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• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Land, Labor, and Violence
• 2. Black Politics and Violence
• 3. Getting Organized: The Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina
• 4. Sin and Redemption: The Election of 1876
• 5. Strange Fruit Hanging from the Palmetto Tree: Lynching in South Carolina
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Y
• Z.

In Shrill Hurrahs, Kate Cote Gillin presents a new perspective on gender roles and racial violence in South Carolina during Reconstruction and the decades after the 1876 election of Wade Hampton as governor. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Southerners struggled to either adapt or resist changes to their way of life. Gillin accurately perceives racial violence as an attempt by white Southern men to reassert their masculinity, weakened by the war and emancipation, and as an attempt by white Southern women to preserve their antebellum privileges. As she reevaluates relationships between genders, Gillin also explores relations within the female gender. She has demonstrated that white women often exacerbated racial and gender violence alongside men, even when other white women were victims of that violence. Through the nineteenth century, few bridges of sisterhood were built between black and white women. Black women asserted their rights as mothers, wives, and independent, free women in the postwar years, while white women often opposed these assertions of black female autonomy. Ironically even black women participated in acts of intimidation and racial violence in an attempt to safeguard their rights. In the turmoil of an era that extinguished slavery and redefined black citizenship, race, not gender, often determined the relationships that black and white women displayed in the defeated South. By canvassing and documenting numerous incidents of racial violence, from lynching of black men to assaults on white women, Gillin proposes a new view of postwar South Carolina. Tensions grew over the struggle for land and labour, black politicisation, the creation of the Ku Klux Klan, the election of 1876, and the rise of lynching. Gillin addresses these issues and more as she focuses on black women's asserted independence and white women's role in racial violence. Despite the white women's reactionary activism, the powerful presence of black women and their bravery in the face of white violence reshaped Southern gender roles forever.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: growing up within the double bind, 1930-1954
• Suppose they don't want us here? Mental mapping of Jim Crow New Orleans
• A street where girls were meddled: insults and street harassment
• Defending her honor: interracial sexual violence, silences, and respectability
• The geography of niceness: morality, anxiety, and Black girlhood
• Relationships unbecoming of a girl her age: sexual delinquency and the house of the good shepherd
• Make-believe land: pleasure in Black girl's lives
• Epilogue: Jim Crow girls, Hurricane Katrina women.

What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, LaKisha Simmons blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children's streets and neighborhoods within Jim Crow New Orleans and offering a rare look into black girls' personal lives. Simmons argues that these children faced the difficult task of adhering to middle-class expectations of purity and respectability even as they encountered the daily realities of Jim Crow violence, which included interracial sexual aggression, street harassment, and presumptions of black girls' impurity. Simmons makes use of oral histories, the black and white press, social workers' reports, police reports, girls' fiction writing, and photography to tell the stories of individual girls: some from poor, working-class families; some from middle-class, ""respectable"" families; and some caught in the Jim Crow judicial system. These voices come together to create a group biography of ordinary girls living in an extraordinary time, girls who did not intend to make history but whose stories transform our understanding of both segregation and childhood.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: imagining freedom in the slave South
• City of contrasts: Charleston before the Civil War
• A way out of no way: Black women and manumission
• To survive and thrive: race, sex, and waged labor in the city
• The currency of citizenship: property ownership and Black female freedom
• A tale of two women: the lives of Cecille Cogdell and Sarah Sanders
• A fragile freedom: the story of Margaret Bettingall and her daughters
• Epilogue: the continuing search for freedom.

For black women in antebellum Charleston, freedom was not a static legal category but a fragile and contingent experience. In this deeply researched social history, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers analyzes the ways in which black women in Charleston acquired, defined, and defended their own vision of freedom. Drawing on legislative and judicial materials, probate data, tax lists, church records, family papers, and more, Myers creates detailed portraits of individual women while exploring how black female Charlestonians sought to create a fuller freedom by improving their financial, social, and legal standing. Examining both those who were officially manumitted and those who lived as free persons but lacked official documentation, Myers reveals that free black women filed lawsuits and petitions, acquired property (including slaves), entered into contracts, paid taxes, earned wages, attended schools, and formed familial alliances with wealthy and powerful men, black and white--all in an effort to solidify and expand their freedom. Never fully free, black women had to depend on their skills of negotiation in a society dedicated to upholding both slavery and patriarchy. Forging Freedom examines the many ways in which Charleston's black women crafted a freedom of their own design instead of accepting the limited existence imagined for them by white Southerners.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• TOC
• Intro
• Part I
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover

This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century America through the life of one of its most charismatic and influential characters: Sojourner Truth. In an in-depth account of this amazing activist, Margaret Washington unravels Sojourner Truth's world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation's most significant reform era. Born into bondage among the Hudson Valley Dutch in Ulster County, New York, Isabella was sold several times, married, and bore five children before fleeing in 1826 with her infant daughter one year before New York slavery was abolished. In 1829, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a domestic, preached, joined a religious commune, and then in 1843 had an epiphany. Changing her name to Sojourner Truth, she began traveling the country as a champion of the downtrodden and a spokeswoman for equality by promoting Christianity, abolitionism, and women's rights. Gifted in verbal eloquence, wit, and biblical knowledge, Sojourner Truth possessed an earthy, imaginative, homespun personality that won her many friends and admirers and made her one of the most popular and quoted reformers of her times. Washington's biography of this remarkable figure considers many facets of Sojourner Truth's life to explain how she became one of the greatest activists in American history, including her African and Dutch religious heritage; her experiences of slavery within contexts of labor, domesticity, and patriarchy; and her profoundly personal sense of justice and intuitive integrity. Organized chronologically into three distinct eras of Truth's life, Sojourner Truth's America examines the complex dynamics of her times, beginning with the transnational contours of her spirituality and early life as Isabella and her embroilments in legal controversy. Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge then propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write. Throughout the book, Washington explores Truth's passionate commitment to family and community, including her vision for a beloved community that extended beyond race, gender, and socioeconomic condition and embraced a common humanity. For Sojourner Truth, the significant model for such communalism was a primitive, prophetic Christianity. Illustrated with dozens of images of Truth and her contemporaries, Sojourner Truth's America draws a delicate and compelling balance between Sojourner Truth's personal motivations and the influences of her historical context. Washington provides important insights into the turbulent cultural and political climate of the age while also separating the many myths from the facts concerning this legendary American figure.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• A note on terminology
• Antebellum Natchez : the place in which they stepped
• Stepping lively amid their shadows : the single white women of antebellum Natchez
• Stepping out on their own : the divorcing women of antebellum Natchez
• Stepping beyond their husbands' graves : the widows of antebellum Natchez
• Stepping lively in place : the Free-Black, not-married women of antebellum Natchez
• Stepping lively at the edge : the disorderly, not-married women of antebellum Natchez
• Stepping through the tumult : not-married women in Confederate and Yankee-occupied Natchez
• Stepping into the breach : the women of postbellum Natchez
• single and married, black and white
• Stepping through the ruins : personal sketches
• Epilogue.

Enlivened with profiles and vignettes of some of the remarkable people whose histories inform this study, Stepping Lively in Place shows how single, free women navigated life in a busy slave-encrusted river-port town before, during, and after the Civil War. It examines how single women in one city (including prostitutes, entrepreneurs, and elite plantation ladies) coped with life unencumbered, or unprotected, by husbands. The book pays close attention to the laws affecting southern gender and sociocultural traditions, focusing especially on how the town's single women maneuvered adroitly but guardedly within the legal arena in which they lived. Joyce Linda Broussard looks at all types of single women-black and white, law-abiding and criminal-including spinsters, widows, divorcees, and abandoned women. She demonstrates the nuanced degrees to which these women understood that the legal, cultural, and social traditions of their place and time could alternately constrain or empower them, often achieving thereby a considerable amount of independence as women. Before the Civil War, says Broussard, the town's patriarchal community tolerated (often reluctantly) even the most independent-minded (and often disorderly) single women-as long as their behaviour left unchallenged the institutions of white male mastery, slavery, and marriage. She explores the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the town's single women, especially when thousands of formerly enslaved women and new widows swelled their ranks. With slavery dead and male authority undermined, Broussard demonstrates how the not-married women of postbellum Natchez confronted a world turned inside out with a determinedly resolute dexterity.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)