I have always been a devoted reader of fiction, and I especially enjoy novels and short stories that delve into characters’ interior lives and motivations. I find people fascinating, both in books and in real life, and I am always trying to figure out why people do or say certain things. I should probably have become a psychologist or a detective instead of a musicologist. I am passionate about doing as much of that kind of sleuthing as a scholar as possible.
I wrote
Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic
I read this book when I was first starting to write my book, and the way Ulrich unravels the history is a total revelation. Each chapter begins with a passage from Ballard’s diary describing a day of her life in her small Maine town. The passages are almost impossible to decipher—shorthand, obscure names, and references that one just can’t understand. Then Ulrich spends the chapter unpacking the entry, telling its full story.
If you like mysteries and figuring out clues (I do!), then this book is enormously satisfying. It also tells a fascinating story about women and medical history. Female midwives like Ballard were gradually replaced by male doctors.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, "A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" (The New York Times Book Review).
Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and…
I listened to this audiobook about motherhood while pushing my newborn second child in a stroller. Sarah Knott takes the reader through the stages of becoming a mother–conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, birth, newborn care, childcare, and resuming work–and then doing it again with a second child.
Throughout, Knott contrasts her own experiences with those of women in the past, especially in North America and Britain. The differences are striking, not just in healthcare but also in social support. I thought about the women I'd written about who had many children and how important familial support was.
As a fellow professor, I was heartened to read about Knott's experience returning to work and re-finding her academic mind. She writes poignantly about how motherhood is a constant interruption. It is so true!
Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity―the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How?
In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her book brings the past and the present viscerally alive. It is at once intimate…
Zach, a young veteran, contemplates suicide after a horrific tour in Afghanistan when Ernest Hemingway appears and stops him. He enrolls in college, where he falls in love with Jessica, a young woman from a wealthy family. Her love stabilizes him, and Hemingway’s appearances become less frequent until she doesn’t…
When researching my book, I often had access to letters, diaries, and even houses of affluent women whose papers archives were preserved. But recreating their intimate home music-making proved difficult. This book contrasts starkly–it's about enslaved colonial Barbadian women. Yet Marisa Fuentes' masterful stitching of archival scraps accessing their lives is moving.
She inventively reads maps, architecture, and ephemera alongside traditional sources to glimpse past existences. Reading this helped me recognize my sources' abundance, but also that sources demand continual re-reading and re-understanding. You can't take their meaning for granted. As Fuentes portrays enslaved lives, I realized my book's genteel subjects, while documented, still harbored unplumbed depths requiring creative interpretation to access their full intimacies.
In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of enslaved women's punishments. In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and…
This recommendation may seem like a wildcard, but bear with me. The book follows two Chinese immigrant siblings in nineteenth-century California who must survive after their father dies. I love how it explores tough family relationships, including between the siblings–a girl and a trans boy.
There's exciting new research on trans people in early America, and I appreciate how the book presents the character straightforwardly without overexplaining his identity anachronistically. I also appreciate its exploration of survival strategies for women and non-cis men in harsh circumstances, despite not being strictly eighteenth-century.
While the setting differs from my usual remit, the book's nuanced handling of gender and depiction of underrepresented experiences make it a valuable addition. Sometimes, works from adjacent periods can shed important light on the ones we study most closely.
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I love an epic family novel, and this fits the bill. It’s set in 1875 in the Cherokee Nation and centers largely on a Cherokee matriarch as she cares for her dying husband, who is white while raising her sons and managing a substantial farm.
It’s also about her neighbors and employees, and there’s a bit of a mystery, too. I’m recommending this book because it shows just how complex family can be and how kinship can be a powerful force for protection, but also, in U.S. legal contexts, it can be used against Native American people.
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Maud’s Line, an epic novel that follows a web of complex family alliances and culture clashes in the Cherokee Nation during the aftermath of the Civil War, and the unforgettable woman at its center.
Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award (Best Western Traditional Novel)
It’s the early spring of 1875 in the Cherokee Nation West. A baby, a black hired hand, a bay horse, a gun, a gold stash, and a preacher have all gone missing. Cherokee America Singer, known as “Check,” a wealthy farmer, mother of five boys,…
Hundreds of handwritten music books from the 1700s are tucked away in archives across America. Many were copied by women. Forgotten today, their music-making was important at the time; it shaped ideas about gender roles, social status, race, and nationalism in the new United States.
These early American women saw copying music by hand and performing it with friends as a way to appear refined, educated, and virtuous. It also made their new nation seem culturally sophisticated. This book follows a group of amateur musicians and shows how musical efforts greatly impacted American culture while allowing women to fashion their identities. The book uncovers their struggles to find meaning in music despite being belittled as "accomplished amateurs."
1184 BCE. Ramesses III, who will become the last of the great pharaohs, is returning home from battle. He will one day assume the throne of the Egyptian empire, and the plots against him and his children have already started. Even a god can die.
Brother. Do. You. Love. Me. is a true story of brotherly love overcoming all. Reuben, who has Down's syndrome, was trapped in a care home during the pandemic, spiralling deeper into a non-verbal depression. From isolation and in desperation, he sent his older brother Manni a text, "brother. do. you.…