Here are 100 books that A Right Worthy Woman fans have personally recommended if you like
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I graduated from Wheaton College, MA, at the time, a women’s college where I developed a heightened appreciation of the power of women’s abilities to strive for more and achieve more. After learning about an ancestor’s involvement in founding the first women’s only medical school, I knew those graduates’ stories needed to be unearthed from the shadows of history by writing my book. Every March, to coincide with Women’s History Month, I celebrate these women, other glass-ceiling smashers, and the authors who write about them through my list of #31titleswomeninhistory. I have presented to the American Medical Women’s Association, local chapters of AAUW, ADK sorority, and Soroptimist International, among others.
In this book, I admired author Stephanie Dray's ability to portray Frances Perkins, the first female US cabinet member, as a multifaceted woman who defied societal expectations driven by her determination and intellect to set her apart in a political world dominated by men.
My respect for Perkins grew as Dray revealed the complexities Perkins faced in balancing her public career with the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. I felt connected to this aspect of Perkins' life; understanding her personal struggles made her an even more relatable character and her accomplishments even more remarkable.
Beyond the personal narrative, I discovered the inner workings of FDR's administration and the crucial contributions Perkins made in shaping policies that still affect us today, earning her place in history.
She took on titans, battled generals, and changed the world as we know it…
New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Dray returns with a captivating and dramatic new novel about an American heroine Frances Perkins.
Raised on tales of her revolutionary ancestors, Frances Perkins arrives in New York City at the turn of the century, armed with her trusty parasol and an unyielding determination to make a difference.
When she’s not working with children in the crowded tenements in Hell’s Kitchen, Frances throws herself into the social scene in Greenwich Village, befriending an eclectic group of politicians, artists, and activists,…
I graduated from Wheaton College, MA, at the time, a women’s college where I developed a heightened appreciation of the power of women’s abilities to strive for more and achieve more. After learning about an ancestor’s involvement in founding the first women’s only medical school, I knew those graduates’ stories needed to be unearthed from the shadows of history by writing my book. Every March, to coincide with Women’s History Month, I celebrate these women, other glass-ceiling smashers, and the authors who write about them through my list of #31titleswomeninhistory. I have presented to the American Medical Women’s Association, local chapters of AAUW, ADK sorority, and Soroptimist International, among others.
Wow, wow, wow. I never knew the first woman to run for president, pumped full of audacity and ambition, placed her name on a ballot over 150 years ago! This book dives into the life of Victoria Woodhull, a pioneering figure whose radical views shook 19th-century America.
The book doesn't just recount the historical 1872 election; I walked back into a vividly described past to embrace and celebrate the struggles and triumphs of women fighting for their rights with a new appreciation of those challenges. I read this novel with my book club as an apt choice to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Now, in 2024, I find that Woodhull’s gutsy moves are even more relevant.
Forty-eight years before women were granted the right to vote, one woman dared to run for President of the United States, yet her name has been virtually written out of the history books.Rising from the shame of an abusive childhood, Victoria Woodhull, the daughter of a con-man and a religious zealot, vows to follow her destiny, one the spirits say will lead her out of poverty to “become ruler of her people.”But the road to glory is far from easy. A nightmarish marriage teaches Victoria that women are stronger and deserve far more credit than society gives. Eschewing the conventions…
I graduated from Wheaton College, MA, at the time, a women’s college where I developed a heightened appreciation of the power of women’s abilities to strive for more and achieve more. After learning about an ancestor’s involvement in founding the first women’s only medical school, I knew those graduates’ stories needed to be unearthed from the shadows of history by writing my book. Every March, to coincide with Women’s History Month, I celebrate these women, other glass-ceiling smashers, and the authors who write about them through my list of #31titleswomeninhistory. I have presented to the American Medical Women’s Association, local chapters of AAUW, ADK sorority, and Soroptimist International, among others.
Although I knew of Hattie McDaniel’s groundbreaking achievement as the first African American woman to win an Academy Award for her iconic role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, I knew little about Hattie’s life before, during, and after the film’s release.
Through this book, I learned why McDaniel's victory marked such a pivotal moment in the history of cinema. More importantly, I appreciated how Tate moved beyond that singular moment to unveil the deeper layers of McDaniel's life, painting a vivid portrait of her struggles, triumphs, and the indelible mark she left on the entertainment industry, including the challenges she faced in a racially segregated Hollywood.
I applaud Tate for transforming Hattie McDaniel from a recognizable name into a three-dimensional, inspiring figure.
Bestselling author ReShonda Tate presents a fascinating fictional portrait of Hattie McDaniel, one of Hollywood's most prolific but woefully underappreciated stars-and the first Black person ever to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in the critically acclaimed classic film Gone With the Wind.
It was supposed to be the highlight of her career, the pinnacle for which she'd worked all her life. And as Hattie McDaniel took the stage in 1940 to claim an honor that would make her the first African-American woman to win an Academy Award, she tearfully took her…
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the…
I graduated from Wheaton College, MA, at the time, a women’s college where I developed a heightened appreciation of the power of women’s abilities to strive for more and achieve more. After learning about an ancestor’s involvement in founding the first women’s only medical school, I knew those graduates’ stories needed to be unearthed from the shadows of history by writing my book. Every March, to coincide with Women’s History Month, I celebrate these women, other glass-ceiling smashers, and the authors who write about them through my list of #31titleswomeninhistory. I have presented to the American Medical Women’s Association, local chapters of AAUW, ADK sorority, and Soroptimist International, among others.
This book is a compelling and powerful WWII novel that vividly captures the chaos and courage of December 7, 1941, the day the first woman, Lieutenant Annie Fox, was awarded the Purple Heart.
I was particularly moved by how it balanced the heroism of Annie’s relentless dedication in her role as Chief Nurse at Hickam Field with the harsh reality of prejudice that she faced later. Page after page, I was pulled into this gripping read that sheds light on both the valor of these unsung heroes and the darker sides of history.
Based on the real life of Lieutenant Annie Fox, Chief Nurse of Hickam Hospital, The Woman with a Purple Heart is an inspiring WWII novel of heroic leadership, courage, and friendship that also exposes a shocking and shameful side of history.
Annie Fox will stop at nothing to serve her country. But what happens when her country fails her?
In November 1941, Annie Fox, an Army nurse, is transferred to Hickam Field, an air force base in Honolulu. The others on her transport plane are thrilled to work in paradise, but Annie sees her new duty station as the Army's…
I spent many a night growing up glued to the television, watching Ken Burns’ Civil War. But as I got older, I found my interests stretching beyond the battles and melancholic music on the screen. I decided to become a historian of abolitionism–the radical reform movement that fought to end the evils of slavery and racial prejudice. Through my research, I seek to explain the substantial influence of the abolitionist movement as well as its significant limitations. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2017, and have since held positions at such institutions as The New School, the University of Bonn, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Reidy's book is an elegant and engaging read, but it is not an easy one.
It illustrates how the process of emancipation actually played out on the ground after Abraham Lincoln issued his famed Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It takes us away from the marble edifices of Civil War Washington and into the dirt, showing us how messy the process of implementing freedom truly was.
It does so, moreover, by centering our attention on the actual men and women fighting for their own freedom. Reidy offers us historians a seminal reminder: change is not made solely from on high.
As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly.
In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P.…
As an archaeologist, anthropologist, and historian who has worked on both the East Coast (Flowerdew Hundred and Jamestown, Virginia) and West Coast (San Diego, California) of the U.S. and dug sites from the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, I am passionate about how archaeology can serve to offer new insights for marginalized peoples in American history. I specialize in exposing how narrow thinking, revisionism, and myth-making warp local histories and turn them into fabrications of the present.
As a historical archaeologist, I find this book especially compelling. Stolen Childhood does a fine job of blending insights from a variety of primary-source narratives and recently uncovered archaeological artifacts; but these insights transcend the specific research questions regarding the conditions of daily life for slave youth in nineteenth-century America and indirectly make an intriguing case for why current archaeologists should pay as much attention to issues of childhood, parenting, and aging as they do to ethnicity, class, and gender.
One of the most important books published on slave society, Stolen Childhood focuses on the millions of children and youth enslaved in 19th-century America. This enlarged and revised edition reflects the abundance of new scholarship on slavery that has emerged in the 15 years since the first edition. While the structure of the book remains the same, Wilma King has expanded its scope to include the international dimension with a new chapter on the transatlantic trade in African children, and the book's geographic boundaries now embrace slave-born children in the North. She includes data about children owned by Native Americans…
Who was the man who would become Caesar's lieutenant, Brutus' rival, Cleopatra's lover, and Octavian's enemy?
When his stepfather is executed for his involvement in the Catilinarian conspiracy, Mark Antony and his family are disgraced. His adolescence is marked by scandal and mischief, his love affairs are fleeting, and yet,…
I am a history professor at Ohio State, where I have taught for most of my career. I have always been fascinated by how people in different regions define their own identities, how other Americans perceive them, and how these ideas change over time. Having lived through several wars (as a civilian), I have observed that social and political conflicts on the homefront can be intense in their own right and that non-military events and military events are often connected. In my work, I have published on gender, race, slavery, family, material culture, legal history, and environmental history, from the Revolution through the Civil War.
This book establishes that slavery was central to the Rhode Island economy from the colonial period well into the nineteenth century.
For many years, historians concentrated on slavery in the South, but we now have great scholarship on slavery in the North. Clark-Pujara illustrates how the black community, including the women, struggled against oppression in New England.
Once I started reading, I could hardly put it down.
Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island
Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode…
I am a historian and educator based in Boston. I have authored three books and numerous essays on the Civil War era. You can find my op-eds in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast. Over the past few years, I have worked with students and teachers across the country to better understand the current controversy surrounding Confederate monuments.
The Confederacy was consistent throughout most of the war that Black men could not be recruited to serve in the army as soldiers. This was a war to preserve slavery and white supremacy and Black enlisted men would have undermined the very justification for secession and the creation of a new nation. As the war entered its fourth year, however, more and more people realized that this policy was no longer tenable. Historian Bruce Levine offers a thorough analysis of the very public and bitterly divisive debate that took place throughout the Confederacy in 1864 over whether slaves could be recruited as soldiers. Confederates debated this subject in the capital of Richmond, in the army, and in countless newspapers. The question was clear: Should the Confederacy recruit Black men as a way to avoid defeat? That it took the Confederate government until mid-March 1865 to finally approve slave enlistment—much too…
In early 1864, as the Confederate Army of Tennessee licked its wounds after being routed at the Battle of Chattanooga, Major-General Patrick Cleburne (the "Stonewall of the West") proposed that "the most courageous of our slaves" be trained as soldiers and that "every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war" be freed. In Confederate Emancipation, Bruce Levine looks closely at such Confederate plans to arm and free slaves. He shows that within a year of Cleburne's proposal, which was initially rejected out of hand, Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin, and Robert E. Lee…
Despite what my kids think, I am not actually old enough to have “been there” during the Civil War itself, but I have spent my entire professional career studying it. Years in archives reading other people’s mail, old newspaper accounts, dusty diaries, and handwritten testimonies, along with sifting through records books and ledgers of all descriptions have taught me exactly how intertwined slavery, Civil War, and emancipation all were, and I am dedicated to trying to explain the connections to anyone who reads my books, stumbles across my digital history work, or sits in my classroom at Georgetown University, where I teach history. Two good places to see the results of my efforts include What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War which won the Avery Craven Award for best book on the Civil War and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize, and Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War, which won the Jefferson Davis Prize and was also a finalist for the Lincoln Prize.
As the Union Army penetrated into Confederate territory, enslaved men, women, and children fled bondage to take refuge with the army. Roughly half a million formerly enslaved people exited slavery in this way, spending the war in encampments appended to the army or in Union occupied cities. They influenced the progress and outcome of the war as well as emancipation. They also encountered conditions that amounted to a humanitarian crisis, one that soldiers tasked with fighting a war were ill-equipped to meet. Civilians from the North made their way to camps and occupied cities to serve as relief workers. Harriet Jacobs headed South as just such a worker. Jacobs herself had been born a slave and made a harrowing escape decades earlier, but when war broke out, she braved the South again. She made her way to Alexandria, Virginia where she worked among the many freedom seekers who came to…
This is the only collection of papers of an African American woman held in slavery.Although millions of African American women were held in bondage over the 250 years that slavery was legal in the United States, Harriet Jacobs (1813-97) is the only one known to have left papers testifying to her life. Her autobiography, ""Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"", holds a central place in the canon of American literature as the most important slave narrative by an African American woman.Born in Edenton, North Carolina, Jacobs escaped from her owner in her mid-twenties and hid in the cramped…
Inspiring historical fiction based on the real life of Bertha Benz, whose husband built the first prototype automobile, which eventually evolved into the Mercedes-Benz marque.
"Unfortunately, only a girl again."
From a young age, Cäcilie Bertha Ringer is fascinated by her father's work as a master builder in Pforzheim, Germany.…
Having grown up visiting lots of historic sites – and hearing my father sing old Civil War tunes (frequently off-key!) on long car trips – I gravitated pretty quickly to studying the Civil War, and its aftermath, when I was in college and then in graduate school. I was particularly interested in the way Americans experienced the Civil War after it was over: the sentimental novels they read; the romantic movies they watched; the reconstructed battlefields they visited. In my work as a professor at Boston University, I try to get students to think about the stories that do, and do not, get told about the Civil War and other events from the past. I suppose the question that always piqued my interest was why people might find the often wildly inaccurate versions of the past so appealing.
In this brief and powerful book, esteemed historian Annette Gordon-Reed focuses on “Juneteenth”, the day (June 19, 1865) when enslaved workers in Texas were declared free by the Union Army following the conclusion of the Civil War. For Gordon-Reed, a black Texas woman, Juneteenth, recently declared a federal holiday, offers a starting point for pondering the legacy of slavery and emancipation for Afro-Texans and for thinking more broadly about the tension between history and myth. In the course of all this, Gordon-Reed tells her own personal story about navigating the often fraught terrain of her state’s legacy of racial exploitation.
Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle and searing episodes of memoir, On Juneteenth recounts the origins of the holiday that celebrates the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. A descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, Annette Gordon-Reed, explores the legacies of the holiday.
From the earliest presence of black people in Texas-in the 1500s, well before enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown-to the day in Galveston on 19 June 1865, when General Gordon Granger announced the end of slavery, Gordon-Reed's insightful and inspiring essays present the saga of a "frontier" peopled by…
