In Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, Julie Des Jardins explores American women's participation in the practice of history from the late nineteenth century through the end of World War II, a period in which history became professionalized as an increasingly masculine field of scientific inquiry. Des Jardins shows how women nevertheless transformed the profession during these years in their roles as writers, preservationists, educators, archivists, government workers, and social activists. Des Jardins explores the work of a wide variety of women historians, both professional and amateur, popular and scholarly, conservative and radical, white and nonwhite. Although their ability to earn professional credentials and gain research access to official documents was limited by their gender (and often by their race), these historians addressed important new questions and represented social groups traditionally omitted from the historical record, such as workers, African Americans, Native Americans, and religious minorities. Assessing the historical contributions of Mary Beard, Zora Neale Hurston, Angie Debo, Mari Sandoz, Lucy Salmon, Mary McLeod Bethune, Dorothy Porter, Nellie Neilson, and many others, Des Jardins argues that women working within the broadest confines of the historical enterprise collectively brought the new perspectives of social and cultural history to the study of a multifaceted American past. In the process, they not only developed the field of women's history but also influenced the creation of our national memory in the twentieth century.

When the US Army Corps of Engineers began planning construction of The Dalles Dam at Celilo Village in the mid-twentieth century, it was clear that this traditional fishing, commerce, and social site of immense importance to Native tribes would be changed forever. Controversy surrounded the project, with local Native communities anticipating the devastation of their way of life and white settler–descended advocates of the dam envisioning a future of thriving infrastructure and industry. In In Defense of Wyam, having secured access to hundreds of previously unknown and unexamined letters, Katrine Barber revisits the subject of Death of Celilo Falls, her first book. She presents a remarkable alliance across the opposed Native and settler-descended groups, chronicling how the lives of two women leaders converged in a shared struggle to protect the Indian homes of Celilo Village. Flora Thompson, member of the Warm Springs Tribe and wife of the Wyam chief, and Martha McKeown, daughter of an affluent white farming family, became lifelong allies as they worked together to protect Oregon’s oldest continuously inhabited site. As a Native woman, Flora wielded significant power within her community yet outside of it was dismissed for her race and her gender. Martha, although privileged due to her settler origins, turned to women’s clubs to expand her political authority beyond the conventional domestic sphere. Flora's and Martha’s coordinated efforts offer readers meaningful insight into a time and place where the rhetoric of Native sovereignty, the aims of environmental movements in the American West, and women’s political strategies intersected. A Helen Marie Ryan Wyman Book

"Nick Witham investigates how widely popular history books have gotten written, promoted, and institutionalized. Not just a matter of writing style, popular accessibility is also a product of an author's frame of mind, the editor's skill, and the publisher's marketing acumen, among other factors. Witham has done extensive work not just in historians' archives but in publishers' files. His primary subjects are Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, and Howard Zinn-all popular historians who were explicitly concerned with the question of popularity. Collectively, they reveal the cross-influences of popular history writing and American popular culture"--

The field of black women's history gained recognition as a legitimate field of study only late in the twentieth century. Collecting stories that are both deeply personal and powerfully political, Telling Histories compiles seventeen personal narratives by leading black women historians at various stages in their careers. Their essays illuminate how--first as graduate students and then as professional historians--they entered and navigated the realm of higher education, a world concerned with and dominated by whites and men. In distinct voices and from different vantage points, the personal histories revealed here also tell the story of the struggle to establish a new scholarly field. Black women, alleged by affirmative-action supporters and opponents to be "twofers," recount how they have confronted racism, sexism, and homophobia on college campuses. They explore how the personal and the political intersect in historical research and writing and in the academy. Organized by the years the contributors earned their Ph.D.'s, these essays follow the black women who entered the field of history during and after the civil rights and black power movements, endured the turbulent 1970s, and opened up the field of black women's history in the 1980s. By comparing the experiences of older and younger generations, this collection makes visible the benefits and drawbacks of the institutionalization of African American and African American women's history. Telling Histories captures the voices of these pioneers, intimately and publicly. Contributors: Elsa Barkley Brown, University of Maryland Mia Bay, Rutgers University Leslie Brown, Washington University in St. Louis Crystal N. Feimster, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sharon Harley, University of Maryland Wanda A. Hendricks, University of South Carolina Darlene Clark Hine, Northwestern University Chana Kai Lee, University of Georgia Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University Nell Irvin Painter, Newark, New Jersey Merline Pitre, Texas Southern University Barbara Ransby, University of Illinois at Chicago Julie Saville, University of Chicago Brenda Elaine Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles Ula Taylor, University of California, Berkeley Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Morgan State University Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University

In this lively account of the writing, publication, and legacy of the 1956 bestselling novel, "Peyton Place," Ardis Cameron tells how the story of a patricide in a small New England village became a cultural phenomenon.

A history of the United States' greatest archival project and how it has shaped what we know about the Civil War Winner of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award * Shortlisted for the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize The Civil War generated a vast archive of official records--documents that would shape the postwar era and determine what future generations would know about the war. Yael Sternhell traces these records from their creation during wartime through their deployment in a host of postwar battles, including those between the federal government and Southerners seeking reparations and between veterans blaming each other for defeat. These documents were eventually published in the most important historical collection ever to have been assembled in the United States: The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and the Confederate Armies. Known as the OR, it is the ultimate source for generations of scholars and writers and ordinary citizens researching the war. By delving into the archive, Sternhell reveals its power to shape myths, hide truths, perpetuate rancor, and foster reconciliation. Far more than a storehouse of papers, the Civil War archive is a major historical actor in its own right.

At a time when issues of gender and sexuality are as prominent as they have ever been, Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe provides an authoritative exploration of the history of these deeply connected subjects over the last 250 years. Incorporating a blend of history and historiography, Annette F. Timm and Joshua A. Sanborn write engagingly on gender and sexuality in a way that illuminates our understanding of historical change and individual experience throughout Europe. The new and improved 3rd edition of this textbook now includes: · Personal vignette textboxes which shed light on key themes through individual life stories · Added material on Russia, Eastern Europe, the Holocaust and the 21st century · Historiographical updates throughout that bring the text up-to-date with new scholarship · 30 new images and maps Through 6 thematic chapters that cover democracy, capitalism, imperialism and war, Timm and Sanborn trace the social construction of gender roles, consider gender's influence on political and economic developments during the period and reflect on where European society's relationship with gender will go both now and in the future.

In 1852 Hannah Rebecca Crowell married sea captain William Burgess and set sail. Within three years, Rebecca Burgess had crossed the equator eleven times and learned to navigate a vessel. In 1856, 22-year-old Rebecca saved the ship Challenger as her husband lay dying from dysentery. The widow returned to her family’s home in Sandwich, Massachusetts, where she refused all marriage proposals and died wealthy in 1917. This is the way Burgess recorded her story in her prodigious journals and registers, which she donated to the local historical society upon her death, but there is no other evidence that this dramatic event occurred exactly this way. In The Captain’s Widow of Sandwich, Megan Taylor Shockley examines how Burgess constructed her own legend and how the town of Sandwich embraced that history as its own. Through careful analysis of myriad primary sources, Shockley also addresses how Burgess dealt with the conflicting gender roles of her life, reconciling her traditionally masculine adventures at sea and her independent lifestyle with the accepted ideals of the period’s “Victorian woman.”

In The Marion Thompson Wright Reader, acclaimed historian Graham Russell Hodges provides a scholarly, accessible introduction to a modern edition of Marion Thompson Wright’s classic book, The Education of Negroes in New Jersey and to her full body of scholarly work. First published in 1941 by Teachers College Press, Thompson’s landmark study has been out of print for decades. Such rarity understates the book’s importance. Thompson’s major book and her life are significant for the histories of New Jersey, African Americans, local and national, women’s and education history. Drawing upon Wright's work, existing scholarship, and new archival research, this new landmark scholarly edition, which includes an all-new biography of this pioneering scholar, underscores the continued relevance of Marion Thompson Wright.

With suffrage secured in 1920, feminists faced the challenge of how to keep their momentum going. As the center of the movement shrank, a small, self-appointed vanguard of “modern” women carried the cause forward in life and work. Feminism as Life’s Work profiles four of these women: the author Inez Haynes Irwin, the historian Mary Ritter Beard, the activist Doris Stevens, and Lorine Pruette, a psychologist. Their life-stories, told here in full for the first time, embody the changes of the first four decades of the twentieth century—and complicate what we know of the period. Through these women’s intertwined stories, Mary Trigg traces the changing nature of the women’s movement across turbulent decades rent by world war, revolution, global depression, and the rise of fascism. Criticizing the standard division of feminist activism as a series of historical waves, Trigg exposes how Irwin, Beard, Stevens, and Pruette helped push the U.S. feminist movement to victory and continued to propel it forward from the 1920s to the 1960s, decades not included in the “wave” model. At a time widely viewed as the “doldrums” of feminism, the women in this book were in fact taking the cause to new sites: the National Women’s Party; sexuality and relations with men; marriage; and work and financial independence. In their utopian efforts to reshape work, sexual relations, and marriage, modern feminists ran headlong into the harsh realities of male power, the sexual double standard, the demands of motherhood, and gendered social structures. In Feminism as Life’s Work, Irwin, Beard, Stevens, and Pruette emerge as the heirs of the suffrage movement, guardians of a long feminist tradition, and catalysts of the belief in equality and difference. Theirs is a story of courage, application, and perseverance—a story that revisits the “bleak and lonely years” of the U.S. women’s movement and emerges with a fresh perspective of the history of this pivotal era.