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"African American women -- Southern States -- Social conditions -- 19th century"
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Out of the House of Bondage
The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.
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Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau
Established by congress in early 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands-more commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau-assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the post-Civil War South. Although it was called the Freedmen's Bureau, the agency profoundly affected African-American women. Until now remarkably little has been written about the relationship between black women and this federal government agency. As Mary Farmer-Kaiser clearly demonstrates in this revealing work, by failing to recognize freedwomen as active agents of change and overlooking the gendered assumptions at work in Bureau efforts, scholars have ultimately failed to understand fully the Bureau's relationships with freedwomen, freedmen, and black communities in this pivotal era of American history.
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The folly of Jim Crow : rethinking the segregated South
Although the origins, application, and socio-historical implications of the Jim Crow system have been studied and debated for at least the last three-quarters of a century, nuanced understanding of this complex cultural construct is still evolving, according to Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, coeditors of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. Indeed, they suggest, scholars may profit from a careful examination of previous assumptions and conclusions along the lines suggested by the studies in this important new collection.
Based on the March 2008 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington, this forty-third volume in the prestigious series undertakes a close review of both the history and the historiography of the Jim Crow South. The studies in this collection incorporate important perspectives that have developed during the past two decades among scholars interested in gender and politics, the culture of resistance, and the hegemonic function of ‘whiteness.’
By asking fresh questions and critically examining long-held beliefs, the new studies contained in The Folly of Jim Crow will, ironically, reinforce at least one of the key observations made in C. Vann Woodward’s landmark 1955 study: In its idiosyncratic, contradictory, and multifaceted development and application, the career of Jim Crow was, indeed, strange. Further, as these studies demonstrate—and as alluded to in the title—it is folly to attempt to locate the genesis of the South’s institutional racial segregation in any single event, era, or policy. Instead, as W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes in his introduction to the volume, formal segregation evolved through an untidy process of experimentation and adaptation.
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Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens
As African American women left slavery and the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed in white employers' homes, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture.Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives and to maintain spaces for their own families despite the demands of employers and the restrictions of segregation. Sharpless also shows how these women's employment served as a bridge from old labor arrangements to new ones. As opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions.Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, this book evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home. Sharpless looks beyond stereotypes to introduce the real women who left their own houses and families each morning to cook in other women's kitchens.
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A forgotten sisterhood
Emerging from the darkness of the slave era and Reconstruction, black activist women Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Nannie Helen Burroughs founded schools aimed at liberating African-American youth from disadvantaged futures in the segregated and decidedly unequal South.
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A Voice from the South
Published in 1892,A Voice from the Southis the only book published by one of the most prominent African American women scholars and educators of her era. Born a slave, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper would go on to become the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree. Cooper became a prominent member of the black community in Washington, D.C., serving as principal at M Street High School, during which time she wroteA Voice from the South.In it, she engages a variety of issues, including women's rights, racial progress, segregation, and the education of black women. Cooper also discusses a number of authors and their representations of African Americans, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion Tourgee, George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, and Maurice Thompson, reaching the conclusion that an accurate depiction had yet to be written.A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings classic works back into print. DocSouth Books editions are selected from the digital library of Documenting the American South and are unaltered from the original publication. The DocSouth series uses digital technology to offer e-books and print-on-demand publications, providing affordable and accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.
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Reconstruction
This entry in the Perspectives in Social History series examines the course and consequences of Reconstruction on the former Confederate states by focusing on the everyday people who lived through it. Reviews \"An overview discusses the social, economic, and political challenges of rebuilding the South with emphasis on the lives of everyday people and a brief historiography of Reconstruction. Following that, eight essays explore topics related to Reconstruction, including the meaning of freedom for African Americans, white women's changing roles, African Americans living in Southern cities, northerners in the South, former slaveholders' and planters' places in the new society, and Native American issues. Articles contain in-text citations; black-and-white photographs, political cartoons, and reproductions; sidebars; and combined lists of references and suggestions for further reading. The 16 primary-source documents include first-person reminiscences, newspaper articles, letters, and the transcript of testimony before the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. It is interesting to note that all but one of the essayists teaches in the United Kingdom. The writing makes this volume best suited for advanced students.\" School Library Journal \"Any high school to college-level library strong in American history will find this an excellent blend of essays and documents charting the experiences of a wide range of ordinary Americans in the South. A top pick for any collection strong in Civil War era history.\" Midwest Book Review
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