There is a tweet going around from someone about how hard it is to find 5 women he admires. Not a great look. #womenalsoknowhistory But I’m also not sure if it’s a bot or a troll, so not retweeting it here. 2/
Instead, it gives me a good opportunity to highlight some amazing work by women—and specifically black women. In the past year I read or re-read a great number of incredible books by black women. Just five of my favorites include: 3/
1. @marthasjones_ outstanding Birthright Citizens—one of the best books I’ve read in the last decade. Incredible in its nuanced and careful portrayal of how African Americans carved out spaces by which they could shape the meaning of U.S. citizenship cambridge.org/core/books/bir… 4/
2. @TeraWHunter's Bound in Wedlock, an incredible reflection on the complexities of black marriage and intimacy in the nineteenth century hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is… 5/
3. Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage, which I re-read for the first time in many years, and remains a critically important work on the relationship between black and white women in slavery and freedom in the nineteenth-century South cambridge.org/core/books/out… 6/
4. A new work on white women as slaveholders by @sejr_historian, They Were Her Property, demonstrates just how fundamental these women were to perpetuating the institution of slavery yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030021… 7/
5. Recently dug into @kcarterjackson’s new book on the role of violence in abolition and it is a really important meditation on how abolitionists used more than just moral suasion to harness support in the North upenn.edu/pennpress/book… 8/
Really grateful to these women for their wonderful scholarship! 9/9
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