Here are 100 books that Wake fans have personally recommended if you like
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I began gathering stories about pregnancy and its avoidance in Mexican archives twenty-five years ago when I was working on my dissertation on religious history. This topic fascinated me because it was central to the preoccupations of so many women I knew, and it seemed to present a link to past generations. But as I researched, I also realized that radical differences existed between the experiences and attitudes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexican women and the concerns, practices, and understandings of my own period that I had assumed were timeless and unchanging. For me, this was a liberating discovery.
This book is one of the reasons why I became a historian.
Ulrich uncovered the nearly illegible diary of an eighteenth-century midwife in Maine and included excerpts of the original at the start of each chapter. When I read the excerpts, I thought: How could these possibly be significant and what do they mean, anyway?
And then, like a detective, a gifted mind-reader, and a learned botanist all rolled into one, Ulrich unpacked each entry, weaving each snippet into the fabric of a wide textile of social history that includes reproductive history, gender and marital relations, local economies, political conflicts, and religion.
Abortion and abortifacients play a marginal role in the story Ulrich tells, but the history of midwifery and reproductive health are central to it.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER ā¢ 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 andā¦
As a kid I loved visiting the local history museum, wandering through the dusty displays of taxidermy buffalo and medieval helmets. I enjoyed the creepy feeling Iād get when I stood next to the wax figures and looked at their frozen faces and not-quite-right hair. As I grew older, I became more interested in seeking out weird and unusual history, and it became a passion throughout my teenage years and into adulthood. Now, Iām able to combine my love of the creepy and occult with historical research. I teach U.S. history at SUNY Brockport, I co-produced Dig: A History Podcast, and I am the co-author of my new book (below).
This book wrecked me; itās such a deep dive into the lives of the woman brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold reconstructs their lives with great empathy, bringing them to the forefront of the story. The five were real women who felt love, pain, and hopeānot faceless victims of sensationalized murder.
These women are often portrayed as āfive prostitutesā in pop culture, but Rubenhold shows that there is no evidence of sex work for most of the women. This book pulls back the curtain on the tension, violence, poverty, and heartbreak in Victorian London. This book brought me to absolute tears.
THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2019 'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming' GUARDIAN
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
As a child, I was drawn to the silences in family stories and as a young adult, the gaps in official records. Now Iām a former English professor turned full-time writer who is fascinated with who gets written out of history, and why. I love exploring overlooked lives, especially womenās livesāfrom Stalinās female relatives to nineteenth-century shopgirls, and most recently, a pair of early medieval queens.
In Women Warriors, the footnotes are every bit as informative and bitingly funny as the text itself. Toler travels across many cultures and eras, from ancient times up until the 20th century, to show that, like it or not, āwomen have always gone to war.ā She covers some women youāve likely heard of beforeālike Boudica, Hua Mulan, and Joan of Arcāas well as many others you probably havenātālike Tomyris, Artemisia II, and Lakshmi Bai. These mini-biographies, taken together, provide an eye-opening and unforgettable corrective about women and warfare.
Who says women donāt go to war? From Vikings and African queens to cross-dressing military doctors and WWII Russian fighter pilots, these are the stories of women for whom battle was not a metaphor.
The woman warrior is always cast as an anomalyāJoan of Arc, not GI Jane. But women, it turns out, have always gone to war. In this fascinating and lively world history, Pamela Toler not only introduces us to women who took up arms, she also shows why they did it and what happened when they stepped out of their traditional female roles to take on otherā¦
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctorāand only womanāon a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
When I moved to South Carolina some 25 years ago, I found understanding all the history around me challenging. Even more than that, I found it hard to talk about! Politics and history get mixed up in tricky ways. I worked with students to understand stories about plantation sites, leading me to start reading the words of survivors of captivity. I started reading slave narratives and trying to listen to what people had to say. While sad sometimes, their words are also hopeful. I now read books about our nationās darkest times because I look for ways to guide us to a better future.
Washington, our first presidentā¦Mr. American Freedom himselfāwas not just a slave owner but a slave hunter. What was his problem, I wondered, as I read about how he and his wife positively obsessed over re-capturing Ona Judge, a woman who escaped from their bondage.
They spent years, money, and some political clout tracking her down and trying to drag her back. They had plenty of other enslaved people! They werenāt short of money! As I read this wild tale of courage and cruelty, I got the messageā¦the Washingtons knew that if a slave could flee the President of the United States, it would demonstrate the hypocrisy of trying to found a nation on liberty that, uh,ā¦..held men, women and children in bondage.
My spoiler for you: They failed. Judge never returned to the Washingtons and lived to tell her own tale about the ugly history of American freedoms. Dunbarās bookā¦
A startling and eye-opening look into America's First Family, Never Caught is the powerful story about a daring woman of "extraordinary grit" (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation's capital. In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn't abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided toā¦
I am a biographer and literary scholar who loves to resurrect stories otherwise lost to history. I first felt this calling on football Saturdays at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, when I would sneak into the Rare Book Room to pore over old records, while my friends all went to the game. There I checked out manuscript boxes that told stories of the communities I inhabited. On these Saturdays, I started to see the invisible forces that created my physical world and marked my presence. Every book I picked below does the same precise workāthey make visible a past that shapes our present.
Everyone knows the life and times of Benjamin Franklin, but what about the extraordinary experiences and opinions of his beloved sister, Jane Franklin?
āGabby, frank, and vexed,ā Janeās life story demonstrates a smart, witty, and hardworking woman who birthed 12 children and survived the death of all of them but one. The hidden history of women in early America comes alive through Leporeās sleuthing arts in this compelling nugget of forgotten history.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR NPR ā¢ Time Magazine ā¢ The Washington Post ā¢ Entertainment Weekly ā¢ The Boston Globe
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historiansāa revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, Jane, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brotherās fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator.
Making use of an astonishing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Leporeā¦
As a child, I was drawn to the silences in family stories and as a young adult, the gaps in official records. Now Iām a former English professor turned full-time writer who is fascinated with who gets written out of history, and why. I love exploring overlooked lives, especially womenās livesāfrom Stalinās female relatives to nineteenth-century shopgirls, and most recently, a pair of early medieval queens.
If youāve ever found yourself obsessed with a family mystery, youāll be captivated by The Lost. Mendelsohn had always wondered what happened to his great-uncle and aunt, and their four daughters, during the Holocaust. His search starts with ordinary genealogical curiosity but quickly spirals into an epic quest. I admire Mendelsohnās elegant, lyrical prose and was swept up in his ruminations on what we owe the past. His discoveries are heartbreaking but they also spark hopeāby rescuing one ordinary family from oblivion.
A writer's search for his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original and riveting epic, brilliantly exploring the nature of time and memory.
'The Lost' begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relative's fates. The quest takes him to aā¦
I grew up thinking that being adopted didnāt matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Courtās overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over womenās reproductive rights placesā¦
As a child, I was drawn to the silences in family stories and as a young adult, the gaps in official records. Now Iām a former English professor turned full-time writer who is fascinated with who gets written out of history, and why. I love exploring overlooked lives, especially womenās livesāfrom Stalinās female relatives to nineteenth-century shopgirls, and most recently, a pair of early medieval queens.
I love gorgeous sentences alongside a good mystery, and Wroe expertly crafts both. A decade after the Princes in the Tower were presumed murdered, a charismatic young man appeared, claiming to be the younger of the two princesāRichard, Duke of York. His enemies, though, said he was a boatmanās son named Perkin Warbeck. So who was he really? Wroeās meditation on appearance and identity has even more resonance in the Instagram-era than it did when it was first published. What does it mean to ālook the partā? And what matters mostāwho we think we are, or who others think we might be?
In 1491, as Machiavelli advised popes and princes and Leonardo da Vinci astonished the art world, a young man boarded a ship in Portugal bound for Ireland. He would be greeted upon arrival as the rightful heir to the throne of England. The trouble was, England already had a king.
The most intriguing and ambitious pretender in history, this elegant young man was celebrated throughout Europe as the prince he claimed to be: Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the āPrinces in the Towerā who were presumed to have been murdered almost a decade earlier. Handsome, well-mannered, and charismatic,ā¦
I'm an American historian and former director of UNC-Chapel Hill's Program in Sexuality Studiesāand former pizza maker, gas pumper, park ranger, and tour guide at the house in which Louisa May Alcott wroteLittle Women. As a historian, I've spent my career trying to understand the lives of people in early American history who weren't well known at the time. In writing the Sewing Girl's Tale, which focuses on a survivor of a sexual assault, it was especially important to keep her at the center of the story. Ultimately, I wanted to know: What was life in the aftermath of the American Revolution likeānot for some Founding Fatherābut for an ordinary young woman.
This book is compelling because Mazzeo is such a skillful writer of creative nonfiction (I also loved her Great Courses lectures on that subject)āand because the focus on Eliza Hamilton shifts what we thought we knew about her vaunted husband. Mazzeo is terrific at keeping Eliza at the center of her own story. And Mazzeo is not afraid to offer informed speculation when the documentary record, as it often does for underrepresented voices from this period, falters. As a professional historian, I learned a lot about centering women's experiences in stories that men keep threatening to take overāand about what kinds of speculation I am and am not comfortable with. I also found her approach to the Reynolds Affairācarefully documented, well reasoned, and centered on Eliza's perspectiveāto be bold, refreshing, and pretty persuasive. Why should we (as most recent Hamilton scholars have done) simply take Alexander Hamilton at his wordā¦
From the New York Times bestselling author of Irena's Children comes a "vivid, compelling, and unputdownable new biography" (Christopher Andersen, #1 New York Times bestselling author) about the extraordinary life and times of Eliza Hamilton, the wife of founding father Alexander Hamilton, and a powerful, unsung hero in America's early days.
Fans fell in love with Eliza Hamilton-Alexander Hamilton's devoted wife-in Lin-Manuel Miranda's phenomenal musical Hamilton. But they don't know her full story. A strong pioneer woman, a loving sister, a caring mother, and in her later years, a generous philanthropist, Eliza had many sides-and this fascinating biography brings herā¦
I am a compulsive reader and writer of speculative fiction, in love with the genreās capacity to extrapolate our present social, economic and technological into horrifying/astonishing futures. That being said, I need strong writing and compelling characters to pull me into a world and make it feel lived in and real. Itās this kind of emotional realism that I seek out as a reader and try to create as an author.
I always love a good near-future sci-fi book and the opening pages of this graphic novel deliver wonderful technological details in spades, including a ubiquitous āServiceā pictured as floating pools of word balloons that cleverly conveys information overload. Then a sharp twist takes the story in a whole new, utterly unexpected direction I wonāt ruin for youā¦ Just read it.
In rare lucid moments you see that you are enslaved.
You tell yourself that The Service is a helpful interface providing your mind
with continual aid and stimulation, but you know it's a
lie.
Patrick Whiteside can help you. He
doesn't require much: An open mind. Determination. The ability to make
sacrifices.
Let Whiteside help
you.
From the pages of BRANDON GRAHAM's
ISLAND comes the debut science fiction epic by MATT SHEEAN and MALACHI
WARD.
Collects "ANCESTOR" from issues 3, 5, 7
and 9 of ISLAND.
Radical Friend highlights the remarkable life of Amy Kirby Post, a nineteenth-century abolitionist and women's rights activist who created deep friendships across the color line to promote social justice. Her relationships with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, William C. Nell, and other Black activists from the 1840s to theā¦
When I was five years old, my father sat down with me in front of the television and we watched together as the Space Shuttle Columbia launched for the first time. Four decades later, Iāve authored a history of those early shuttle missions, been a part of developing future space missions, and, most importantly of all, watched several space firsts with my own son. Space exploration is humanity at its greatest ā working together using the best of our abilities to overcome incredible challenges and improve life here on Earth ā and Iām always grateful for the opportunity to share that inspiration with others.
If youāre exploring space history, Apollo 11 is THE moment above all others ā the first footsteps on another world. In Moonbound, Fetter-Vorm both captures and contextualizes that moment brilliantly, using the words of the astronauts themselves to share the story of the mission, while also giving the big picture that got them there ā in the process unpacking everything from Galileo to the layers of a spacesuit.
On a summer night in 1969, two men climbed down a ladder onto a sea of dust at the edge of an ancient dream. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on lunar soil, the moon ceased to be a place of mystery and myth. It became a destination.
Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of that journey, Moonbound tells the monumental story of the moon and the men who went there first. With vibrant images and meticulous attention to detail, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm conjures the long history of the visionaries, stargazers, builders, and adventurers who sent Apollo 11 onā¦