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This was an educational assortment for me, as there are some authors I haven't heard of and some who I just automatically ignore as fiction for the masses, but now I'm a bit more appreciative, for example Tony Hillerman and Lisa Scottolini. Each story is prefaced by the editor with some background on the author, and that is sometimes more interesting than the story itself (haven't quite managed to finish the Ellery Queen one). The real gems, maybe this is personal taste, are the Twilight-zonish bordering on horror stories, including a nice one by Harlan Ellison. The older stories are a bit of a slog prose-wise but the bigger problem is diversity. There are some women (I estimate a quarter to third), but I couldn't tell that any were not white (and from some of the stories I could definitely tell they're white). Probably Tony Hillerman is the closest to a non-white writer, but it would have been nice to get something from Walter Mosley, maybe.

This is one of those books that should replace whatever sanitized history text is promulgated in public schools these days (I'm extrapolating from my school days). Even now, for me this was an eye opener, I hadn't realized the Trail of Tears was not a singular event but a decades long campaign of ethnic cleansing in an unholy alliance of slave owners, wannabe slave owners, real estate speculators, a president with genocidal tendencies (how is he still on the twenty dollar bill?), and New York bankers (what else is new).

Even for those in the genocide-is-bad camp, there's plenty of stereotype-confounding nuance to be learned, like how many Native Americans had thriving farms (including some with slaves, although they tended to be treated better, relatively, sometimes given their own farms like feudal serfs), many applied for citizenship and titles to their land (turns out that "come assimilate with us" was a bluff), and race was not such a notion within Native American society, there were tribes including African Americans and mixed race families. Also, the accounts of how cholera decimated populations in their forced cramp conditions (some on their journey west refused to be packed into steamboats) should turn you into a pro-masker.