Colonial Women

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTELLER Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize A Heather's Pick A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year One of Indigo’s Most Anticipated Books One of the CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction of 2024 A Winnipeg Free Press Best Fiction Book of 2024 From one of...

Weaving a vibrant tapestry of fact and fiction, Into the Wilderness sweeps us into another time and place . . . and into the heart of a forbidden, incandescent affair between a spinster Englishwoman and an American frontiersman. Here is an epic of romance and history that will captivate readers...

The Sunday Times Bestseller A new assessment of the West’s colonial record In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’ – that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with...

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023 NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, LA TIMES, SLATE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and others “Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is...

From the acclaimed author of In the Shadow of the Empress comes the thrilling chronicle of two of the most influential and glamorous women in nineteenth-century Europe—Elisabeth, empress of Austria, and Eugénie, empress of France—and their efforts to rule amid the scandal, intrigue, tragedy...

Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By the end of the trials, beyond the 20 who were executed and the five who perished in prison, 207 individuals had been accused, 74 had been "afflicted", 32 had officially accused their fellow neighbors, and 255 ordinary people had been inexorably drawn into that ruinous and murderous vortex, and this doesn't include the religious, judicial, and governmental leaders.

Author Carol F. Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in 17th-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society and attempts to answer the question why some women were vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft and possession.

In the 18th century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death.

Weaving a vibrant tapestry of fact and fiction, Into the Wilderness sweeps us into another time and place . . . and into the heart of a forbidden, incandescent affair between a spinster Englishwoman and an American frontiersman. Here is an epic of romance and history that will captivate readers...

The battle for the unification and rule of the Far Stars Confederation will be decided in Jay Allan's exhilarating third and final book in the swashbuckling space saga, The Far Stars, begun with Shadow of Empire and Enemy in the Dark. The Far Stars stands on the edge of a precipice. The forces...

An intimate, revelatory novel about a notorious woman at the center of the American Revolution. During the war for independence, Elizabeth Loring rose to infamy as the American mistress of William Howe, the British general who failed repeatedly to stamp out George Washington’s rebellion...

In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches.

This enthralling work of scholarship strips away abstractions to reveal the hidden - and not always stoic - face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In this book, we encounter the awesome burdens - and the considerable power - of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising - and, all too often, mourning - her children, and even attaining fame as a heroine of frontier conflicts or notoriety as a murderess.

Alice Morse Earle’s writings, beginning in 1890, focused on small sociological details rather than grand details, and thus are invaluable for modern social historians.

Two years ago, Ruth Hanover vanished into the wilderness of the New Jersey colony without a trace, leaving behind her husband, William, and their daughter, Sarah. Though William and Sarah have never stopped hoping that Ruth will return, as time goes by it becomes less and less likely they will ever see her again.

The real story of the American "Shero" Mary Patton and her famed gunpowder production can finally be heard in her voice via this creative nonfiction work. Scientific, forestry, and geologic research reveal the hidden truth untold for hundreds of years. Her famed gunpowder helped win the battles of King's Mountain, Cowpens, and Guilford Courthouse. Sold across the entire Southeast, the legend comes to an all new light.

Drawing on encounters between the Creeks of the Southeast and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century, Savage Systers reveals a world in which Native women wielded power through means that shocked European observers: ritualized torture, scalp dances, brutal initiation rites, even infanticide and cannibalism. Far from aberrations, these acts embodied forms of feminine authority rooted deep in tribal culture. In deciding whether a captive lived or died, whether a stranger was rejected or absorbed, Native women determined the fate of peoples and nations.

Silencing the Women: The Witch Trials of Mary Bliss Parsons is the true story of what happened to an early New England colonial Puritan woman settler who was too beautiful, too rich, and too outspoken for her times. Enmeshed in a web of jealousy and gossip, she struggled to overcome victimization by the harsh judgments of church, state, and gender expectations. How she survived in the fearsome wilderness of the Connecticut River Valley Massachusetts Bay Colony is a love story told by a descendant.

Great Britain's forced transportation of convicts to colonial Australia is well known. Less widely known is Britain's earlier program of sending convicts - including women - to North America. Many of these women were assigned as servants in Maryland. Contemporary readers and scholars will be fascinated by Ziegler's explanation of how gender-influenced punishments were meted out to women and often ensnared them in Britain's system of convict labor.

What does it mean to be a Jewish woman in America? In a gripping historical narrative, Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the stories of a diverse group of extraordinary people - from the colonial-era matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to labor organizer Bessie Hillman and the great justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to scores of other activists, workers, wives, and mothers who helped carve out a Jewish American identity.