The “hush” of the title comes suddenly, when first Elizabeth Cady Stanton dies on October 26, 1902, and three years later Susan B. Anthony dies on March 13, 1906. It is sudden because Stanton, despite near blindness and immobility, wrote so intently right to the end that editors had supplies of her articles on hand to publish several months after her death. It is sudden because Anthony, at the age of eighty-five, set off for one more transcontinental trip, telling a friend on the Pacific Coast, “it will be just as well if I come to the end on the cars, or anywhere, as to be at home.” Volume VI of this extraordinary series of selected papers is inescapably about endings, death, and silence. But death happens here to women still in the fight. An Awful Hush is about reformers trained “in the school of anti-slavery” trying to practice their craft in the age of Jim Crow and a new American Empire. It recounts new challenges to “an aristocracy of sex,” whether among the bishops of the Episcopal church, the voters of California, or the trustees of the University of Rochester. And it sends last messages about woman suffrage. As Stanton wrote to Theodore Roosevelt on the day before she died, “Surely there is no greater monopoly than that of all men, in denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey.” With the publication of Volume VI, this series is now complete.

After being forgotten for nearly 130 years, the “Mother of Suffrage in Missouri” and her husband are finally taking their rightful place in history. St. Louisans Virginia and Francis Minor forever changed the direction of women’s rights by taking the issue to the Supreme Court for the first and only time in 1875, a feat never eclipsed even by their better-known peers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Yet despite a myriad of accomplishments and gaining notoriety in their own time, the Minors’ names have largely faded from memory. In 1867, Virginia founded the nation’s first organization solely dedicated to women’s suffrage—two years before Anthony formed the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA). Virginia and Francis were also the brains behind the groundbreaking idea that women were given the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, a philosophy the NWSA adopted for nearly a decade. And their story doesn’t end there. After the court case, Francis went on to become a prolific writer on women’s rights and one of the first and strongest male allies of the suffrage movement. Virginia instigated tax revolts across the country and campaigned side-by-side with Anthony for women’s rights in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. America’s Forgotten Suffragists: Virginia and Francis Minor is the first biography of these suffrage celebrities who were unique for their time in being jointly dedicated to the cause of female enfranchisement. This book follows their lives from slave-holding Virginians through their highly-lauded civilian work during the Civil War, and into the height of the early suffrage movement to show how two ordinary people of like mind, dedicated to a cause, can change the course of history.

In Spiritualism's Place, four friends and scholars who produce the acclaimed Dig: A History Podcast, share their curiosity and enthusiasm for uncovering stories from the past as they explore the history of Lily Dale. Located in western New York State, the world's largest center for Spiritualism was founded in 1879. Lily Dale has been a home for Spiritualists attempting to make contact with the dead, as well as a gathering place for reformers, a refuge for seekers looking for alternatives to established paths of knowledge, and a target for skeptics. This intimate history of Lily Dale reveals the role that this fascinating place has played within the history of Spiritualism, as well as within the development of the women's suffrage and temperance movements, and the world of New Age religion. As an intentional community devoted to Spiritualist beliefs and practices, Lily Dale brings together multiple strands in the social and religious history of New York and the United States over the past 150 years: feminism, social reform, utopianism, new religious movements, and cultural appropriation. Podcasters and historians alike, Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Elizabeth Garner Masarik, and Marissa C. Rhodes each identify one site in Lily Dale and one theme that its history illuminates. They use those sites and themes to approach Lily Dale not as debunkers but as inquisitive researchers and storytellers. At the same time, they also reflect on their own relationships contending that it's never quite possible to separate grief, hope, faith, and friendship from understandings of the past. Spiritualism's Place breaks myths, unveils unexpected stories, and finds new ways to contemplate Spiritualism's role in American history.

The second volume of Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times contains sixteen essays on Tennessee women in the forefront of the political, economic, and cultural history of the state and assesses the national and sometimes international scope of their influence. The essays examine women's lives in the broad sweep of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in Tennessee and reenvision the state's past by placing them at the center of the historical stage and examining their experiences in relation to significant events. Together, volumes 1 and 2 cover women's activities from the early 1700s to the late 1900s. Volume 2 looks at antebellum issues of gender, race, and class; the impact of the Civil War on women's lives; parades and public celebrations as venues for displaying and challenging gender ideals; female activism on racial and gender issues; the impact of state legislation on marital rights; and the place of women in particular religious organizations. Together these essays reorient our views of women as agents of change in Tennessee history. Contributors: Beverly Greene Bond on African American women and slavery in Tennessee; Zanice Bond on Mildred Bond Roxborough and the NAACP; Frances Wright Breland on women's marital rights after the 1913 Married Women's Property Rights Act; Margaret Caffrey on Lide Meriwether; Gary T. Edwards on antebellum female plainfolk; Sarah Wilkerson Freeman on Tennessee's audacious white feminists, 1825-1910; M. Sharon Herbers on Lilian Wyckoff Johnson's legacy; Laura Mammina on Union soldiers and Confederate women in Middle Tennessee; Ann Youngblood Mulhearn on women, faith, and social justice in Memphis, 1950-1968; Kelli B. Nelson on East Tennessee United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1914-1931; Russell Olwell on the "Secret City" women of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II; Mary Ellen Pethel on education and activism in Nashville's African American community, 1870-1940; Cynthia Sadler on Memphis Mardi Gras, Cotton Carnival, and Cotton Makers' Jubilee; Sarah L. Silkey on Ida B. Wells; Antoinette G. van Zelm on women, emancipation, and freedom celebrations; Elton H. Weaver III on Church of God in Christ women in Tennessee, early 1900s-1950s.

Examines material culture and the act of institution creation, especially through architecture and landscape, to recount a deeper history of the lives of African American women in the post-Civil War South.