History Books

Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation

Sheila Weller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 92 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A groundbreaking and irresistible biography of three of America's most important musical artists -- Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon -- charts their lives as women at a magical moment in time.

Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon remain among the most enduring and important women in popular music. Each woman is distinct. Carole King is the product of outer-borough, middle-class New York City; Joni Mitchell is a granddaughter of Canadian farmers; and Carly Simon is a child of the Manhattan intellectual upper crust. They collectively represent, in their lives and their songs, a great swath of American girls who came of age in the late 1960s. Their stories trace the arc of the now mythic sixties generation -- female version -- but in a bracingly specific and deeply recalled way, far from cliché. The history of the women of that generation has never been written -- until now, through their resonant lives and emblematic songs.

Filled with the voices of many dozens of these women's intimates, who are speaking in these pages for the first time, this alternating biography reads like a novel -- except it's all true, and the heroines are famous and beloved. Sheila Weller captures the character of each woman and gives a balanced portrayal enriched by a wealth of new information.

Girls Like Us is an epic treatment of midcentury women who dared to break tradition and become what none had been before them -- confessors in song, rock superstars, and adventurers of heart and soul.

Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation

Cokie Roberts

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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 19th Century -> Antebellum
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Founding Mothers, Cokie Roberts paid homage to the heroic women whose patriotism and sacrifice helped create a new nation. Now the number one New York Times bestselling author and renowned political commentator—praised in USA Today as a "custodian of time-honored values"—continues the story of early America's influential women with Ladies of Liberty. In her "delightfully intimate and confiding" style (Publishers Weekly), Roberts presents a colorful blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women's public roles and private responsibilities.

Recounted with the insight and humor of an expert storyteller and drawing on personal correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources—many of them previously unpublished—Roberts brings to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork for a better society. Almost every quotation here is written by a woman, to a woman, or about a woman. From first ladies to freethinkers, educators to explorers, this exceptional group includes Abigail Adams, Margaret Bayard Smith, Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Catherine Adams, Eliza Hamilton, Theodosia Burr, Rebecca Gratz, Louisa Livingston, Rosalie Calvert, Sacajawea, and others. In a much-needed addition to the shelves of Founding Father literature, Roberts sheds new light on the generation of heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation, giving these ladies of liberty the recognition they so greatly deserve.

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Midwife's Tale 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Interesting diary of a Maine midwife. Not the easiest read but enjoyable.

Absolutely terrific and important work 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Please disregard the 2 stars in the rating. It is a 5 star book. The system automaticaly put 2 stars and would not let me change it.

I can't say enough about how wonderful this book is and how much I enjoyed reading it. This book would be a wonderful gift for anyone in the medical profession. It is a fascinating account of an amazing woman facing the challenges of life in early Maine as well as the every day facts of life necessary for survival. She contributed immensely to life itself as she was the midwife to hundreds of, if not more, women and the birth of their children.

For myself, I used it as a genealogical tool because that is the area of the country where all of my ancestors came from. It is facinating to know the trials and tribulations as well as the joys of our ancestors.

Priscilla Paul
Memphis

Editorial Review:

Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier.

Celia, A Slave

Melton A. Mclaurin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Buy or Die! 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Everyone! Buy Celia, a slave! She's Celia, a slave! Buy four or five at least!

A few pages that should be read by all 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 6 people found this review helpful.

"Yet the lives of lesser figures, men and women who lived and died in virtual autonomy, often better illustrate certain aspects of the major issures of a perticular period than do (others who achieve national prominence)". The introduction my Melton A. McLaurin sets up a well researched and thought out work regarding the life of a female slave, caught killing her owner for raping her over a period of years. The author does two very important things very well in this book. He demonstates in very real terms the hopelessness of women in particular during this sordid period or American history AND he places in a timeline perspective just before the outbreak of the Civil War when tensions were high, especially in her "home" state of Missouri, where the stakes could not have been higher with the question of the expansion of slavery into newly admitted states was being hotly contensted. While it would be impossible to argue that she would ever get a fair "trial" McLaurin astutely walks us through a real defense team doing their best in a time period where ANY notion of fairness is null and void and, specifically, why this is the case.

This book is a must read for any serious students of the "peculiar institution". It is remarkable how the author takes an "anonomous" life and demonstrates how and individual could be and was treated as property and degraded to the depths of our ability to comprehend while weaving in the fast moving antibellum period and the legislation, politics and emotions of the time.

Editorial Review:

Celia was an ordinary slave--until she struck back at her abusive master and became the defendant in a landmark trial that threatened to undermine the very foundations of the South's "Peculiar Institution."

Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South

Deborah Gray White

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not quite Honest story of slave women 2 out of 5 stars.
10 of 23 people found this review helpful.

I believe that this book is factually incorrect. White makes a strong statement that slave children were dying of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SID). She is unable to admit the possibility, desire and need of slave mothers to commit infanticide. For a high schooler or entry level college student, this book could give the wrong messages. While some of her facts are well taken, the ones that she concentrates on the most may very well be false. There is other material in this book that I think is just outright wrong considering that I have done substantial research on slavery. A reader can learn more about chattel slavery by studying slavery outside the US: slavery in Latin America and Brazil particularly. Historians outside the US have not turned slavery into a happy patchwork quilt.

Editorial Review:

Living with the dual burdens of racism and sexism, slave women in the plantation South assumed roles within the family and community that contrasted sharply with traditional female roles in the larger American society. This new edition of Ar'n't I a Woman? reviews and updates the scholarship on slave women and the slave family, exploring new ways of understanding the intersection of race and gender and comparing the myths that stereotyped female slaves with the realities of their lives. Above all, this groundbreaking study shows us how black women experienced freedom in the Reconstruction South-their heroic struggle to gain their rights, hold their families together, resist economic and sexual oppression, and maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds.

The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World: Completely Revised and Updated

Joni Seager

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

AN INVALUABLE RESOURCE 5 out of 5 stars.
29 of 29 people found this review helpful.

I was first introduced to this atlas years ago in graduate school and was immediately impressed with the depth of subjects covered and professional graphics. As a result I was very happy to purchase Penguin's third edition of this atlas last week. Hot off the presses, THE PENGUIN ATLAS OF WOMEN IN THE WORLD contains up-to-date statistics of how women fare around the world. This invaluable resource is divided into the following seven sections: Women in the World, Families, Birthrights, Body Politics, Work, To Have and Have Not, and Power. This atlas succeeds where other types of media fail - it leaves a very evident impression of the continued discrepancy between men and women in all aspects of social, economic, and political life. After studying this atlas I was left with a renewed sense of what countries women fare better than others - and the answers might surprise you as much as myself! I highly recommend THE PENGUIN ATLAS OF WOMEN IN THE WORLD to anyone interested in the state of women around the world.

Editorial Review:

In this revision of her ground-breaking atlas, Joni Seager draws on a vast amount of new global data to explore the key issues facing women today: equality, motherhood, feminism, beauty, culture, women at work, women in the global economy, changing households, domestic violence, time budgets, children, lesbian rights, women in government, and more.

Women, Art, and Society (World of Art)

Whitney Chadwick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"A wave of new scholarship floods her text….Chadwick opens up whole new ways of thinking about familiar images."—Women's Art Journal

This acclaimed study challenges the assumption that great women artists are exceptions to the rule who transcended their sex to produce major works of art. While acknowledging the many women whose contributions to visual culture since the Middle Ages have often been neglected, Whitney Chadwick's survey reexamines the works themselves and the ways in which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct reference to gender. In her discussion of feminism and its influence on such a reappraisal, the author also addresses the closely related issues of ethnicity, class, and sexuality.

This expanded edition incorporates recent developments in contemporary art. Chadwick addresses the turn toward autobiography in much recent women's art. She considers issues such as the personal versus the political and the private versus the public, and analyzes the differences between women's art today and the seminal feminist work of the 1970s and 1980s. 325 illustrations, 90 in color.

The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America, Revised Edition

Ruth Rosen

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

For anyone who wants a thorough introduction to the modern American women's movement, this is it: a rousing story of the revolution by a history professor who participated in its struggles. Ruth Rosen introduces her book by reminding readers of discriminatory practices that were common in pre-1960s America: "Harvard's Lamont Library was off-limits to women for fear they would distract male students. Newspaper ads separated jobs by sex; bars often refused to serve women; some states even excluded women from jury duty; no women ran big corporations or universities, worked as firefighters or police officers." She then proceeds to delineate the changes that make such discrimination seem unthinkable today. Her research takes in popular books, magazines, newspaper articles and television, the details of politics and law, and the individual liberation stories of not only famous feminists and thinkers but many lesser-known women as well.

By the end of the 1970s, there are not only legal abortions, Title IX, and more women than men at American universities but letters like the following submitted to Ms. magazine: "One day last week, I pulled up to a four-way stop in my taxi," writes Jill Wood. "At one of the stop signs sat a police officer in a cruiser, and at the third, a telephone installer in a van. What made the occasion memorable was the fact that all three of us were women. We celebrated with much joyful laughter." Yet, says Rosen, this is only the beginning of the struggle for human rights. The World Split Open should serve to galvanize the energies of a new generation of women and men. --Maria Dolan

Born for Liberty

Sara Evans

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A thorough and informative history of women in the U.S. 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Evans' "Born for Liberty" is an excellent history of women in the U.S. The women's rights movements are often times portrayed as struggles of white middle-class women for white middle-class women. Evans includes the struggles and contributions of working-class women, black women, and immigrant women to the women's rights movements. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the struggle for equality and the role of women in shaping this country's history.

PRESUMTIOUS PRECEPT 2 out of 5 stars.
10 of 52 people found this review helpful.

Its title claims a broad accomplishment, an "all your answers are here" assertion. Although it presents hundreds of historical figures, it is quickly evident that by "History of Women," the author means "The Plight of Women and What Their Heroes Have Done About It." The narrative embraces the concept that from this county's origin to the present, women are victims of misogyny, but that there are several heroes of the struggle. Despite the decline in feminist momentum, there nevertheless seems to be a wealth of "historical" readings recently published by feminists. A critique of feminism's tenants will not be attempted with this review, but it seems pressing to take issue with the didactic narratives of "historical" texts such as Born for Liberty. Exempt from their presentations is a clear discussion of three essential components: definitions of the terms "oppression" and "liberty," and the ideologies that steer their metanarratives in the name of "history." The exemption of these elements does not allow for rhetorical inquiry, which is vital for the veracity of the texts' contents. Feminist history, arguably a genre of its own, credulously seeks to convert its readers on the pretense that there is a universal understanding of what it means to be oppressed and liberated. Once readers naively embrace this pretense, they are prone to also believing the tenants of feminism. Perhaps, then, the narrative of Born for Liberty will successfully promote the feminist agenda, but its converts will have naively succumbed to the same tactics of hierarchical propaganda that it claims to abhor.

Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

"Pots and pans" history 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 15 people found this review helpful.

"Pots and pans" history. So that's what this stuff is called. If that is supposed to diminish it, allow me to suggest that nothing could be further from the truth.

Nothing is more controversial in our society today than "woman's place," and no where is it more controversial than among women. (Any email list will bear this out.)

But what was it like for the women who were the founders of this country? How often do we even think about how they lived, unless we happen to visit one of the burgeoning historical communities multiplying across the country?

It was work, and it was hard work. Women were at home, and they were at home for a reason. Even getting to church was a major endeavor, and one they fought for, for it was women who built many of the major American congregations thriving today.

Their relationships with each other sustained them, and also were likely to pose the most threat, for women could make or break the reputations of one another, upon which survival depended.

Childbirth, pre, post and in between, determined the rhythm of life for generations of women. There were many births, and many of them did not live to adulthood. A woman who was able to nurture many children to see her grandchildren and great-grandchildren had accomplished a great deal, and was honored accordingly.

They had to know and understand the rhythms of nature and the timing of how to use an oven they could stand in and work with its heat as it coursed over the length of a day. There were no timers. There were no temperature regulators. There certainly were no microwave ovens or dish washers or washing machines.

They made medical tinctures as well as food, for doctors were few and far between and if they couldn't nurse their loved ones to health, they lost them more often than not.

They acted as "Deputy Husbands," representing their husbands in their livelihood, not in their own right, but as stand-ins based on the status of their husbands. It was power, even if not their own.

Well researched, thoroughly documented, well written and a very pleasant read, this book will allow us all to count our blessings -- and honor our foremothers.

...geminiwalker

Editorial Review:

This enthralling work of scholarship strips away those abstractions to reveal the hidden -- and not always stoic -- face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In these pages we encounter the awesome burdens -- and the considerable power -- of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising -- and, all too often, mourning -- her children, and even attaining fame as a heroine of frontier conflicts or notoriety as a murderess. Painstakingly researched, lively with scandal and homely detail, Good Wives is history at its best.