I have always been interested in family stories, the history of women’s lives, and history in general. Discovering new (at least it was at the time!) work in social and women’s history at university in the 1980s opened up new vistas for me and showed me it was possible to do academic work in the discipline in creative and challenging ways. These books were crucial to my development as a historian, both because of their subject matter and because they are so beautifully written. They brought the past “to life” for me and showed that historians could care about their subjects without sacrificing academic rigor.
I wrote
Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad: A Transnational History of Stage and Screen Actresses
I read this book the summer before I returned to university to complete my B.A. Thompson’s book convinced me that one of my first loves, the study of history, was where I wanted to be.
It is a ground-breaking study of people overlooked, ignored, and condescended to by historians, whose lives were changed by early forms of industrialization in late 18th and early 19th-century England. Thompson treats these people as active agents in shaping their worlds socially, economically, and politically, and he takes their role in “making class” and political activism seriously.
It is also beautifully written, and the depth of his research sets a high standard for subsequent generations of historians.
Fifty years since first publication, E. P. Thompson's revolutionary account of working-class culture and ideals is published in Penguin Modern Classics, with a new introduction by historian Michael Kenny
This classic and imaginative account of working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a cultured and political consciousness of great vitality.
This book is very dear to me because of the author’s breadth of vision, the creativity with which she approached it, and the radical possibilities for women’s lives and gender relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that she uncovered.
Taylor demonstrates the importance of radical utopianism in challenging traditional notions of gender relations and marriage and introduces us to fascinating women who were part of that process. Her book shows us how new possibilities were considered for society and makes us realize that women’s marginalization in more mainstream socialist parties was not inevitable. Taylor’s writing is elegant and moving.
A new edition of Barbara Taylor's classic book, with a new introduction.
In the early nineteenth century, radicals all over Europe and America began to conceive of a 'New Moral World', and struggled to create their own utopias, with collective family life, communal property, free love and birth control. In Britain, the visionary ideals of the Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, attracted thousands of followers, who for more than a quarter of a century attempted to put theory into practice in their own local societies, at rousing public meetings, in trade unions and in their new Communities of Mutual Association.
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
Stansell’s book brings to life the lives and experiences of working-class women in New York City, a group often ignored by historians. She creates a vivid portrait of the hardships that these women endured as they struggled to survive and often had to make their living in occupations such as domestic service or sex work.
Stansell doesn’t paint them as victims, though, as Stansell points to their agency and strength. Her research is remarkable for its rigor and depth. After reading this book, I had a very different understanding of New York City in this period.
Before the Civil War, a new idea of womanhood took shape in America in general and in the Northeast in particular. Women of the propertied classes assumed the mantle of moral guardians of their families and the nation. Laboring women, by contrast, continued to suffer from the oppressions of sex and class. In fact, their very existence troubled their more prosperous sisters, for the impoverished female worker violated dearly held genteel precepts of 'woman's nature' and 'woman's place.'
City of Women delves into the misfortunes that New York City's laboring women suffered and the problems that resulted. Looking at how…
This book places First Nations and Métis women at the heart of fur trade society and shows that they played crucial roles as workers and wives, mothers, and daughters. Van Kirk creates striking portraits of women whose relationships with fur traders made them important linchpins between their Indigenous and Métis communities and white fur trade society.
The book takes an innovative approach to studying the fur trade in early Canada. Van Kirk also shows how these women’s lives were deeply affected by changes in the fur trade and the coming of settler society to Western Canada.
Sexual encounters between Indian women and the fur traders of the North West and Hudson's Bay Companies are generally thought to have been casual and illicit in nature. This illuminating book reveals instead that Indian–white marriages, sanctioned "after the custom of the country," resulted in many warm and enduring family unions. These were profoundly altered by the coming of the white women in the 1820s and 1830s.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
I knew about the history of enslaved people and the institution of slavery in the Americas. Still, until I read Jones’ book, I did not appreciate how slavery affected African-American women’s lives in so many different ways, even after the institution itself formally ended.
I also gained a new understanding of their bravery, ingenuity, persistence, and contributions to their communities and American society more generally. Jones tells their stories with empathy and great wisdom, shattering stereotypes and insisting that we pay attention to these women and their lives.
The forces that shaped the institution of slavery in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after slavery was abolished. Toiling in sweltering Virginia tobacco factories or in the kitchens of white families in Chicago, black women felt a stultifying combination of racial discrimination and sexual prejudice. And yet, in their efforts to sustain family ties, they shared a common purpose with wives and mothers of all classes. In labour of Love, labour of Sorrow , historian Jacqueline Jones offers a powerful account of the changing role of black women, lending a voice to an unsung struggle from…
By the late nineteenth century, Canadian women had begun forging careers as professional actresses, appearing not just in Canada but in the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. They played an integral role in theatrical networks and helped shape transnational middle-class culture.
Taking the approach of feminist collective biography, I examine these “sweet girls’” childhoods, their experiences of work, touring, and company management, the plays in which they appeared, and the celebrity they enjoyed. I show how these women helped convey messages about race, empire, and white identity in popular culture. My book explores how being an actress abroad became work, as well as a profession for Canadian women.
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search…
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. The…
