Category: Biography

  • Voices from the Gaps: Kym Ragusa Voices from the Gaps University of Minnesota 2007-04-24 Shalee Dettmann Joey Grihalva Jenna Fodness Gaushia Thao I don’t know where I was conceived, but I was made in Harlem. Its topography is mapped on my body: the borderlines between neighborhoods marked by streets that were forbidden to cross, the…

  • “A gallant heart to the empire.” Autoethnography and Imperial identity in Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures Philological Quarterly Volume 83, Number 2, Spring, 2004 Sarah Salih, Professor of English University of Toronto A portrait of Mary Seacole in oils, c. 1869, by the obscure London artist Albert Charles Challen (1847–81). The original was discovered in 2003…

  • The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington.” For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation’s most visible and most powerful African-American leader.

  • Trading Races: Joseph and Marie Bunel, a Diplomat and a Merchant in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and Philadelphia Journal of the Early Republic Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2010 pages 351-376 E-ISSN: 1553-0620 Print ISSN: 0275-1275 Philippe R. Girard, Associate Professor of History McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana Based on extensive research in French, British, and…

  • Sandweiss unearths a compelling tale of secret racial identity News at Princeton Princeton University 2009-12-17 Jennifer Greenstein Altmann For three decades, history professor Martha Sandweiss had wondered about a little-noticed detail in the life of Clarence King, a well-known figure in the history of the American West. King, a 19th-century geologist and author, was a…

  • American Lives: The ‘Strange’ Tale Of Clarence King National Public Radio 2010-08-18 Steve Inskeep, Host Morning Edition U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library Ada Copeland, an African-American woman born in Georgia just months before that state seceded from the Union, moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. There, she met a man named James Todd.…

  • Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line The Penguin Press 2009-02-05 384 pages 5.98 x 9.01in Hardcover ISBN 9781594202001 Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History Princeton University National Book Critics Circle Awards Winner The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West and the woman…

  • Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family University of Chicago Press 2004 200 pages 22 halftones, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 Cloth ISBN: 9780226318219 Paper ISBN: 9780226318233 Ronne Hartfield In her prologue to Another Way Home, Ronne Hartfield notes the dearth of stories about African Americans who have occupied the area of…

  • The true story of a slave who became the wealthiest black woman in the South

  • Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook in one of the Western Hemisphere’s most infamous vice districts, Nella Larsen (1891-1964) lived her life in the shadows of America’s racial divide. She wrote about that life, was briefly celebrated in her time, then was lost to later generations–only to be rediscovered and…