Women's History Primary Sources
Women's History: Autobiographies, Diaries, Journals, Memoirs, and Letters
A sampling of some resources at the Madson Area Technical College Libraries
Across the Plains in the Donner Party by ISBN: 0896460630
Agatha Christie by ISBN: 0345276469
All Said and Done by ISBN: 0399112510
American grit : a woman's letters from the Ohio frontier by
" In 1826 thirty-year-old Anna Briggs Bentley, her husband, and their six children left their close Quaker community and the worn-out tobacco farms of Sandy Spring, Maryland, for frontier Ohio. Along the way, Anna sent back home the first of scores of letters she wrote her mother and sisters over the next fifty years as she strove to keep herself and her children in their memories. With Anna's natural talent for storytelling and her unique, female perspective, the letters provide a sustained and vivid account of everyday domestic life on the Ohio frontier. She writes of carving a farm out of the forest, bearing many children, darning and patching the family clothes, standing her ground in religious controversy, nursing wounds and fevers, and burying beloved family and friends. Emily Foster presents these revealing letters of a pioneer woman in a framework of insightful commentary and historical context, with genealogical appendices.
ISBN: 0813122651
Auschwitz : a Doctor's Story by
"A taut, terse Holocaust narrative that is all the more powerful for its ironic reserve." -- Kirkus Reviews
ISBN: 9781555536596
A Black Woman's Civil War Memoirs by
"These are the memoirs of a black woman who was born a slave, who had the good fortune to gain her freedom early in the war, with the education and ability to observe and the will to recall in later years the significance of the events in which she was a vigorous participant. Susie King Taylor's recollections are invaluable for those who wish to understand the Civil War from the black woman's point of view. ... A treasure in the light of today's feminist movement." (from the Introduction by Willie Lee Rose)
ISBN: 0910129851
Coming of Age in Mississippi by
Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till#146;s lynching. Before then, she had "known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was#133;the fear of being killed just because I was black." In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life. An all-A student whose dream of going to college is realized when she wins a basketball scholarship, she finally dares to join the NAACP in her junior year. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC she has first-hand experience of the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement, and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs and deadly force that were used to destroy it. A deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation#146;s destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the footsoldiers in the civil rights movement.
ISBN: 0385337817
Days on the road : crossing the plains in 1865 : the diary of Sarah Raymond Herndon by
Sarah Raymond was an unmarried woman of twenty-four who in May 1865--barely a month after the end of the Civil War--mounted her beloved pony and headed west alongside the wagon carrying her mother and two younger brothers. They traveled by wagon train over the Great Plains toward the Rocky Mountains, with no certain idea of where they would settle themselves but a strong desire to leave war-torn Missouri behind and start a new life. Days on the Road is the story of this remarkable journey and of the young woman who made it. Written on the trail and originally published in 1902, it is a tribute to all of the emigrants who made their way west and the tale of a truly extraordinary woman.
ISBN: 0762725818
Diary of a Crack Addict's Wife by
This is the harrowing and unflinchingly candid story of one woman's vicarious descent into a nightmare of drugs, fear and violence. Hunter was a respected army veteran with a good job, a son and a no-nonsense attitude. Then she met Mark Davis, who promised Cynthia the world. She was three months pregnant when she discovered her husband's crack addiction and she did all she could to keep this discovery a secret. Meanwhile Mark was transformed into a monster capable of anything. Mesmerising and heart-wrenching, this is a staggering account of her liberation.
ISBN: 0758208340
The Diary of Anne Frank by
A comparison of the three versions of Anne Frank's diary; Anne's original entries, including never-before-published material; the diary as she herself edited it while in hiding; and the best-known version, edited by her father. B & W photographs throughout
ISBN: 0385240236
The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1854-1863 by
In 1854 Caroline Seabury of Brooklyn, New York, set out for Columbus, Mississippi, to teach French at its Institute for Young Ladies. She lived in Columbus until 1863, through the years of mounting sectional bitterness that preceded the Civil War and through the turmoil and hardships of the war itself. During that time, her most intimate confidant was her diary. Discovered in the archives of the Minnesota State Historical Society, it is published here for the first time. The diary is an illuminating account of southern plantation society and the "peculiar institution" of slavery on the eve of its destruction. Seabury also records her uneasy attempts to come to terms with her position as an unmarried, white, Northern woman whose job was to educate wealthy, white, Southern girls in a setting seemingly oblivious to the horrors of slavery. The diary is not simply a chronicle of daily happenings; Seabury concentrates on remarkable events and the memorable feelings and ideas they generate, shaping them into entries that reveal her as an accomplished writer. She frames her narrative with her journey south in 1854 and the hazardous and exhausting return north through battle lines in 1863. Disapproving of slavery, yet deeply attached to friends and her life in Columbus and also painfully conscious of the fragility of her own economic and social position, Seabury condemned privately in her diary the evils that she endured silently in public. There are striking scenes of plantation life that depict the brutalities of slavery and benumbed responses to them. Seabury also successfully captures the mood of Mississippi as it changed from a fire-eating appetite to fight the Yankees to a grim apprehension of inexorable defeat. Most impressive of all is Seabury's poignantly honest presentation of herself, caught in the middle.
ISBN: 0299128709
Don't let's go to the dogs tonight : an African childhood by
When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, heady scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy. “Smell that,” she whispered, “that’s home.” Vanessa was running up and down the deck, unaccountably wild for a child usually so placid. Intoxicated already. I took in a faceful of African air and fell instantly into a fever. In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with visceral authenticity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time. From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller–known to friends and family as Bobo–grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war, and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself at their African life and its rugged farm work with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything else. Though she loved her children, she was no hand-holder and had little tolerance for neediness. She nurtured her daughters in other ways: She taught them, by example, to be resilient and self-sufficient, to have strong wills and strong opinions, and to embrace life wholeheartedly, despite and because of difficult circumstances. And she instilled in Bobo, particularly, a love of reading and of storytelling that proved to be her salvation. A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller writes poignantly about a girl becoming a woman and a writer against a backdrop of unrest, not just in her country but in her home. But Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is more than a survivor’s story. It is the story of one woman’s unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it, a portrait lovingly realized and deeply felt.
ISBN: 0375507507
Dust Bowl Diary by
"Life in what the newspapers call 'the Dust Bowl' is becoming a gritty nightmare," Ann Marie Low wrote in 1934. Her diary vividly captures that "gritty nightmare" as it was lived by one rural family--and by millions of other Americans. The books opens in 1927--"the last of the good years"--when Ann Marie is a teenager living with her parents, brother, and sister on a stock farm in southeastern North Dakota. We follow her family and friends, descendants of homesteaders, through the next ten years--a time of searing summer heat and desiccated fields, dying livestock, dust to the tops of fence posts and prices at rock bottom--a time when whole communities lost their homes and livelihoods to mortgages and, hardest of all, to government recovery programs. We also see the coming to maturity of the author in the face of economic hardship, frustrating family circumstances, and the stifling restrictions that society then placed on young women. Ann Marie Low's diary, supplemented with reminiscences, offers a rich, circumstantial view of rural life a half century ago: planting and threshing before the prevalence of gasoline-powered engines, washing with rain water and ironing with sadirons, hauling coal on sleds over snow-clogged roads, going to end-of-school picnics and country dances, and hoarding the egg and cream money for college. Here, too, is an iconoclastic on-the-scene account of how a federal work project, the construction of a wildlife refuge, actually operated. Many readers will recognize parts of their own past in Ann Marie Low's story; for others it will serve as a compelling record of the Dust Bowl experience.
ISBN: 0803279132Publication Date: 1984-12-01
Emma Spaulding Bryant : Civil War bride, carpetbagger's wife, ardent feminist : letters and diaries, 1860-1900 by
Emma Spaulding's life might have been the simple story of a nineteenth-century woman in rural Maine. Instead, wooed by the ambitious John Emory Bryant, the Yankee Reconstruction activist and Georgia politician, she became the Civil War bride of a Republican carpetbagger intent on reforming the South. The grueling years in the shadow of her husband's controversial political career gave her a backbone of steel and the convictions of an early feminist. Emma supported John's agenda-to "northernize" the South and work for civil rights for African-Americans- and frequently reflected on national political events. Struggling virtually alone to rear a daughter in near poverty, Emma became an independent thinker, suffragist, and officer in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. In eloquent letters, Emma coached her husband's understanding of "the woman question;" their remarkable correspondence frames a marriage of love and summarizes John's career as it determined the contours of Emma's own story--from the bitter politics of Reconstruction Georgia to her world as a mother, writer, editor, and teacher in Tennessee and, with her husband, running a mission for the homeless in New York. In this extraordinary resource, Ruth Douglas Currie organizes and edits their voluminous correspondence, enhancing the letters with an extensive introduction to Emma Spaulding Bryant's life, times, and legacy.
ISBN: 082322273X
George Washington's Beautiful Nelly by
A life in letter penned by a well-connected daughter of the early republic.
ISBN: 0872497542
Girl with two landscapes : the wartime diary of Lena Jedwab, 1941-1945 by
This is a journal account of a sixteen-year-old girl who in June 1941 bade farewell to her family for what was to have been a summer-long vacation camp. Lena Jedwab left her home in Bialystok, Poland and arrived in Russia just as Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Lena was stranded in a Russian children's home while her family was murdered by the Nazis at the Treblinka concentration camp for the crime of having been born Jewish. her family and the uncertainties of her future. Expressed are her conflicted emotions over what the war had done to her youth and the gratitude felt for being alive, nourished and in school while so many others were displaced, starving, and dying. Not since The Diary of Anne Frank, has there been such a personalised account by an adolescent girl caught up in the turmoil and terror of World War 2. Girl with Two Landscapes is an incredibly important and highly prized addition to Judaic Studies and Holocaust Studies collections.
ISBN: 0841914273
Guest of the Revolution by ISBN: 0840741057
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age--and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity."--James Baldwin
ISBN: 9780345514400
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by
An authentic autobiographical account of slave life in the South from the 1820s to the 1840s. To escape sexual exploitation by her master, Brent ran away and hid in an attic crawl space that became her home for seven years of unbelievable physical hardship. Edited by L. Maria Child; Introduction by Walter Teller.
ISBN: 0156443503
In our time : memoir of a revolution by
There once was a time when the concept of equal pay for equal work did not exist, when women of all ages were "girls," when abortion was a back-alley procedure, when there was no such thing as a rape crisis center or a shelter for battered women, when "sexual harassment" had not yet been named and defined. "If conditions are right," Susan Brownmiller says in this stunning memoir, "if the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding passion can ignite a societal transformation." In Our Time tells the story of that transformation, as only Brownmiller can. A leading feminist activist and the author of Against Our Will, the book that changed the nation's perception of rape, she now brings the Women's Liberation movement and its passionate history vividly to life. Here is the colorful cast of characters on whose shoulders we stand--the feminist icons Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem, and the lesser known women whose contributions to change were equally profound. And here are the landmark events of the era: the consciousness-raising groups that sprung up in people's living rooms, the mimeographed position papers that first articulated the new thinking, the abortion and rape speak-outs, the daring sit-ins, the underground newspaper collectives, and the inventive lawsuits that all played a role in the most wide-reaching revolution of the twentieth century. Here as well are Brownmiller's reflections on the feminist utopian vision, and her dramatic accounts, rendered with honesty and humor, of the movement's painful internal schisms as it struggled to give voice to the aspirarations of all women. Finally, Brownmiller addresses that most relevant question: What is the legacy of feminism today?
ISBN: 0385318316- Journal of a Georgia Woman, 1870-1872 by "Eliza Frances "Fanny" Andrews (1840-1931) was born into southern aristocracy in Washington, Georgia. The acclaimed author of Journal of a Georgia Girl: 1864-1865, she was an exceptional woman who went on to become a journalist, writer, teacher, and internationally recognized botanist. In 1870, as Andrews was working on her first novel, she embarked on a visit to wealthy "Yankee kin" in Newark, New Jersey. The trip had a profound effect on her life, as she was astonished by the contrasts between North and South. This previously unpublished segment of Andrews's writings begins with her New Jersey sojourn and ends with her mother's death in 1872. It is remarkable for the light it sheds on the social and economic transformations of the Reconstruction era, particularly as they were perceived and experienced by a southern woman."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights ReservedISBN: 1572331712
Kate Chopin's Private Papers by
Toth and Seyersted's well-organized, carefully edited volume makes available all manuscripts and related items from all archival collections.... This volume is essential for American literature collections." --Choice An edition of the primarily unpublished papers of Kate Chopin, author of the feminist classic The Awakening. These papers illuminate the growth of Chopin as a writer, reveal the reactions of critics to her work, and settle a number of controversies in Chopin studies.
ISBN: 0253331129
Letters from the Dust Bowl by
In May 1936 Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace wrote to Caroline Henderson to praise her contributions to American "understanding of some of our farm problems." His comments reflected the national attention aroused by Henderson’s articles, which had been published in Atlantic Monthly since 1931. Even today, Henderson’s articles are frequently cited for her vivid descriptions of the dust storms that ravaged the Plains. Caroline Henderson was a Mount Holyoke graduate who moved to Oklahoma’s panhandle to homestead and teach in 1907. This collection of Henderson’s letters and articles published from 1908 to1966 presents an intimate portrait of a woman’s life in the Great Plains. Her writing mirrors her love of the land and the literature that sustained her as she struggled for survival. Alvin O. Turner has collected and edited Henderson’s published materials together with her private correspondence. Accompanying biographical sketch, chapter introductions, and annotations provide details on Henderson’s life and context for her frequent literary allusions and comments on contemporary issues.
ISBN: 0806133503
The Letters of the Rozmberk Sisters by
The letters of the Rozmberk sisters, Perchta and Anézka, give a vivid insight into how medieval women viewed themselves. Perchta's letters inform her father that his choice of a husband for her has caused her desperate sadness and sorrow in which death seems a better alternative. Despite her unhappiness and her almost total dependence on others, however, Perchta undertook to take control of her own fate and to improve the circumstances of her life. Her letters were the means whereby she informed her father and brothers of her misery and persuaded them to take action, and in the process they tell us about her expectations of respect and companionship in marriage. The letters of both sisters show them to be women with a vigorous sense of their own dignity and offer insights into the hopes and disappointments, joys and vexations of fifteenth-century women. The letters also introduce theenvironment and the activities of daily castle life, and offer an intimate picture of family life in the fifteenth century.JOHN M. KLASSEN is Professor of History at Trinity Western University, Canada. He was assisted in the translations by EVA DOLEZALOVA, Historical Institue, Prague, and LYNN SZABO, Trinity Western University.
ISBN: 085991612X
Life among the Piutes by ISBN: 0874172527
A Life of Her Own by
First published in France in 1977, this autobiography vivifies the captivating Carles from her peasant origins in a tiny Alpine village through her work as a teacher, farmer, mother, feminist and political activist.
ISBN: 0140169652
Lipstick Jihad by
As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Tehran. Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga and listened to Madonna. For years, she ignored the tense standoff between her two cultures. But college magnified the clash between Iran and America, and after graduating, she moved to Iran as a journalist. This is the story of her search for identity, between two cultures cleaved apart by a violent history. It is also the story of Iran, a restive land lost in the twilight of its revolution. Moaveni's homecoming falls in the heady days of the country's reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets and shouted for the Islamic regime to end. In these tumultuous times, she struggles to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron and turquoise-tinted Iran of her imagination. As she leads us through the drug-soaked, underground parties of Tehran, into the hedonistic lives of young people desperate for change, Moaveni paints a rare portrait of Iran's rebellious next generation. The landscape of her Tehran -- ski slopes, fashion shows, malls and cafes -- is populated by a cast of young people whose exuberance and despair brings the modern reality of Iran to vivid life.
ISBN: 1586481932
Love & war in London : a woman's diary, 1939-1942 by
Olivia Cockett was twenty-six years old in the summer of 1939 when she responded to an invitation from Mass Observation to "ordinary" individuals to keep a diary of their everyday lives, attitudes, feelings, and social relations. This book is an annotated, unabridged edition of her candid and evocative diary. Love and War in London: A Woman's Diary 1939-1942 is rooted in the extraordinary milieu of wartime London. Vibrant and engaging, Olivia's diary reveals her frustrations, fears, pleasures, and self-doubts. She records her mood swings and tries to understand them, and speaks of her lover (a married man) and the intense relationship they have. As she and her friends and family in New Scotland Yard are swept up by the momentous events of another European war, she vividly reports on what she sees and hears in her daily life. Hers is a diary that brings together the personal and the public. It permits us to understand how one intelligent, imaginative woman struggled to make sense of her life, as the city in which she lived was drawn into the turmoil of a catastrophic war.
ISBN: 0889204586
Mary Chesnut's Civil War by
An authorized account of the Civil War, drawn from the diaries of a Southern aristocrat, records the disintegration and final destruction of the Confederacy.
ISBN: 0300024592
The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells by
Published for the first time in its entirety, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells tracks the young Ida through her transition from schoolteacher to a fearless crusader against lynching in the late 19th century. This unique document provides rare insight into the lives of 19th-century African-American women. Features a foreword by Mary Helen Washington.
ISBN: 0807070645Publication Date: 1995-01-01
A Milwaukee woman's life on the left : the autobiography of Meta Berger by
Meta Berger (1873-1944), a pioneering advocate for socialism, public education, women's rights, and peace, was also the wife of Victor Berger--a Socialist Party leader, newspaper editor, and U.S. congressman from Milwaukee.
ISBN: 0870203223
The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It by
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in southern and black history. With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well. "This autobiographical account of the creation of the boycott is the most important document on that highly significant episode since Martin Luther King's own version, Stride Towards Freedom. I feel certain that scholars and students will refer to this unique historical source for generations to come." --J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan "This valuable first-hand account of the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott, written by an important, behind-the-scenes organizer, evokes the emotional intensity of the civil rights struggle. It ought to be required reading for all Americans who value their freedom and the contribution of black women to our history." --Coretta Scott King "A sharply remembered addition to the literature on what has become an event of mythic proportions, and a sound primer for those interested in community organizing. The author is scrupulously honest, modest, and gives unsung heroes much deserved praise." --Kirkus "This fascinating memoir provides new evidence on the origins and sustaining force of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56)." --Anthony O. Edmonds, Library Journal "There's no substitute for this intimate memoir; it provides an immediacy and graphic intensity never before available." --Marge Frantz, San Jose Mercury News "This powerful memoir is a milestone in the history of that boycott and in the American Civil Rights Movement." --American History Illustrated "This absorbing study may become a minor classic in the literature of the Montgomery bus boycott. . . . Garrow correctly states in his Foreword that this book is the most important participant-observer account of the Montgomery protest available to students and scholars of the black freedom movement. . . . This straightforward, sensitive memoir is must reading for students of the civil rights movement. It is a powerful commentary on how a woman and the group she led rose up to throw off an injustice thrust upon them. When Jo Ann Robinson and other Montgomery women decided no longer to play the role of contented black Southerners, they gave blacks everywhere renewed hope, and they helped to create a national leader who took them closer to the promised land." --Jimmie L. Franklin, The Alabama Review "In an absorbing, first-hand narrative, the dignified and unassuming Robinson focuses on the role of the Women's Political Council (WPC) and details the WPC's plans to engineer a boycott months before the heralded arrest of Rosa Parks. . . . The value of this primary source will endure long after many best-selling, secondary accounts of national politics during this period have disappeared." --Keith D. Miller and Elizabeth Vander Lei, Explorations in Sight and Sound
ISBN: 0870495240
Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashing Thunder by ISBN: 0472061097
Narrative of Sojourner Truth by ISBN: 0195090519
The Nazi Officer's Wife by
#1 New York Times Bestseller Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite Edith's protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret. In wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells how German officials casually questioned the lineage of her parents; how during childbirth she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal something of her past; and how, after her husband was captured by the Soviets, she was bombed out of her house and had to hide while drunken Russian soldiers raped women on the street. Despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith created a remarkable record of survival. She saved every document, as well as photographs she took inside labor camps. Now part of the permanent collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents, several of which are included in this volume, form the fabric of a gripping new chapter in the history of the Holocaust--complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.
ISBN: 068816689X
Night by
Night-- A terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family...the death of his innocence...and the death of his God. Penetrating and powerful, as personal asThe Diary Of Anne Frank,Nightawakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.
ISBN: 0553272535
No place like home : echoes from Kosovo by
Explores the recent history of Kosovo through photgraphic portraits and landscapes integrated with a wide range of Kosovo's civilians. The book challenges current media representation of both refugees and Kosovars. Melanie Friend's prize-winning work has appeared in Granta, th Guardian, Time Magazine, The Independent, and Marie Claire among other publications. Her photographs of Kosovar Albanian refugees have been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London as well as in galleries internationally, including the US.
ISBN: 1573441198
Ohitika Woman by ISBN: 0060975830
One Woman's World War II by
Memoirs by sailors, soldiers and pilots who fought in World War II abound, but here is a rarity: a personal account by a woman who served in both the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and the American Red Cross during the war and after the occupation. The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was established in 1942, allowing American women for the first time to serve, in supporting roles, in the military. The following year, Violet A. Kochendoerfer, an independent and adventurous young Minnesota woman, joined the WAACs. Always alert to new opportunities, she soon left for a job with the American Red Cross and saw much of World War II in the European Theater of Operations as she served as director of service clubs attached to military units in Britain, France, and Germany. Kochendoerfer tells of enduring buzz bombs in London as her 315th Troop Carrier Group took part in D-Day operations; of providing service clubs for the 82nd Airborne Division as it forced the last bridgehead of the war; of witnessing the final surrender of the main German Army and the liberation of a concentration camp; and of meeting and celebrating with the Russians after the Germans surrendered. Her story, some of it told through letters she wrote home, provides a woman's unique perspective on historic events usually recounted only by men.
ISBN: 0813118662
The power of her sympathy : the autobiography and journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick by
An illuminating collection of writings by this remarkable early American author.
ISBN: 0934909350
The Private Mary Chesnut by
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian C. Vann Woodward and Chesnut's biographer Elisabeth Muhlenfeld present here the previously unpublished Civil War diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut. The ideal diarist, Mary Chesnut was at the right place at the right time with the right connections. Daughter of onesenator from South Carolina and wife of another, she had kin and friends all over the Confederacy and knew intimately its political and military leaders. At Montgomery when the new nation was founded, at Charleston when the war started, and at Richmond during many crises, she traveled extensivelyduring the war. She watched a world "literally kicked to pieces" and left the most vivid account we have of the death throes of a society. The diaries, filled with personal revelations and indiscretions, are indispensable to an appreciation of our most famous Southern literary insight into theCivil War experience.
ISBN: 0195035135
Ravensbrück by
A masterly and moving account of the most horrific hidden atrocity of World War II: Ravensbr#65533;ck, the only Nazi concentration camp built for women On a sunny morning in May 1939 a phalanx of 867 women--housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, prostitutes--was marched through the woods fifty miles north of Berlin, driven on past a shining lake, then herded in through giant gates. Whipping and kicking them were scores of German women guards. Their destination was Ravensbr#65533;ck, a concentration camp designed specifically for women by Heinrich Himmler, prime architect of the Holocaust. By the end of the war 130,000 women from more than twenty different European countries had been imprisoned there; among the prominent names were Genevi#65533;ve de Gaulle, General de Gaulle's niece, and Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of the wartime mayor of New York. Only a small number of these women were Jewish; Ravensbr#65533;ck was largely a place for the Nazis to eliminate other inferior beings--social outcasts, Gypsies, political enemies, foreign resisters, the sick, the disabled, and the "mad." Over six years the prisoners endured beatings, torture, slave labor, starvation, and random execution. In the final months of the war, Ravensbr#65533;ck became an extermination camp. Estimates of the final death toll by April 1945 have ranged from 30,000 to 90,000. For decades the story of Ravensbr#65533;ck was hidden behind the Iron Curtain, and today it is still little known. Using testimony unearthed since the end of the Cold War and interviews with survivors who have never talked before, Sarah Helm has ventured into the heart of the camp, demonstrating for the reader in riveting detail how easily and quickly the unthinkable horror evolved. Far more than a catalog of atrocities, however, Ravensbr#65533;ck is also a compelling account of what one survivor called "the heroism, superhuman tenacity, and exceptional willpower to survive." For every prisoner whose strength failed, another found the will to resist through acts of self-sacrifice and friendship, as well as sabotage, protest, and escape. While the core of this book is told from inside the camp, the story also sheds new light on the evolution of the wider genocide, the impotence of the world to respond, and Himmler's final attempt to seek a separate peace with the Allies using the women of Ravensbr#65533;ck as a bargaining chip. Chilling, inspiring, and deeply unsettling, Ravensbr#65533;ck is a groundbreaking work of historical investigation. With rare clarity, it reminds us of the capacity of humankind both for bestial cruelty and for courage against all odds.
ISBN: 9780385520591
Ride Out the Dark by ISBN: 0839828535
Rosa Parks by
Rosa Parks is best known for the day she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, sparking the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Yet there is much more to her story than this one act of defiance. In this straightforward, compelling autobiography, Rosa Parks talks candidly about the civil rights movement and her active role in it. Her dedication is inspiring; her story is unforgettable. "The simplicity and candor of this courageous woman's voice makes these compelling events even more moving and dramatic."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
ISBN: 0141301201
The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony by
In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840-1866 is the first of six volumes of The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The collection documents the lives and accomplishments of two of America's most important social and political reformers. Though neither Stanton nor Anthony lived to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, each of them devoted fifty-five years to the cause. Their names were synonymous with woman suffrage in the United States and around the world as they mobilized thousands of women to fight for the right to a political voice. Opening when Stanton was twenty-five and Anthony was twenty, and ending when Congress sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the states for ratification, this volume recounts a quarter of a century of staunch commitment to political change. Readers will enjoy an extraordinary collection of letters, speeches, articles, and diaries that tells a story-both personal and public-about abolition, temperance, and woman suffrage. When all six volumes are complete, the Selected Papers of Stanton and Anthony will contain over 2,000 texts transcribed from their originals, the authenticity of each confirmed or explained, with notes to allow for intelligent reading. The papers will provide an invaluable resource for examining the formative years of women's political participation in the United States. No library or scholar of women's history should be without this original and important collection.
ISBN: 0813523176
Virtuous lives : four Quaker sisters remember family life,abolitionism, and women's suffrage by
"These women were passionate, dynamic, and full of conviction...Engaging and quick reading that should appeal to students in women's studies, Quakerism, and New England history". -- Library Journal
ISBN: 9780826406873
Waiting on the bounty : the Dust Bowl diary of Mary Knackstedt Dyck by
Mary Knackstedt Dyck was a farmer's wife in Kansas for over 30 years, during that time she kept a diary written in pencil on notebook paper. This volume contains her entries for the years 1936-1941, the years of the dustbowl, which drove many farmers from their farms.
ISBN: 0877456941
A Woman's Civil War by
Cornelia Peake McDonald's story of the Civil War records a personal and distinctly female battle: a southern woman's lonely struggle in the midst of chaos to provide safety and shelter for herself and her nine children as their home is disrupted and destroyed by the forces of war. Whether describing a Union soldier's theft of her Christmas cakes, the discovery of a human foot in her garden, or the death of her daughter, her story of the Civil War at home is compelling and disturbing. Her tremendous determination and unyielding spirit is a testimony to a woman's will to preserve her family.
ISBN: 0517222140
A Woman's Wit and Whimsy by
Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy (1812-1899) was a discerning 21-year-old woman of privilege. Although she was respectful in polite comapny, the diary she kept during the summer of 1833 reveals a trenchant and amused view of the affectation of the Harvard community, as well as upper-class Boston life.
ISBN: 1555535747
The woman in battle : the Civil War narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazques, Cuban woman and Confederate soldier by
A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford. As Buford, she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man. In the North, she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information, drugs, and counterfeit bills to support the Confederate cause. She was even hired by the Yankee secret service to find "the woman . . . traveling and figuring as a Confederate agent"--Velazquez herself. Originally published in 1876 as The Woman in Battle, this Civil War narrative offers Velazquez's seemingly impossible autobiographical account, as well as a new critical introduction and glossary by Jesse Alem#65533;n. Scholars are divided between those who read the book as a generally honest autobiography and those who read it as mostly fiction. According to Alem#65533;n's critical introduction, the book also reads as pulp fiction, spy memoir, seduction narrative, travel literature, and historical account, while it mirrors the literary conventions of other first-person female accounts of cross-dressing published in the United States during wartime, dating back to the Revolutionary War. Whatever the facts are, this is an authentic Civil War narrative, Alem#65533;n concludes, that recounts how war disrupts normal gender roles, redefines national borders, and challenges the definition of identity.
ISBN: 0299194248
A woman in Berlin : eight weeks in the conquered city : a diary by
An astonishing find-the landmark journal of a woman living though the Russian occupation of Berlin-which has already earned comparisons to diaries by Etty Hillesum and Victor Klemperer For six weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman, alone in the city, kept a daily record of her and her neighbors' experiences, determined to describe the common lot of millions. Purged of all self-pity but with laser-sharp observation and bracing humor, the anonymous author conjures up a ravaged apartment building and its little group of residents struggling to get by in the rubble without food, heat, or water. Clear-eyed and unsentimental, she depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. And with shocking and vivid detail, she tells of the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject: the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity. Through this ordeal, she maintains her resilience, decency, and fierce will to come through her city's trial, until normalcy and safety return. At once an essential record and a work of great literature, A Woman in Berlin not only reveals a true heroine, sure to join other enduring figures of the twentieth century, but also gives voice to the rarely heard victims of war: the women.
ISBN: 0805075402
Women's work : an anthology of African-American women's historical writings from antebellum America to the Harlem Renaissance by Call Number: 973 W872ISBN: 9780195331998
The World of Hannah Heaton by
An ordinary eighteenth-century New England woman, Hannah Heaton left an extraordinary document as her legacy. Over a period of 40 years, from the Great Awakening through the Revolutionary War, this farm wife and mother kept a diary recounting her experiences. Now published for the first time, Heaton's diary offers an unparalleled revelation of one American woman's experience of the birth of the nation. Much of her diary records Heaton's spiritual struggles, beginning with her conversion during the Great Awakening and her separation from the established Congregational church. Pious by nature, she recalls her childhood fears of the devil, who at night tempted her away from prayer and told her in a whisper to hang herself. Deeply concerned over her own salvation and that of those she loved, Heaton found comfort in the act of writing, feeling that such self-examination brought her closer to God. Hannah Heaton was devoutly religious and intensely self-aware. Spiritually isolated from her husband and children, and often at odds with her neighbors and church community, she found solace in her journal, which was at times her only friend. She loved her husband deeply, but nonetheless regretted marrying a nonbeliever and yearned for him to become a true spiritual partner. He tolerated her religious convictions but occasionally grew frustrated and even hid her spectacles so that she could not read the Bible. A staunch patriot, Heaton carefully recorded her impressions of the Revolutionary War. Believing the fight for independence was part of God's plan, Heaton, who before the war had scarcely taken note of the political world around her, began to write at length about imperial policy and military engagements. As she wrote of the national struggles, however, she remained equally interested in the intricate details of her own private life: her relationships with kinfolk and neighbors, her domestic struggles, and her personal experiences with disease and death. Heaton's unabridged diary, edited and annotated by Barbara E. Lacey, is an extraordinarily valuable source for scholars and students of colonial history, women's studies, and religion in America.
ISBN: 0875803121
A writer's diary : being extracts from the diary of Virgiinia Woolf by
An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, drawn by her husband from the personal record she kept over a period of twenty-seven years. Included are entries that refer to her own writing, others that are clearly writing exercises; accounts of people and scenes relevant to the raw material of her work; and comments on books she was reading. Edited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf; Indices.
ISBN: 0156027917Publication Date: 2003-03-31
Zlata's Diary by
The personal journal of an accomplished 11-year-old Sarajevan girl whose world was shattered by the chaos and terror of war.
Call Number: 949.7024092 F48 (Closed Reserve)ISBN: 0670857246Publication Date: 1994
Zoya's story : an Afghan woman's struggle for freedom by
Zoya's Story is a young woman's searing account of her clandestine war of resistance against the Taliban and religious fanaticism at the risk of her own life. An epic tale of fear and suffering, courage and hope, Zoya's Story is a powerful testament to the ongoing battle to claim human rights for the women of Afghanistan. Though she is only twenty-three, Zoya has witnessed and endured more tragedy and terror than most people do in a lifetime. Zoya grew up during the wars that ravaged Afghanistan and was robbed of her mother and father when they were murdered by Muslim fundamentalists. Devastated by so much death and destruction, she fled Kabul with her grandmother and started a new life in exile in Pakistan. She joined the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which challenged the crushing edicts of the Taliban government, and she made dangerous journeys back to her homeland to help the women oppressed by a system that forced them to wear the stifling burqa, condoned public stoning or whipping if they ventured out without a male chaperon, and forbade them from working. Zoya is our guide, our witness to the horrors perpetrated by the Taliban and the Mujahideen "holy warriors" who had defeated the Russian occupiers. She helped to secretly film a public cutting of hands in a Kabul stadium and to organize covert literacy classes, as schooling-branded a "gateway to Hell" -- was forbidden to girls. At an Afghan refugee camp she heard tales of heartrending suffering and worked to provide a future for families who had lost everything. The spotlight focused on Afghanistan after the New York and Washington terrorist attacks highlights the conditions of repression and fear in which Afghan women live and makes Zoya's Story utterly compelling. This is a memoir that speaks louder than the images of devastation and outrage; it is a moving message of optimism as Zoya struggles to bring the plight of Afghan women to the world's attention.
ISBN: 0060097825
Primary Sources
Madison College Libraries Research Guide with more information on Primary Sources