Download or read book A Midwife s Tale written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-12-22 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • 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 and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale.
Download or read book The Diary of Martha Ballard 1785 1812 written by Martha Ballard and published by . This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of Augusta written by Charles Elventon Nash and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-09-23 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From admired historian—and coiner of one of feminism's most popular slogans—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich comes an exploration of what it means for women to make history. In 1976, in an obscure scholarly article, Ulrich wrote, "Well behaved women seldom make history." Today these words appear on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, and all sorts of Web sites and blogs. Ulrich explains how that happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. She ranges from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One's Own. Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history.
Download or read book The Age of Homespun written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-08-26 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America–ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock–relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history. In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history.
Download or read book Good Wives written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-12-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This enthralling work of scholarship strips away 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.
Download or read book The Midwife s Tale written by Gretchen Moran Laskas and published by Delta. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I come from a long line of midwives,” narrates Elizabeth Whitely. “I was expected to follow Mama, follow Granny, follow Great-granny. In the end, I didn’t disappoint them. Or perhaps I did. After all, there were no more midwives after me.”For generations, the women in Elizabeth’s family have brought life to Kettle Valley, West Virginia, heeding a destiny to tend its women with herbals, experience, and wisdom. But Elizabeth, who has comforted so many, has lost her heart to the one man who cannot reciprocate, even when she moves into his home to share his bed and raise his child. Then Lauren Denniker, Elizabeth’s adopted daughter, begins to display a miraculous gift--just as Elizabeth learns that she herself is unable to have a child. How Elizabeth comes to free herself from a loveless relationship, grapple with Lauren’s astonishing abilities, and come to terms with her own emptiness is the compelling heart of this remarkable tale. Incorporating the spirited mountain mythology of prewar Appalachia, Gretchen Laskas has crafted a story as true to our time as its own, and a cast of characters as poignant as they are entirely original.
Download or read book A House Full of Females written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of A Midwife's Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History, and The Age of Homespun--a revelatory, nuanced, and deeply intimate look at the world of early Mormon women whose seemingly ordinary lives belied an astonishingly revolutionary spirit, drive, and determination. A stunning and sure-to-be controversial book that pieces together, through more than two dozen nineteenth-century diaries, letters, albums, minute-books, and quilts left by first-generation Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, the never-before-told story of the earliest days of the women of Mormon "plural marriage," whose right to vote in the state of Utah was given to them by a Mormon-dominated legislature as an outgrowth of polygamy in 1870, fifty years ahead of the vote nationally ratified by Congress, and who became political actors in spite of, or because of, their marital arrangements. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing of this small group of Mormon women who've previously been seen as mere names and dates, has brilliantly reconstructed these textured, complex lives to give us a fulsome portrait of who these women were and of their "sex radicalism"--the idea that a woman should choose when and with whom to bear children.
Download or read book The Midwives Book written by Mrs. Jane Sharp and published by . This book was released on 1671 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work supplied English midwives and English women with a compendium of information for the Continent and from the author's own thirty years of experience.
Download or read book Minding the Manor written by Mollie Moran and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-12-23 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in 1916 in Norfolk, Mollie Moran is one of the few people still alive today who can recall working "downstairs" in the golden years of the early 1930's before the outbreak of WWII. She provides a rare and fascinating insight into a world that has long since vanished. Mollie left school at age fourteen and became a scullery maid for a wealthy gentleman with a mansion house in London’s Knighsbridge and a Tudor manor in Norfolk. Even though Mollie's days were long and grueling and included endless tasks, such as polishing doorknobs, scrubbing steps, and helping with all of the food prep in the kitchen, she enjoyed her freedom and had a rich life. Like any bright-eyed teenager, Mollie also spent her days daydreaming about boys, dresses, and dances. She became fast friends with the kitchen maid Flo, dated a sweet farmhand, and became secretly involved with a brooding, temperamental footman. Molly eventually rose to kitchen maid for Lord Islington and then cook for the Earl of Leicester's niece at the magnificent Wallington Hall.
Download or read book Brought to Bed written by Judith Walzer Leavitt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic work reveals how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the present, including a new preface that discusses writings on the subject over the past three decades.
Download or read book Reading Birth and Death written by Jo Murphy-Lawless and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes an important contribution to the fields of obstetrics, midwifery, childbirth education, sociology of the body, cultural studies and women's studies.
Download or read book Paper Trails written by Cameron Blevins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of how the US Post made the nineteenth-century American West. There were five times as many post offices in the United States in 1899 than there are McDonald's restaurants today. During an era of supposedly limited federal government, the United States operated the most expansive national postal system in the world. In this cutting-edge interpretation of the late nineteenth-century United States, Cameron Blevins argues that the US Post wove together two of the era's defining projects: western expansion and the growth of state power. Between the 1860s and the early 1900s, the western United States underwent a truly dramatic reorganization of people, land, capital, and resources. It had taken Anglo-Americans the better part of two hundred years to occupy the eastern half of the continent, yet they occupied the West within a single generation. As millions of settlers moved into the region, they relied on letters and newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, petitions and money orders to stay connected to the wider world. Paper Trails maps the spread of the US Post using a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices, revealing a new picture of the federal government in the West. The western postal network bore little resemblance to the civil service bureaucracies typically associated with government institutions. Instead, the US Post grafted public mail service onto private businesses, contracting with stagecoach companies to carry the mail and paying local merchants to distribute letters from their stores. These arrangements allowed the US Post to rapidly spin out a vast and ephemeral web of postal infrastructure to thousands of distant places. The postal network's sprawling geography and localized operations forces a reconsideration of the American state, its history, and the ways in which it exercised power.
Download or read book Foul Bodies written by Kathleen M. Brown and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In colonial times few Americans bathed regularly; by the mid-1800s, a cleanliness “revolution” had begun. Why this change, and what did it signify? A nation’s standards of private cleanliness reveal much about its ideals of civilization, fears of disease, and expectations for public life, says Kathleen Brown in this unusual cultural history. Starting with the shake-up of European practices that coincided with Atlantic expansion, she traces attitudes toward “dirt” through the mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that cleanliness—and the lack of it—had moral, religious, and often sexual implications. Brown contends that care of the body is not simply a private matter but an expression of cultural ideals that reflect the fundamental values of a society.The book explores early America’s evolving perceptions of cleanliness, along the way analyzing the connections between changing public expectations for appearance and manners, and the backstage work of grooming, laundering, and housecleaning performed by women. Brown provides an intimate view of cleanliness practices and how such forces as urbanization, immigration, market conditions, and concerns about social mobility influenced them. Broad in historical scope and imaginative in its insights, this book expands the topic of cleanliness to encompass much larger issues, including religion, health, gender, class, and race relations.
Download or read book The Plight of Feeling written by Julia A. Stern and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American novels written in the wake of the Revolution overflow with self-conscious theatricality and impassioned excess. In The Plight of Feeling, Julia A. Stern shows that these sentimental, melodramatic, and gothic works can be read as an emotional history of the early republic, reflecting the hate, anger, fear, and grief that tormented the Federalist era. Stern argues that these novels gave voice to a collective mourning over the violence of the Revolution and the foreclosure of liberty for the nation's noncitizens—women, the poor, Native and African Americans. Properly placed in the context of late eighteenth-century thought, the republican novel emerges as essentially political, offering its audience gothic and feminized counternarratives to read against the dominant male-authored accounts of national legitimation. Drawing upon insights from cultural history and gender studies as well as psychoanalytic, narrative, and genre theory, Stern convincingly exposes the foundation of the republic as an unquiet crypt housing those invisible Americans who contributed to its construction.
Download or read book The Midwife s Tale written by Nicky Leap and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mothers and midwives reveal the wonders and difficulties of early twentieth century childbirth in this informative and insightful healthcare history. Before the foundation of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, expectant mothers relied on midwives to help them through childbirth. Based on interviews conducted with dozens and mothers and retired midwives over several years, Billie Hunter and Nicky Leap’s The Midwife’s Tale shares the stories of these women in their own words, shedding light on their experiences and on the realities of childbirth in the first half of the twentieth century. Intriguing, poignant, and sometimes humorous, this oral history covers the experiences of women from the 1910s through the 1950s including accounts of the difficulties of rearing large families in poverty-stricken environments and the lack of information about contraception and abortion—even as midwifery changed from an unqualified “handywoman” skill to an actual profession.
Download or read book Reflections on History and Historians written by Theodore S. Hamerow and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History as a field of learning is in a state of crisis. It has lost much of its influence in institutions of higher learning and its place in public esteem. Historians have, in large part, lost touch with the intelligent lay reader and with the undergraduate college student. History's value to society is being questioned. In this work, a distinguished historian views the profession to which he has been devoted for more than thirty years. Theodore S. Hamerow's learned observations will be welcomed by all historians and by those involved in the management of higher education, and should be required reading for all graduate students in history. Far from being a sentimental look at the past, Hamerow's work confronts the unpleasant reality of the present. History, he says flatly, is a discipline in retreat. The profession is in serious trouble and there are no signs that its problems will be resolved in the foreseeable future. After identifying the current crisis, Hamerow proceeds to trace the development of the profession over the last hundred years and to examine its characteristics in modern society. In this section of the book he shares some fascinating practical observations on the ways in which the profession operates. Hamerow explains why some historians rise to prominence while others do not. He also examines causes of the dissatisfactions that afflict many historians and their students. Hamerow also examines the way in which academic historians live their lives, as he expands on the daily realities that they face. He then explains how those realities have shaped scholarship and led to the "new history." The broad use of social science methods, he observes, has had the effect of isolating the new historians from traditional historians, indeed from one another. Couched in the arcane prose of machine-readable languages, says Hamerow, history has become inaccessible to the intelligent lay reader who had once read historical works with interest, understanding, and appreciation. In concluding his examination, Hamerow asks, "What is the use of history?" It has long been a favorite question asked by historians, but seldom one over which they agonized for very long. After considering various arguments for the usefulness of historical investigation, Hamerow offers his own justification. There are times, says Hamerow, when even the most spontaneous or instructive cultural pursuits need to be examined in the light of the purposes they serve and the goals they seek. Now might be a good time for all historians to take a long look at the direction their discipline has taken in the past century, at the functions it has come to perform, and at the serious dilemma it now faces. Hamerow is a steady and helpful guide to any such examination.
