but for the future of American education.

Meanwhile, Empire and Frontier: Colonel Peter Schuyler and the Valiant Iroquois in King William’s War: 1689–1701, published by Pegasus Books, transports readers more than three centuries into the past.

Sam tells the story of Peter Schuyler, the Dutch-American mayor of Albany, military commander, and Indian Affairs commissioner who forged an unusually close alliance with the Five Nations of the Iroquois during King William’s War. Known to his Iroquois allies as “Brother Quider,” Schuyler fought alongside them against the French while navigating a dizzying mix of warfare, colonial politics, and cross-cultural diplomacy. The alliance he helped sustain would become a model for the military and diplomatic relationships that shaped later colonial conflicts, including the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. It’s an action-packed and surprisingly little-known chapter of early American history—and, as readers of Sam’s Captain Kidd will know, exactly the kind of history he loves bringing back to life.

Two very different books, two terrific authors, one publication day. Congratulations, Mickey and Sam!