Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion

In this illustrated presentation and conversation, Elizabeth Block will discuss her new book, Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion, which examines how wealthy American women—as consumers and as influencers—helped shape French couture of the late nineteenth century. Countering the usual narrative of the designer as solo creative genius, Block shows that these American women were active participants in the era's transnational fashion system.

Poor Richard's Women

Contrary to his conventional image as a highly reasoned individual, Benjamin Franklin's intimate relations revealed a man who struggled with passion and prudence throughout his life. Hear the truth about Ben’s common-law wife, Deborah Read, once dismissed by male historians as a dull, ignorant woman.

The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation

A comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War, Thavolia Glymph’s recent book, The Women’s Fight, shows how women--North and South, white and black, enslaved and free—were fully engaged in the wartime struggles on the home front, the military fight, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter, Ruth, inherited the sack and embroidered it with just a handful of words that evoke her family’s sweeping story of loss and of love. It reads:
 

Female Genius

In the provocative new biography Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution, Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s—the Age of the Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educator delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia.

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

Join us as Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. Jones will recount how African American women defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons.

The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz.

Phillis Wheatley Peters in Material Memory

2023 marks the 250th publication anniversary of Phillis Wheatley Peters’ Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Throughout this anniversary year, The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters: A Poet and Her Legacies, a project directed by the University of Georgia and Texas Christian University, honors the occasion as a milestone in both literary and historical terms generating countless cultural legacies.

Emma Willard: Maps of History

Born in the Connecticut River Valley in 1787, Emma Hart Willard was part of the first generation of American girls to be educated outside of the home. As both a student and a young teacher in Connecticut, Vermont, and New York, she chafed at the limitations placed on female learning, but also the traditional methods of teaching. She went on to transform female education as founder of the Troy Female Seminary, and in the classroom experimented with new methods of teaching geography and history.

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