Here are 100 books that The Grimkes fans have personally recommended if you like
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As an academic, activist, author, and a student of American women’s history, I’m passionate about recognizing the contributions of diverse American women. I graduated from Wellesley College, on the cusp of the 1970s women’s movement. My doctoral dissertation, a biography of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in Her Own Right,hailed by both Oprah and theWall Street Journal, was the basis of Ken Burns’ documentary, Not for Ourselves Alone. My career centered on women: working to advance women’s rights, writing and teaching women’s history, and leading a girls’ school. As a cisgender white woman, I’m a member of the Society of American Historians and Veteran Feminists of America.
This pathbreaking work is the first in-depth biography of Terrell (1863-1954). It challenges common stereotypes about Black women and identifies common ground among women who struggle to balance work and family. Mary Church, born during the Civil War, had two white grandfathers, who impregnated enslaved women and then allowed their offspring to marry. After Emancipation, Molly’s father became a wealthy Memphis land developer, which allowed her to attend Oberlin, earn a master’s degree, and travel in Europe. She married a graduate of Harvard and Howard Law, whom Theodore Roosevelt named the first Black justice of the peace in Washington, DC. She did not allow her distrust of Susan B. Anthony to derail her fight for Black voting rights, before and after the Nineteenth Amendment passed. A founder and the first president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, Terrell used her lace and pearls and Republican connections…
Born into slavery during the Civil War, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) would become one of the most prominent activists of her time, with a career bridging the late nineteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP, Terrell collaborated closely with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Unceasing Militant is the first full-length biography of Terrell, bringing her vibrant voice and personality to life. Though most accounts of Terrell focus almost exclusively on her…
I'm fascinated with material culture – studying the things we make and use – and what they tell us about our history. My particular passion is for nineteenth-century Black material culture, often the only tangible history of enslaved and newly-emancipated Black lives. The books on my list educated me of the historical realities for African Americans, from emancipation to Jim Crow – providing critical context for deciphering the stories embedded in historical artifacts. Overall, the gendered (and harrowing) history these books provide on the contributions of African-American women to civil rights and social justice should be required reading for everyone.
This book details the engagement and impact African American women have made on race and gender issues throughout American history.
Paula Giddings uses first-person narratives to portray how generations of Black women have acted as “agents of change” to achieve political and economic progress. In researching the lives of two nineteenth-century Black female sculptors, I needed to understand the cultural and political environment that inspired them to tackle the controversial themes of race, gender, and social injustice in their art.
When and Where I Enter provided a gendered and historical framework to help me answer these critical questions.
“History at its best―clear, intelligent, moving. Paula Giddings has written a book as priceless as its subject”―Toni Morrison
Acclaimed by writers Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter is not only an eloquent testament to the unsung contributions of individual women to our nation, but to the collective activism which elevated the race and women’s movements that define our times. From Ida B. Wells to the first black Presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm; from the anti-lynching movement to the struggle for suffrage and equal protection under the law; Giddings tells the stories of black women who…
I have always loved exploring, whether it is on the shelves of the library or on a car trip. Growing up, we left our sheltered home in New England and piled into our dad’s car. We explored caves in Virginia and South Dakota, the ocean in Massachusetts and Maine, and museums from Chicago to Boston. In historical fiction, I see the boundaries of human experience, knowing people and places I could never in reality experience. I learn empathy, history, natural science, and political science in these pages. For me, a good historical novel is as good as a vacation, delving into the past, sight-seeing, window-shopping, and experiencing beyond the everyday.
Courage brings Bella to apply to financier J.P. Morgan to assemble his marvelous library of rare books. Concealing her identity as black, she stars in a world of art critics and high finance, giving up her identity in pursuit of her dream. I loved and wondered at this brave woman.
The Instant New York Times Bestseller! A Good Morning America* Book Club Pick!
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR! Named a Notable Book of the Year by the Washington Post!
“Historical fiction at its best!”*
A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.
In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by…
At school I fell in love philosophy. But at university, as I grew older, I started to feel out of place: all the authors we read were men. I loved Plato, but there was something missing. It didn’t occur to me until I was in my thirties to look for women in the history of philosophy! I read Wollstonecraft first, then Olympe de Gouges, and the other women I wrote about in my book, and now I’m looking at women philosophers from the tenth to the nineteenth century. There is a wealth of work by women philosophers out there. Reading their works has made philosophy come alive for me, all over again.
I’ve read and written a lot on Wollstonecraft, so I don’t surprise easily.
But I was surprised when I found out that Mary Wollstonecraft was a theatre buff who knew Shakespeare inside out, and that her favourite opera was Handel’s Judas Maccabeus and she would sometimes sing arias from it, that she loved swimming and horse riding.
The picture of Wollstonecraft that emerges from this book is that of a philosopher whose love and knowledge of humanity fed into her theories of human progress.
A compelling portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft that shows the intimate connections between her life and work
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, is a work of enduring relevance in women's rights advocacy. However, as Sylvana Tomaselli shows, a full understanding of Wollstonecraft's thought is possible only through a more comprehensive appreciation of Wollstonecraft herself, as a philosopher and moralist who deftly tackled major social and political issues and the arguments of such figures as Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. Reading Wollstonecraft through the lens of the politics and culture of her…
I read (and write) biography as much for history as for an individual life story. It’s a way of getting a personalized look at an historical period. When the book is a family biography, the history is amplified by different family members' perspectives, almost like a kaleidoscope, and it stretches over generations, allowing the historical story to blossom over time. The genre also opens a window into the ethos that animated this unique group of individuals who are bound together by blood. Whether it's a desire for wealth or power, the zeal for a cause, or the need to survive adversity, I found it in these family stories.
When Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877, he was the richest man in America. Two generations later, the family parlayed their wealth into social status in the city's newly defined class structure.
Anderson Cooper, CNN news anchor, and his co-author trace the city's social history, beginning with Anderson's ancestor who emigrated to the small Dutch colony at the tip of Manhattan as an indentured servant. The story ends with Anderson's mother Gloria, the last Vanderbilt to have known the family at the peak of its wealth and social clout before lavish spending took its toll.
Most affecting are Anderson’s memories of his mother that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with sharing life with someone we love.
New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty-his mother's family, the Vanderbilts.
One of the Washington Post's Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021
When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father's small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires-one in shipping and another in railroads-that would…
As an academic, activist, author, and a student of American women’s history, I’m passionate about recognizing the contributions of diverse American women. I graduated from Wellesley College, on the cusp of the 1970s women’s movement. My doctoral dissertation, a biography of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in Her Own Right,hailed by both Oprah and theWall Street Journal, was the basis of Ken Burns’ documentary, Not for Ourselves Alone. My career centered on women: working to advance women’s rights, writing and teaching women’s history, and leading a girls’ school. As a cisgender white woman, I’m a member of the Society of American Historians and Veteran Feminists of America.
This is the biography of the author’s grandmother, Adella Hunt Logan (1863-1915), a teacher at Tuskegee. W.E.B. DuBois, who challenged Booker T. Washington’s vocational vision for Black Americans, gave her the title princess. Like Terrell, Logan could “pass” for white, but rarely did: to travel safely north and to have kidney surgery in a white hospital. Unlike Terrell, she was the product of her mother’s and grandmother’s longstanding, consensual relationships with slaveholders. Logan’s life was confined by racism, sexism, marriage, and motherhood, yet she urged reluctant Black women to pursue suffrage, lobbied for equal pay, and espoused reproductive rights, before her tragic death. She was the only Black lifetime member of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and the only member enrolled from Alabama. The author incorporates public records, family archives, stories handed down, and African myths to choreograph this compelling tour de force.
A compelling reconstruction of the life of a black suffragist, Adella Hunt Logan, blending family lore, historical research, and literary imagination
"Both a definitive rendering of a life and a remarkable study of the interplay of race and gender in an America whose shadows still haunt us today."-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"If you combine the pleasures of a seductive novel, discovering a real American heroine, and learning the multiracial history of this country that wasn't in our textbooks, you will have an idea of the great gift that Adele Logan Alexander has given us."-Gloria Steinem
At school I fell in love philosophy. But at university, as I grew older, I started to feel out of place: all the authors we read were men. I loved Plato, but there was something missing. It didn’t occur to me until I was in my thirties to look for women in the history of philosophy! I read Wollstonecraft first, then Olympe de Gouges, and the other women I wrote about in my book, and now I’m looking at women philosophers from the tenth to the nineteenth century. There is a wealth of work by women philosophers out there. Reading their works has made philosophy come alive for me, all over again.
I’ve read a lot of biographies of Simone de Beauvoir.
But this is the one that best brought out her importance as a philosopher, the many ways in which her thought differed from Sartre’s and the ways in which this has been obscured by a posterity that just wants to see her as his sidekick.
One thing that this book did for me that others on Beauvoir didn’t was to reconcile me with the unpleasant aspects of her life and relationships – she was human, she was flawed, but so were her male peers!
"One is not born a woman, but becomes one", Simone de Beauvoir
A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short.
Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the twentieth century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who…
At school I fell in love philosophy. But at university, as I grew older, I started to feel out of place: all the authors we read were men. I loved Plato, but there was something missing. It didn’t occur to me until I was in my thirties to look for women in the history of philosophy! I read Wollstonecraft first, then Olympe de Gouges, and the other women I wrote about in my book, and now I’m looking at women philosophers from the tenth to the nineteenth century. There is a wealth of work by women philosophers out there. Reading their works has made philosophy come alive for me, all over again.
Anna Julia Cooper is one of the nineteen and twentieth American philosophers I find most exciting.
Her book, A Voice from the South, is the first feminist book to introduce the idea of intersectionality! She spent her very long lifetime writing about education, women’s rights, racism, and she has a fascinating correspondence with the intellectuals of her time, including W.E.B Dubois.
But until recently getting hold of her writings wasn’t terribly easy, unless you were willing to read online, or had access to a good academic library.
This beautiful and cheap edition is a godsend and everyone should buy it.
A collection of essential writings from the iconic foremother of Black intellectual history, feminism and activism
The Portable Anna Julia Cooper will introduce a new generation of readers to an educator, public intellectual and community activist whose prescient insights and eloquent prose underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African-American social and political activism.
This volume brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia…
At school I fell in love philosophy. But at university, as I grew older, I started to feel out of place: all the authors we read were men. I loved Plato, but there was something missing. It didn’t occur to me until I was in my thirties to look for women in the history of philosophy! I read Wollstonecraft first, then Olympe de Gouges, and the other women I wrote about in my book, and now I’m looking at women philosophers from the tenth to the nineteenth century. There is a wealth of work by women philosophers out there. Reading their works has made philosophy come alive for me, all over again.
We know that there were women in Ancient Greece who did philosophy like Diotima and Aspasia (Socrates’s teachers) or Hypatia (who was murdered by Christians in Alexandria) or Lasthenia and Axiothea (students at Plato’s Academy).
There are also ancient texts signed with women’s names like Perictione (Plato’s mum), or Theano (Pythagoras’s wife). But we can’t always trust that those texts were written by these actual women.
Do we really think that if Plato’s mother had written philosophy, her work would have turned up a century later with a bunch of fake letters in Alexandria? What Dutsch’s book does is much more exciting than trying to prove that Plato’s mum was a philosopher.
It looks at the texts that these women supposedly wrote, and the stories that were told about them, so that we get to find out what it would have been like to be a woman and a philosopher…
Women played an important part in Pythagorean communities, so Greek sources from the Classical era to Byzantium consistently maintain. Pseudonymous philosophical texts by Theano, Pythagoras' disciple or wife, his daughter Myia, and other female Pythagoreans, circulated in Greek and Syriac. Far from being individual creations, these texts rework and revise a standard Pythagorean script.
What can we learn from this network of sayings, philosophical treatises, and letters about gender and knowledge in the Greek intellectual tradition? Can these writings represent the work of historical Pythagorean women? If so, can we find in them a critique of the dominant order or…
I read (and write) biography as much for history as for an individual life story. It’s a way of getting a personalized look at an historical period. When the book is a family biography, the history is amplified by different family members' perspectives, almost like a kaleidoscope, and it stretches over generations, allowing the historical story to blossom over time. The genre also opens a window into the ethos that animated this unique group of individuals who are bound together by blood. Whether it's a desire for wealth or power, the zeal for a cause, or the need to survive adversity, I found it in these family stories.
In 1866, Lazarus Morganthau emigrated from Germany, intent on rebuilding the fortune he had lost. He died destitute but, like the Biblical Lazarus, his descendants rose again.
Family members made a fortune in New York real estate before turning to public service, with Henry Sr. becoming an Ambassador, Henry Jr. a confidant of FDR and Secretary of the Treasury, and Robert the longest-serving District Attorney in Manhattan’s history. We get a detailed look at New York's interlocking spheres of society, finance, and politics, and at how the Morgenthaus, as Jews, found acceptance despite the antisemitism of the time.
An "epic and intimate" (David M. Kennedy) portrait of four generations of the Morgenthau family, a dynasty of power brokers and public officials with an outsize—and previously unmapped—influence extending from daily life in New York City to the shaping of the American Century.
"A work of important and enduring history...from the making of New York, to the Greatest Generation, to surviving one of the toughest jobs in law and order: Manhattan DA. The Morgenthau name and the contributions of this historic family will endure forever." --Tom Brokaw
