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"So you're the little woman who started this big war," Abraham Lincoln is said to have quipped when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin converted readers by the thousands to the anti-slavery movement and served notice that the days of slavery were numbered. Overnight Stowe became a celebrity, but to defenders of slavery she was the devil in petticoats.
Most writing about Stowe treats her as a literary figure and social...
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"The one thing I do not want," quipped Jacqueline Kennedy, "is to be called First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse." This lively collection includes more than 350 revealing and thought-provoking remarks by White House wives, from Martha Washington ("I live a very dull life here, and know nothing that passes in town.") to Michelle Obama ("The only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for...
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2012
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"A rich and moving play with music . . . it taps into seasonal themes of redemption, forgiveness and community, with a decidedly American bent."—Variety
Set on a chilly Christmas Eve during the latter days of the Civil War, Paula Vogel's new pageant for the holiday season weaves a tapestry of both fictional and historical characters—together with period holiday music and lesser-known marches, hymns, and spirituals—to
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In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its "scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent," to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television. Assuming the voices...
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Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of "perfect"...
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This volume explores the lives and works of nine Northern women who wrote during the Civil War period, examining the ways in which, through their writing, they engaged in the national debates of the time. Lyde Sizer shows that from the 1850 publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin through Reconstruction, these women, as well as a larger mosaic of lesser-known writers, used their mainstream writings publicly to make sense of war, womanhood, Union, slavery,...
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The best columns by the award-winning Chicago Tribune writer, on diverse topics like family, loss, mental health, advice, and the Windy City.
Over the last two decades, Mary Schmich's biweekly column in the Chicago Tribune has offered advice, humor, and discerning commentary on a broad array of topics including family, milestones, mental illness, writing, and life in Chicago. Schmich won the 2012 Pulitzer for Commentary for "her wide range of down-to-earth...
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"Human experience is varied and astonishing," notes Jo Carson, "and this is a taste." A uniquely American writer and performer, Carson has spent fifteen years working with peoples' stories in communities across the country, crafting more than thirty plays from the oral histories she has collected. In performance, these works have illuminated and invigorated the communities in which they were forged, as the people see themselves onstage in a new light....
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Susanna Rowson--novelist, actress, playwright, poet, school founder, and early national celebrity--bears little resemblance to the title character in her most famous creation, Charlotte Temple. Yet this best-selling novel has long been perceived as the prime exemplar of female passivity and subjugation in the early Republic. Marion Rust disrupts this view by placing the novel in the context of Rowson's life and other writings. Rust shows how an early...
12) Mrs. Packard
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Illinois, 1861: Without proof of insanity, Elizabeth Packard is committed by her husband to an asylum. Based on historical events, Emily Mann's play tells of one woman's struggle to right a system gone wrong in this winner of the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award.
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In the decades spanning the nineteenth century, thousands of women entered the literary marketplace. Twelve of the century's most successful women writers provide the focus for Mary Kelley's landmark study: Maria Cummins, Caroline Howard Gilman, Caroline Lee Hentz, Mary Jane Holmes, Maria McIntosh, Sara Parton, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Virginia Terhune, Susan Warner, and Augusta Evans Wilson. These...
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During the Civil War, its devastating aftermath, and the decades following, many southern white women turned to writing as a way to make sense of their experiences. Combining varied historical and literary sources, Sarah Gardner argues that women served as guardians of the collective memory of the war and helped define and reshape southern identity. Gardner considers such well-known authors as Caroline Gordon, Ellen Glasgow, and Margaret Mitchell...
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An intriguing study of artist and civil rights activist Shirley Graham Du Bois
One of the most intriguing activists and artists of the twentieth century, Shirley Graham Du Bois also remains one of the least studied and understood. In Race Woman, Gerald Horne draws a revealing portrait of this controversial figure who championed the civil rights movement in America, the liberation struggles in Africa and the socialist struggles in Maoist China. Through...
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Remembering: Joan Williams' Uncollected Pieces illustrates again that rediscovering an admired author-especially through his or her later works-is every bit as engaging as discovering a new literary voice. Joan Williams, an accomplished and prize-winning southern novelist, published a number of short stories and nonfiction pieces in the later years of her life; a life complicated early on by the influential men with whom she was involved, namely...
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Every Natural Fact: Five Seasons of Open-Air Parenting is a narrative of mother-and-son nature outings across the state of Wisconsin. In a style that blends the voices of Janisse Ray and Annie Dillard, a mother and son explore parallels in the world of people and nature. The interconnected chapters stand on their own and build upon each other. These explorations of natural history, flora and fauna, and parenting themes demonstrate that the mythic...
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Take flight with these dazzling persona poems telling the stories of daredevil pilots in the early days of aviation-from the author of American Yard.
Daredevil pilots Lincoln Beachey, Betty Scott, Harriet Quimby, Ruth Law, Ormer Locklear, Bessie Coleman, and Clyde Pangborn fly at carnival altitudes to thrill millions of spectators who have never seen an airplane. In a lyrical sequence of persona poems, the pilots in Exuberance wonder how the experience...
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