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Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy "Stunning."-Rebecca Onion, Slate "Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present."-Parul Sehgal, New York Times "Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective."-Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold...

Presenting a diverse collection of documents, Root of Bitterness reaches from the colonial era through the nineteenth century, focusing on six dominant themes: women's work, the power of gender, the physical body, women's collective efforts, diversity and conflict among women, and women's relation to state authority. This edition contains about twenty selections from the original volume and almost sixty new ones.

Astor. Rockefeller. McCormick. Belmont. All family names that still adorn buildings, streets and charity foundations. While the men blazed across America with their oil, industry, and railways, the matriarchs founded art museums, opera houses, and symphony houses that functioned almost as private clubs. These women ruled American society with a style and impact that make today's socialites seem pale reflections of their forbears. Linked by money, marriage, privilege, power and class, they formed...

From the celebrity spirit mediums of the nineteenth century to the TikTok witches hexing the patriarchy, women have long used magic and mysticism to seize back the power they re so often denied. Organized around different approaches women have taken to the occult over the decades creating new magical systems and symbols, using the supernatural for political gain, seeking fame and fortune as spiritual practitioners, questioning and investigating paranormal phenomena, and embracing their witchy i...

We are not all born with equal opportunities. Yet there have been countless women who have overcome a range of barriers such as prejudice, illness, and personal tragedy to advance our understanding of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). They used their knowledge to change the world, and their stories are fascinating. This book offers a concise introduction to the lives of 45 women, taking you into the cultural and social context of the world they lived in. Through their int...

Pre-war debutantes were members of the most protected, not to say isolated, stratum of 20th-century society: the young (17-20) unmarried daughters of the British upper classes. For most of them, the war changed all that for ever. It meant independence and the shock of the new, and daily exposure to customs and attitudes that must have seemed completely alien to them. This book will record, in their own voices where possible, the extraordinary diversity of challenges, shocks and responsibilities...

The role played by women in the evolution of religious art and architecture has been largely neglected. This study of upper-class women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries corrects that oversight, uncovering the active role they undertook in choosing designs, materials, and locations for monuments, commissioning repairs and additions to many parish churches, chantry chapels, and almshouses characteristic of the English countryside. Their preferred art, Barbara J. Harris shows, reveals their...

`Riveting, tragic tale’ New Yorker `Anna Pasternak has produced an irresistible account of joy, suffering and passion’ Financial Times The heartbreaking story of the passionate love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya – the tragic true story that inspired Doctor Zhivago. Doctor Zhivago has sold in its millions yet the true love story that inspired it has never been fully explored. Pasternak would often say `Lara exists, go and m...

A year in the life of a peasant woman in medieval England is vividly evoked in this extraordinary portrait of Marion, a carpenter’s wife, and her extended family. Based on years of research, Ann Baer brings to life the reality of a world that has been lost.Rising before dawn in a tiny village to a day of gruelling hard work, Marion and her husband face the daily struggle for survival. Starvation is never far away and travel to the next village is virtually unheard of. Existing without soap, pape...

Voices of Cherokee Women is a compelling collection of first-person accounts by Cherokee women. It includes letters, diaries, newspaper articles, oral histories, ancient myths, and accounts by travelers, traders, and missionaries who encountered the Cherokees from the 16th century to the present. Among the stories told by these "voices" are those of Rebecca Neugin being carried as a child on the Trail of Tears; Mary Stapler Ross seeing her beautiful Rose Cottage burned to the ground during the C...

Women on death row are such a rarity that, once condemned, they may be ignored and forgotten. Ohio, a typical, middle-of-the-road death penalty state, provides a telling example of this phenomenon. The Fairer Death: Executing Women in Ohio explores Ohio's experience with the death penalty for women and reflects on what this experience reveals about the death penalty for women throughout the nation. Victor Streib's analysis of two centuries of Ohio death penalty legislation and adjudication revea...