A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY26 start with W start with W
A unique collection of more than 150 letters written to an Ohio serviceman during the American Civil War that offers glimpses of women’s lives as they waited, worked, and wrote from the Ohio home front. The letters reveal fascinating details of the lives of mostly young, single women—friends, acquaintances, love interests, and strangers who responded to one Union soldier’s advertisement for correspondents. Almost all of the women who responded to Lieutenant Edwin Lewis Lybarger’s lonely-hearts newspaper advertisement lived in Ohio and supported the Union. Lybarger carried the collection of letters throughout three years of military service, preserved them through his life, and left them to be discovered in an attic trunk more than a century after Lee’s surrender.
Women’s letter writing functioned as a form of “war work” that bolstered the spirits of enlisted men and “kinship work” that helped forge romantic relationships and sustain community bonds across the miles. While men’s letters and diaries abound in Civil War history, less readily available are comprehensive collections of letters from middle-class and rural women that survived the weathering of marches, camp life, and battles to emerge unscathed from men’s knapsacks at war’s end.
The collection is accompanied by a detailed editorial introduction that highlights significant themes in the letters. Together, they contribute to the still-unfolding historical knowledge concerning Northern women’s lives and experiences during this significant period in American history.
"The ancient Celts capture the modern imagination as do few other people of classical times. Naked barbarians charging the Roman legions, Druids performing sacrifices of unspeakable horror, women fighting beside their men and even leading armies—these, along with stunning works of art, are the images most of us call to mind when we think of the Celts," observes Philip Freeman. "And for the most part, these images are firmly based in the descriptions handed down to us by the Greek and Roman writers."
This book draws on the firsthand observations and early accounts of classical writers to piece together a detailed portrait of the ancient Celtic peoples of Europe and the British Isles. Philip Freeman groups the selections (ranging from short statements to longer treatises) by themes—war, feasting, poetry, religion, women, and the Western Isles. He also presents inscriptions written by the ancient Celts themselves. This wealth of material, introduced and translated by Freeman to be especially accessible to students and general readers, makes this book essential reading for everyone fascinated by the ancient Celts.
The years following Appomattox offered the freed people numerous opportunities and challenges. Ex-slaves reconnected with relatives dispersed by the domestic slave trade and the vicissitudes of civil war. They sought their own farms and homesteads, education for their children, and legal protection from whites hostile to their new status. They negotiated labor contracts, established local communities, and, following the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, entered local, state, and national politics.
Though aided by Freedmen's Bureau agents and sympathetic whites, former slaves nevertheless faced daunting odds. Ku Klux Klansmen and others terrorized blacks who asserted themselves, many northerners lost interest in their plight, and federal officials gradually left them to their own resources. As a result, former Confederates regained control of the southern state governments following the 1876 presidential election.
We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice is a substantially revised and expanded edition of a book originally published under the title Black Voices from Reconstruction, 1865–1877.
This book explores the unique history of West Virginia, the only state born out of the Civil War. Western Virginians faced a dual crisis of allegiance and identity, torn between their historical ties to the secessionist state of Virginia and their loyalty to the Union. The population included a significant number of enslaved people, for whom the conflict’s outcome would have major consequences. Many Civil War narratives focus on major battles, but William Kerrigan shifts attention to the civilians of Western Virginia—both free and enslaved—who endured military occupation, raids, and guerrilla warfare. Civilians faced loyalty oaths, arrests, property destruction, and invasions by soldiers and partisans from both sides. Enslaved individuals played an active role, providing intelligence and assistance to Union forces and risking their lives for their freedom. At the same time, political leaders grappled with complex legal and political questions, first rejecting secession from the Union and subsequently pursuing their own secession from Virginia to form the new state of West Virginia. Their challenges included framing a new government, defining the state’s borders, addressing the future of slavery, and securing federal recognition. Postwar reconstruction in West Virginia presented its own challenges, distinct from those of other border states, as the return of defeated Confederates threatened the stability of the new state. The book highlights how the experiences of Western Virginia’s noncombatants, political leaders, and enslaved people contributed to the region’s turbulent transformation during and after the Civil War.
In 1901, Dr. Alfred Fournier committed an act both simple and revolutionary: he wrote ForOur Sons, When They Turn 18, a sexual and reproductive health treatise based on his clinical work at a leading Paris hospital. If this booklet aided adolescent understanding of health, it also encouraged reformers around the world to publish. By 1913, countless works on venereal disease prevention were available to adolescents.
During this period, authors wrestled with how to make still-developing scientific information available to a reader also in the process of maturing. What would convince a young person to avoid acting on desire? What norms should be employed in these arguments, when social and legal precedents warned against committing ideas about sex to print? How, in other words, could information about sex be made both decent and compelling? Health reformers struggled with these challenges as doctors' ability to diagnose diseases such as syphilis outpaced the production of medicines that could restore health. In this context, information represented the best and truest prophylactic. When publications were successful, from the perspective of information dissemination, they were translated and distributed worldwide.
What Adolescents Ought to Know explores the evolution of these printed materials—from a single tract, written by a medical researcher and given free to anyone, to a thriving commercial enterprise. It tells the story of how sex education moved from private conversation to purchased text in early twentieth-century America.
A wide-ranging blueprint for change, Where Are the Workers? shows how working-class perspectives can expand our historical memory and inform and inspire contemporary activism.
Contributors: Jim Beauchesne, Rebekah Bryer, Rebecca Bush, Conor Casey, Rachel Donaldson, Kathleen Flynn, Elijah Gaddis, Susan Grabski, Amanda Kay Gustin, Karen Lane, Rob Linné, Erik Loomis, Tom MacMillan, Lou Martin, Scott McLaughlin, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Karen Sieber, and Katrina Windon
When Where the Wild Grape Grows was published in 2005 by the University of Massachusetts Press, it was the first book-length critical study of Dorothy West. Since then, the publication of more volumes on West and her circle testify to popular and academic interest in under-represented artists of the Harlem Renaissance, many of whom appeared first in West’s literary magazine, Challenge (1934-1937). Challenge included poems by West’s cousin Helene Johnson as well as by her friends Lucia Mae Pitts, Waring Cuney, Pauli Murray, Grace Walker, Mae Cowdery, Marcia Prendergast, and Bessie Calhoun Bird. West also published work by her romantic partner Marian Minus and by Juanita DeShields (the first Black Canadian graduate of McGill University) and the Trinidadian author Alfred Mendes. She included artwork by Mildred Jones and journalism by Eslanda Robeson and Dorothy Peterson. In addition to her editorial activities, West corresponded with important African American musicians including Maud Cuney Hare, Alberta Hunter, and Henry T. Burleigh, and with sculptors Augusta Savage and Richmond Barthé. Just as West mentored others, she was encouraged by such academic luminaries as Columbia Professors Blanche Colton Williams and Dorothy Scarborough, and by the controversial novelist Erskine Caldwell.
The new Introduction to Wild Grape will include fresh research on these individuals, many of whom formed part of West’s social and artistic circle. Lucia Pitts, for example, was a poet who served in the famous WAC (Women’s Army Corps) 6888th Battalion. The work of Marian Minus and Mae Cowdery has received critical attention recently and they also merit closer investigation. The Boston writer and musicologist Maud Cuney Hare was an artistic mentor to West; her cousin Waring Cuney was a close friend: both will receive more attention in the paperback edition. The artist Mildred Jones accompanied West and twenty other young African Americans to Russia in 1932 as participants in an ultimately aborted propaganda film on race relations in America; Jones studied with the important Russian Modernist painter Aleksandr Deyneka.
The original edition of Wild Grape cites two stories about West’s Russian experiences (penned under the pseudonym Mary Christopher in 1934), “Room in Red Square” and “Russian Correspondence,” but the volume does not include the actual stories. The stories are interesting because they shed light on West’s unrequited romance with Langston Hughes and her relationships with other members of the group, and they offer a unique perspective on daily life in the U.S.S.R. Both stories will be published in the new edition, along with a detailed discussion of new research about West’s visit to Russia.
A third uncollected story, “Cook” (1934), written by West under the pseudonym Jane Isaac will also be included. This story is extremely important to West’s oeuvre and her artistic development; it includes characters, themes, tropes, and plot lines that she expanded and developed in her two novels, The Living Is Easy (1948) and The Wedding (1995).
Since 2005, new material has been added to the West archive in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. The section of Wild Grape devoted to West’s correspondence will include additional unpublished letters which underscore West’s dedication to African American art and culture.
The book includes the Benson-West family tree in Appendix II. Several scholars have expressed appreciation for this information which has not been published elsewhere; the chart will be updated to include the birth of several of West’s descendants.
Gathered here in meticulous translation are Anna Maria van Schurman's defense of women's education, her letters to other learned women, and her own account of her early life, as well as responses to her work from male contemporaries, and rare writings by Schurman's mentor, Voetius. This volume will interest the general reader as well as students of women's, religious, and social history.
Stan Hoig shows how treaty-making - once considered a viable method of peaceably resolving conflicts - degenerated into a deeply flawed system sullied by political deceptions and broken promises.
White Man's Paper Trail illuminates the pivotal role of treaty negotiations in the buildup to the Plains Indian wars, in American Indians' loss of land and self-determination, and in Euro-American westward expansion.
Though Barbary privateers began to seize North American colonists as early as 1625, Barbary captivity narratives did not begin to flourish until after the American Revolution. During these years, stories of Barbary captivity forced the U.S. government to pay humiliating tributes to African rulers, stimulated the drive to create the U.S. Navy, and brought on America's first post-revolutionary war. These tales also were used both to justify and to vilify slavery.
The accounts collected here range from the 1798 tale of John Foss, who was ransomed by Thomas Jefferson's administration for tribute totaling a sixth of the annual federal budget, to the story of Ion Perdicaris, whose (probably staged) abduction in Tangier in 1904 prompted Theodore Roosevelt to send warships to Morocco and inspired the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion. Also included is the unusual story of Robert Adams, a light-skinned African American who was abducted by Arabs and used by them to hunt negro slaves; captured by black villagers who presumed he was white; then was sold back to a group of Arabs, from whom he was ransomed by a British diplomat.
Long out of print and never before anthologized, these fascinating tales open an entirely new chapter of early American literary history, and shed new light on the more familiar genres of Indian captivity narrative and American slave narrative.
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Drawing upon nearly two hundred years of recorded African American oratory, The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches,edited by Richard W. Leeman and Bernard K. Duffy, brings together in one unique volume some of this tradition’s most noteworthy speeches, each paired with an astute introduction designed to highlight its most significant elements.
Arranged chronologically, from Maria Miller Stewart’s 1832 speech “Why Sit Ye Here and Die?” to President Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, these orations are tied to many of the key themes and events of American history, as well as the many issues and developments in American race relations. These themes, events, and issues include the changing roles of women, Native American relations, American “manifest destiny,” abolitionism, the industrial revolution, Jim Crow, lynching, World War I and American self-determination, the rise of the New Deal and government social programs, the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, the Vietnam War, Nixon and Watergate, gay and lesbian rights, immigration, and the rise of a mediated culture. Leeman and Duffy have carefully selected the most eloquent and relevant speeches by African Americans, including those by Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Barbara Jordan, Jesse Jackson, and Marian Wright Edelman, many of which have never received significant scholarly attention.
The Will of a People is the first book to pair the full texts of the most important African American orations with substantial introductory essays intended to guide the reader’s understanding of the speaker, the speech, its rhetorical interpretation, and the historical context in which it occurred. Broadly representative of the African American experience, as well as what it means to be American, this valuable collectionwill serve as an essential guide to the African American oratory tradition.
"Owoman, woman! upon you I call; for upon your exertions almost entirely depends whether the rising generation shall be any thing more than we have been or not. Owoman, woman! your example is powerful, your influence great."—Maria W. Stewart, "An Address Delivered Before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston" (1832)
Here—in the only collection of speeches by nineteenth-century African-American women—is the battle of words these brave women waged to address the social ills of their century. While there have been some scattered references to the unique roles these early "race women" played in effecting social change, until now few scholars have considered the rhetorical strategies they adopted to develop their powerful arguments.
In this chronological anthology, Shirley Wilson Logan highlights the public addresses of these women, beginning with Maria W. Stewart’s speech at Franklin Hall in 1832, believed to be the first delivered to an audience of men and women by an American-born woman. In her speech, she focused on the plight of the Northern free black. Sojourner Truth spoke in 1851 at the Akron, Ohio, Women’s Rights Convention not only for the rights of black women but also for the rights of all oppressed nineteenth-century women. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper struggled with the conflict between universal suffrage and suffrage for black men. Anna Julia Cooper chastised her unique audience of black Episcopalian clergy for their failure to continue the tradition of the elevation of womanhood initiated by Christianity and especially for their failure to support the struggling Southern black woman. Ida B. Wells’s rhetoric targeted mob violence directed at Southern black men. Her speech was delivered less than a year after her inaugural lecture on this issue—following a personal encounter with mob violence in Memphis. Fannie Barrier Williams and Victoria Earle Matthews advocated social and educational reforms to improve the plight of Southern black women. These speeches—all delivered between 1832 and 1895—are stirring proof that, despite obstacles of race and gender, these women still had the courage to mount the platform in defense of the oppressed.
Introductory essays focus on each speaker’s life and rhetoric, considering the ways in which these women selected evidence and adapted language to particular occasions, purposes, and audiences in order to persuade. This analysis of the rhetorical contexts and major rhetorical tactics in the speeches aids understanding of both the speeches and the skill of the speakers. A rhetorical timeline serves as a point of reference.
Historically grounded, this book provides a black feminist perspective on significant events of the nineteenth century and reveals how black women of that era influenced and were influenced by the social problems they addressed.
"A government which can protect and defend its citizens from wrong and outrage and does not is vicious. A government which would do itand cannot is weak; and where human life is insecure through either weakness or viciousness in the administration of law, there must be a lack of justice, and where this is wanting nothing can make up the deficiency."—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, "Duty to Dependent Races," National Council of Women of the United States, Washington, D.C. (1891)
"This unique collection of documents will be a boon to teachers of history and to scholars of the French Revolution. . . . Recommended."
-- Library Journal
Vivid sources for reconstructing the lives of Assyrian women
In this collection Cécile Michel translates into English texts related to wives and daughters of merchants and to their activities in nineteenth-century BCE Aššur and Kaneš. Discovered in excavations of the Old Assyrian private archives at Kültepe (ancient Kaneš) in Central Anatolia, these letters sent from Aššur reflect the preeminent role of Assyrian women within the family and in the domestic economy, as well as their contribution to long-distance trade. Contracts and other legal texts excavated at Kültepe attest to Assyrian and Anatolian women as parties in marriage and divorce contracts, last wills, loans, and purchase contracts. These unique finds paint a vivid portrait of women who aspire to be socially respected and provide a rare opportunity to reconstruct their daily lives as both businesswomen and housewives.
Features
- More than three hundred letters and documents transliterated and translated with commentary
- An overview of the study of women and gender in Assyriology
- A reconstruction of women's roles as textile producers, investors, and creditors within a long-distance commercial network
Cécile Michel is Senior Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, France) and Professor at Hamburg University (Germany). She is a member of the international group of scholars in charge of the decipherment of the 23,000 tablets found at Kültepe (ancient Kaneš) and of the Kültepe archaeological team. She is the coeditor of and contributor to The Role of Women in Work and Society in the Ancient Near East (2016), Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD (2017), and Mathematics, Administrative and Economic Activities in Ancient Worlds (2020).
Insightful and provocative, Women’s Activist Organizing in US History draws on both classic texts and recent bestsellers to reveal the breadth of activism by women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Contributors: Daina Ramey Berry, Melinda Chateauvert, Tiffany M. Gill, Nancy A. Hewitt, Treva B. Lindsey, Anne Firor Scott, Charissa J. Threat, Anne M. Valk, Lara Vapnek, and Deborah Gray White
More than three hundred letters written in Greek and Egyptian by women in Egypt in the millennium from Alexander the Great to the Arab conquest survive on papyrus and pottery. These letters were written by women from various walks of life and shed light on critical social aspects of life in Egypt after the pharaohs. Roger S. Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore collect the best preserved of these letters in translation and set them in their paleographic, linguistic, social, and economic contexts. As a result, Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800, provides a sense that these women's habits, interests, and means of expression were a product more of their social and economic standing than of specifically gender-related concerns or behavior.
Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800, takes the reader through theoretical discussions about the handwriting and language of the letters, the education and culture of the writers, and the writers' everyday concerns and occupations, as well as comparing these letters to similar letters from later historical periods. For each letter, discussion focuses on handwriting, language, and content; in addition, numerous illustrations help the reader to see the variety of handwritings. Most of this material has never been available in English translation before, and the letters have never previously been considered as a single body of material.
A thirteenth-century treatise on the theory and practice of ophthalmology, this unique work provides a window on what passed for medical knowledge of the eye during the late Middle Ages. Although little is known of the author, Benevenutus Grassus, he seems to have roamed Italy in the early thirteenth century as a medical practitioner specializing in diseases of the eye.
Here isa unique collection of documents that spans the history of New Jersey, from the arrival of Dutch traders in the 1600s to the present. The materials touch on a range of subjects such as slavery and abolitionism, the labor movement, race and ethnic relations, and economic and environmental issues. The documents include letters, journals, pamphlets, petitions, artwork, and songs created not only by those who exercised power, but also by men and women of more humble station. Their lively accounts range from descriptions of Native Americans in the seventeenth century to Bruce Springsteen’s lament about a declining factory town.
New to this expanded edition is the text of former governor James McGreevey’s “I am a Gay American” speech, as well as entries about the Abbott v. Burke court ruling mandating that New Jersey equalize funding of urban and suburban schools districts, sprawl and its effects on water supply, and the state’s economic boom in the 1990s.
A balanced survey of New Jersey’s history in the context of a changing nation, this book is ideal for general readers who want to explore the primary sources of the state’s past, and to U.S. history students at the high school and college levels.
New to this expanded edition is the text of James McGreevey's "I am a Gay American" speech, as well as entries about the Abbott v. Burke court ruling mandating that New Jersey equalize funding of urban and suburban schools districts, sprawl and its effects on water supply, and the state's economic boom in the 1990s.
A balanced survey of New Jersey's history presented in the context of a changing nation, this volume is well suited to general readers who want to explore the primary sources of the state's past, and to U.S. history students at the high school and college levels.
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