Sinha also greatly enlarges the temporal boundaries students are accustomed to (1865 to 1877), by covering the end of the nineteenth century—including labor reform movements, the subjugation of Native American tribes in the West, and the rise of American imperialism—into the Progressive era with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment.

In a sense, within an imperial context, humanitarian assistance inadvertently provided some Acadian women refugees with a platform unlike they had ever had before. 

Centering material culture when researching those with scant documentary evidence of their lives can help fill in the gaps of their experience.

Women’s work is often hidden or marginal within historical records that were meant to show men’s economic and political lives.

Women’s economic labor was essential to state function.

Not only was women’s and African Americans’ public leadership new and controversial, but also, well into the 1800s, Black and white women didn’t typically cooperate in charitable activity or reform efforts.

“The life of a citizen,” they reminded the all-male jury, “lies in the hands of woman.” The result made prosecuting sexual assaults among acquaintances all but impossible.  

Cridge’s American utopia did not singularly hinge on technological innovation or economic equality. It was a comprehensive achievement that combined political and economic equality with women’s autonomy and health.

When facilitated responsibly, historical role-play can be an invaluable educational method because it encourages empathy and taking ownership of one’s participation in the classroom.

Cycling culture offered individual women, as well as couples, greater freedom in daily life.

Indeed, early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years. This deeper history of salt shaped space, relations, and power dynamics during the eighteenth century in ways both explicit and obscure.

This was how I stumbled upon the extraordinary life of Anandi Gopal Joshee, known more informally as Anandibai (bai, a term of respect for Marathi women), the first Indian woman to have come to the United States to pursue a medical degree in 1883.

In the early republic, social media had its own crucial importance, although what the media employed was not the tweet, but little bits of pasteboard.

Tracing the intellectual and economic connections between Black women, Black data and colored conventions in the antebellum era.

WERE EARLY AMERICAN ELECTIONS FOR WHITE MEN ONLY?

But the nature of woman’s role in the destiny of expanding America, for Farnham, presented its own dilemmas. What exactly is required of Woman to take up this profound, national responsibility?

“But what if women indeed were mentioned? Would we have to change our interpretation of the place of women in the Constitution?”

Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation A delicately woven ivory silk map, embroidered in the first years of the nineteenth century, […]

The book is both an intersectional study of crime and an intersectional study of gender, poverty, and class.

Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history

“While bringing an incident of rape to legal officials was undoubtedly challenging for all victims, ironically, the cases that might be most successfully prosecuted were often the most difficult for victims to bring to court.”

“Which babies born outside the U.S. count as Americans from birth? And which men and women can bestow U.S. citizenship, automatically, upon their children?”

Yet it’s not at all clear what Thomas Jefferson’s political legacy, his racist writings, his slaveholding, his proclamations against slavery, his fear of miscegenation, and his (apparently) active miscegenation mean to us when taken together.

And then, I got hooked on Phillis Wheatley—even though I still wasn’t sure whether I liked her poetry or not.

“In 1767 the author of a letter to the editor of the New York Journal bemoaned the fashion that led women to double the size of their heads with the use of pomatum, artificial pads, and hair procured from corpses. But most distressing of all, the writer claimed, the ‘frizzled’ style resembled the ‘shock head of a Negro.'”

Embroidered orchards and peony hair ornaments testify that women were practitioners of floral display, but many women sought knowledge as well as style.

While primly stitching Eve’s fall from innocence on her canvas, Christina likely reflected on the brutal consequences suffered by those who succumbed to temptation in her everyday world.

Reading a 1959 article about a 1639 miscarriage in 2011 reveals how little the discourse about women’s bodies evolves over three hundred and twenty years.

Sedgwick’s evolving ideas about her children’s natures and her ability to shape them reflected an emerging American skepticism of the perfectibility of the individual and society at large, and an increasing emphasis on the determining power of innate characteristics.

It is exceedingly difficult to trace women, but particularly non-elite women of color, through the sources that are available.

When it came to women being federal employees, Jefferson could not see the light for the lighthouse.

Erotic standards are also historically contingent: what would have raised eyebrows in the eighteenth century often seems laughably tame, even quaint to the modern viewer.

Penned in 1897 by Julia C. Ferris, a white teacher and local educational leader, the manuscript narrates portions of the life of Jane Clark, an enslaved woman who escaped to Auburn in 1859. This narrative, rich with information about the Underground Railroad, has never been available to scholars, teachers, and lay readers—until now.

When we read the war from the perspective of female Loyalists, Loyalism becomes even more inclusive.

A strange and memorable thing. After outpourings of prayer, with the utmost fervor and fasting, there appeared an Angel, whose face shone like the noonday sun. His features were those of a man, and beardless; his head encircled by a splendid tiara; on his shoulders were wings; his garments were white and shining; his robe reached to his ankles; and about his loins was a belt not unlike the girdles of the peoples of the East.

As opposing groups fight to defend antagonistic beliefs, their accounts take on a life of their own, such that the women’s existence becomes most important not in and of itself but rather as a register of broader cultural struggles.

“Unlike West, Peale, and Trumbull, who gaze piercingly outward at viewers, Goodridge refuses a returning gaze, due not to modesty but to distraction.”

In the end, four papers stood out as making truly original contributions to scholarship on Salem witchcraft.

Under the specter of witches’ meetings said to be aimed at destroying the village ministry, an unprecedented and momentous claim, the New England tradition of legal caution towards witchcraft accusations completely evaporated.

Godbeer likens examining seventeenth-century witch trials through the surviving transcripts to watching “narrow-beamed spotlights that play upon an otherwise darkened landscape” . . .

Forest Leaves helps us locate the young poet in time and space, but the retrospective addition of these poems to Harper’s corpus unsettles the literary order in interesting and jarring ways.

Forest Leaves is a transitional volume: a collection that reflects Harper’s youth and schooling, but that is also already attuned to the fleeting nature of life, to the moral stain of slavery on the nation, and to many other “grown-up” topics.

“When Puritans saw specters of witches and Indians assembled in military companies, heard trumpets mustering them to meetings, or cried out that invisible attackers were tearing them to pieces, they were articulating the beliefs of their ancestors in England as well as their own New England assumptions.”

Ammunition, Or Sarah Winchester, 23 Years Dead, and My Grandmother, Newly Widowed, Speak The men were paid extra: danger money. […]

Women were not merely objects of male colonists’ desires; they also gloried in their reproductive abilities.

A critical awareness of the process of working, and sometimes failing, to conceptualize history and its possible futures, says Klein, is what the humanities can offer data visualization.

(October 1830)

Wigginton reveals the many different kinds of American women—including women of color, lower-status women, and dissenting or exiled women—who participated in the public dialogues that helped to constitute an American sense of national identity.

Women poets were under-recognized experts and artists in the forms associated with their homes and neighborhoods, the realms where they held power and influence.

When editorial work is done well, it prods you toward a new way of thinking about a text or set of texts without closing down other interpretive possibilities.

How did a nineteenth-century woman of means accomplish so much, unhampered and unassisted by a husband, and what sort of life did this strong-willed woman live?

Anne was oppressed and it is difficult for me to write her. I don’t want to oppress her further and […]

The Marquis de Lafayette visited Lexington, Kentucky, in May 1825 as part of his triumphal tour of the United States, […]

For many readers, the most eye-opening revelation of this book will be Osborn’s evolving position on slavery.

Despite the limited extant documents penned in Wheatley’s hand or published in her name, Carretta finds her almost everywhere, in church records, letters, newspaper articles, subscription lists, and elsewhere.

Alcoholic beverages for most people were food, prepared in the same kitchens by the same people who cooked the spoon bread, stirred the porridge, and roasted the meat.

Adam Smith never attached the invisible hand of the market to a fully formed body, but he and his fellow […]

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

The women of sensibility were expected to feel but not to feel too much.

Common-place talks with Jessica Choppin Roney, author of Governed by a Spirit of Opposition.

Discovery is one thing, interpretation another.

Harper’s early work adds a new genre–unabashedly romantic poetry– to her oeuvre.

As an abolitionist lecturer, Harper honed to perfection a polemical political style that appears to differ with the seemingly sentimental and religious form of Forest Leaves.

  AT ATKA In February at AtkaI stood on the black sandsbelow the trading postand watched my husbandfade up the […]

Tricks a Girl Can Do Hannah Maynard (1834-1918) was a Canadian photographer whocreated surreal images after the death of her […]

The neat separation of feminine and masculine spheres existed more as an ideal than as a fact.

Students can see how the virtue and nurturing nature of women is clearly reflected in the mother’s face and through the calm manner she exhibits as not one but two children demand her attention.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Can early American books regain such a readership in the twenty-first century?

American literature, culture, and ideals stand wounded because America has regularly asserted that some lives and literatures—especially Black lives and literatures—matter less than others.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“[G]iven the sorry record of ‘legitimate’ European medicine in the period, a profession that one historian of medicine recently noted was as likely to kill a patient as to cure her, it is no surprise that Mesmerism–which at least did no damage–successfully passed itself off as the cutting edge of Enlightenment science.”

Sitting in a sunlit reading room at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I pored over letters I knew from genealogical records and internal evidence were the material remains of a stepfamily.

Domestic Violation, Women, and Remembrance in Missouri’s Guerrilla Theater The sound of gunfire cracked the morning silence. News that another […]

By liberating her thoughts from the space of prose and her account from the limitations of physicality, Knight can transform the landscape through her narration, using poetry to “divert” and contain the threat of the unfamiliar.

Why did I leap into this project—and why did I stick to it?

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Both the supporters and detractors of the Vigilance Committee claimed to have not only God and the right, but also ‘the ladies’ on their side.”

“I had seen lots of sheets like this in New England museums but I never expected to find one in a research library. I was tempted to unfold it to its full length just to see the reaction of the sober scholars seated at the polished tables around me.”

In its intermingling of the national, the paternal, the feminine, and the global, this letter is perhaps not quite the warm epistle of friendship it purports to be.

When Thomas Harris’s ghost appeared to his childhood friend William Briggs across a field one March morning in 1792, he […]

Dickinson did not regard the book as a meaningful unit of analysis for her work, but too often, her editors and critics have.

History and the Found Poem Debt We may never know the mystery of sleep.We don’t want to become machines. But […]

My sister has a box of extraordinary things such as are not to be seen every day.

My search for Mehetabel’s diary had entailed a good six months of concentrated—and at times seemingly futile—effort. When I finally held it in my hands, however, every moment of that search seemed worthwhile.

How did women, with multiple daily obligations to family, reconcile a seemingly contradictory Transcendentalist imperative to cultivate “self-reliance”?

The inked letters are in Sewall’s hand, dated March 24, 1698/9, and they read, “Nunnacôquis signifies an Indian Earthen Pot as Hannah Hahatan’s Squaw tells me.”

Hayley’s arrival in Boston was reported in newspapers from New England to South Carolina.

An increasing popular interest in classical mythology proved liberating for American women.

Kelley’s extensive research makes clear that the educated women of the early nineteenth century reveled in their learning…

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Unlike the starving seamstress or the prostitute, both represented as victims of male commercial culture, the women trained as designers, wood engravers, and illustrators represented a new, respectable, potentially comfortable form of female industry.

Dolley Madison proved a premier influence peddler, though she would have never seen her work that way nor would her contemporaries.

Mary Clark Carr, it turns out, is even more interesting than Ann Carson. Anyone with a gun and a few friends can kidnap a governor, but how many women in the early republic had the talent, initiative, and opportunity to earn their living by writing?

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“By the late 1870s, guides mentioned a few pastimes as specifically well suited to women and children. Guides began to list carousels, circuses, pantomimes, and magic and marionette shows in conjunction with kids.”

The obviousness of reproduction as a frame for hereditary racial slavery did not come quickly to me nor, I would argue, does it come so for most.

“As the war with Iraq loomed through the 2002-03 school year, we heard echoes from conflicts throughout U.S. history.”

In place of powdered wigs and radical ideals, Berkin shows us bloody legs and dirty shirts.

Among artists and craftsman, Lovell notes how kinship and patronage were often closely aligned.

The central theme in the study of Brook Farm, [Delano] emphasizes, should not be explanation for its collapse but appreciation of its achievements.

I also think professional historians should be more open to what self-trained, so-called amateur historians can teach them.

Anne Bradstreet was a deeply ambitious poet who was far from surprised by the publication of her first book.

“Even after a woman mastered painting’s technical skills and the theory that stood behind them, she encountered the nagging problem of publicity. A successful artist had to exhibit and advertise. She necessarily exposed herself to strangers as she drummed up a clientele and again when she sat down to capture their likenesses. The training needed to transform raw talent into polished style was beyond most women’s reach just as the demands of professional painting were at odds with the standards of feminine decorum.”

With history like this, I thought, who needs fiction?

Only a year and a half after the fact, the rescue of Jessica Lynch has begun to seem like a quaint memory, as our attention has been turned from American captives to American captors, from Lynch’s blond ingenuousness to the scary hard eyes of Lynndie England and her comrades at Abu Ghraib.

“Godbeer challenges our early-twenty-first-century understanding that it is natural that each person have a distinct sexual orientation that comprises a major part of personal identity–a sexuality. Early European Americans had no such understanding.”

The taste of independence Sampson experienced as a “masterless woman,” according to Young, may have contributed to her willingness to seek her fortunes as Robert Shurtliff in May 1782.

At its best, the book finds a kind of poetry in the act of diving into the wreck of the archive, the dark grottoes of history where competing narratives jostle, where myth and “truth” hopelessly blur.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“For a kick I clicked on the description and viewed the item. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Young readers travel into the world of books with little or no luggage. They generally don’t have prior knowledge of the times.”

“[S]eventeenth-century Protestants believed that the spirit of a dead person might appear in order to draw attention to “an injustice that might not be detected by other means’.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Daily life in the city often was an adventure on its own.”

“Why this judgment about whether or not the participants really lived the life of 1883 homesteaders? Is the experiment a success if they feel as though they were homesteading or only if they convince the experts that they’d worked hard enough to survive the winter?”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The fact that everyone in the city helped to build or run the new government led to a new kind of domesticity that was literally shaped by national politics, although in ways L’Enfant and Washington could not have foreseen.”

Women like Pocahontas essentially became, like Pygmalion, characters eventually submissive to certain English manners and mores, made devoid of all cultural threat by their nearly complete assimilation into dominant, white society.

Massachusetts, after all, had not executed anyone for rape in twenty-seven years . . . Yet now . . . the community took a daughter’s accusation against her father so seriously that it sent a man to the gallows. What circumstances, we wondered, led to this extraordinary outcome?

Since the ability to impregnate a woman was a crucial component of manhood in seventeenth-century America, T could be at best only a partial man by colonial standards.

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The card catalog in the Amsterdam Municipal Archive is a thing of legend among Dutch historians . . .