Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Almanacs, American
Languages : en
Pages : 672
Book Description
The Worcester Almanac, Directory and Business Advertiser
Author: Women and Reform in a New England Community, 1815-1860
Author: Carolyn J. LawesPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813184010
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
Interpretations of women in the antebellum period have long dwelt upon the notion of public versus private gender spheres. As part of the ongoing reevaluation of the prehistory of the women's movement, Carolyn Lawes challenges this paradigm and the primacy of class motivation. She studies the women of antebellum Worcester, Massachusetts, discovering that whatever their economic background, women there publicly worked to remake and improve their community in their own image. Lawes analyzes the organized social activism of the mostly middle-class, urban, white women of Worcester and finds that they were at the center of community life and leadership. Drawing on rich local history collections, Lawes weaves together information from city and state documents, court cases, medical records, church collections, newspapers, and diaries and letters to create a portrait of a group of women for whom constant personal and social change was the norm. Throughout Women and Reform in a New England Community, conventional women make seemingly unconventional choices. A wealthy Worcester matron helped spark a women-led rebellion against ministerial authority in the town's orthodox Calvinist church. Similarly, a close look at the town's sewing circles reveals that they were vehicles for political exchange as well as social gatherings that included men but intentionally restricted them to a subordinate role. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the women of Worcester had taken up explicitly political and social causes, such as an orphan asylum they founded, funded, and directed. Lawes argues that economic and personal instability rather than a desire for social control motivated women, even relatively privileged ones, into social activism. She concludes that the local activism of the women of Worcester stimulated, and was stimulated by, their interest in the first two national women's rights conventions, held in Worcester in 1850 and 1851. Far from being marginalized from the vital economic, social, and political issues of their day, the women of this antebellum New England community insisted upon being active and ongoing participants in the debates and decisions of their society and nation.
Bibliography of American Directories Through 1860
Author: Dorothea N. SpearPublisher: Worcester, Ma. : American Antiquarian Society
ISBN:
Category : Directories
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
First Fruits of Freedom
Author: Janette Thomas GreenwoodPublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807895784
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
A moving narrative that offers a rare glimpse into the lives of African American men, women, and children on the cusp of freedom, First Fruits of Freedom chronicles one of the first collective migrations of blacks from the South to the North during and after the Civil War. Janette Thomas Greenwood relates the history of a network forged between Worcester County, Massachusetts, and eastern North Carolina as a result of Worcester regiments taking control of northeastern North Carolina during the war. White soldiers from Worcester, a hotbed of abolitionism, protected refugee slaves, set up schools for them, and led them north at war's end. White patrons and a supportive black community helped many migrants fulfill their aspirations for complete emancipation and facilitated the arrival of additional family members and friends. Migrants established a small black community in Worcester with a distinctive southern flavor. But even in the North, white sympathy did not continue after the Civil War. Despite their many efforts, black Worcesterites were generally disappointed in their hopes for full-fledged citizenship, reflecting the larger national trajectory of Reconstruction and its aftermath.
Reminiscences of Worcester from the Earliest Period, Historical and Genealogical
Author: Caleb Arnold WallPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Worcester (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 428
Book Description
Women Medical Doctors in the United States Before the Civil War
Author: Edward C. AtwaterPublisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580465714
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 419
Book Description
An invaluable reference work chronicling the lives of over 200 women who received medical degrees in the United States before the Civil War.
Public Documents of Massachusetts
Author: MassachusettsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Massachusetts
Languages : en
Pages : 954
Book Description
A Man on Fire
Author: DOUGLAS. EGERTONPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197554059
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
""Colonel Higginson was a man on fire," read one obituary. "He had convictions and lived up to them in the fullest degree." The obituary added that he had "led the first negro regiment, contributed to the literature of America, and left an imprint upon history too deep to be obliterated." Thomas Wentworth Higginson would have been pleased to have been referred to as "colonel." He was proud of his military service and happily used the title for many decades after the end of the Civil War, and up to his death in May 1911 at the age of eighty-seven. Nonetheless, his time in the army was just one of many things for which he hoped to be remembered. "I never shall have a biographer, I suppose," he mused to his diary in 1881. Just in case somebody took up the challenge, however, he wished to provide a hint about his career. "If I do" find a chronicler, he wrote, "the key to my life is easily to be found in this, that what I longed for from childhood was not to be eminent in this or that way, but to lead a whole life, develop all my powers, & do well in whatever came in my way to do." It was a life marked by numerous struggles for social justice and progressive causes, from abolitionism to women's rights, from religious tolerance to socialism, and from physical fitness for both genders to temperance. Yet almost alone among his contemporaries and reform-minded friends, Higginson refused to devote himself to a single crusade. Even as a young man, he warned his mother that his "greatest intellectual difficulty has been having too many irons in the fire." Some of his colleagues disapproved of this, having dedicated all their efforts to ending slavery or advancing women's social and political rights. Then there were disputes about tactics. Some relied on the pen or the spoken word to garner support for their chosen cause. Abolitionists who followed the lead of Boston publisher William Lloyd Garrison, for example, typically declined to vote and believed that moral suasion and Christian pacifism would bring about an end to slavery. Frederick Douglass argued that violent means might be necessary to liberate four million enslaved Americans, of which he had once been one. John Brown went farther still and urged his supporters to take the fight into the contested territories of the Midwest or even the South, which the government of Abraham Lincoln effectively did in late 1862, when the War Department authorized a regiment of contraband soldiers on the Carolina coast. At one point or another, Higginson embraced all of these causes and employed all of these tactics to advance them, using the written page, his eloquent voice, his Sharps rifle, and, on one occasion, even a makeshift battering ram"--
Willing's Press Guide and Advertisers' Directory and Handbook
Author: Index to the Catalogue of Books in the Bates Hall of the Public Library of the City of Boston
Author: Boston Public LibraryPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Library catalogs
Languages : en
Pages : 760
Book Description