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  • Women in Agriculture

    This Women’s History Month, learn about female farmers here in Vermont and beyond. In collaboration with Fleming Museum’s Vermont Female Farmers exhibit, UVM Libraries is featuring Women in Agriculture. Explore this book display in order to learn more about the history of women farmers, their stories, and how women are leading innovation in the field of agriculture. Find these titles and more by visiting the display located in the Howe Library lobby. 
     

    Vermont Female Farmers
    On view February 4 – May 17, 2025, at the Fleming Museum of Art

    Passion, labor, and grit abound in this striking portrait series from Vermont-based photographer JuanCarlos González. Whether capturing moments of intense concentration or joyous pride, the 45 works are an intimate look at the daily life and livelihoods of the women whose hands shape farming in Vermont.

     

    Cover ArtVermont female farmers by González, JuanCarlos

    This project focuses on the meaningful and impactful contributions that female farmers are making to Vermont's culture, identity, and economy yet who may be overlooked compared to their male counterparts. For Vermont Female Farmers, I visited 38 farmers and photographed them at work during their daily life on the farm. I attempt to center their livelihood, labor, and passion. Each is different and has a unique story, working with chickens, goats, cows, produce, saffron, flowers, and much more.
     
     
     

    Cover ArtWomen in agriculture : professionalizing rural life in North America and Europe, 1880-1965

    Women have always been skilled at feeding their families, and historians have often studied the work of rural women on farms and in their homes. However, the stories of women who worked as agricultural researchers, producers, marketers, educators, and community organizers have not been told until now. Taking readers into the rural hinterlands of the rapidly urbanizing societies of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, the essays in Women in Agriculture tell the stories of a cadre of professional women who acted to bridge the growing rift between those who grew food and those who only consumed it. The contributors to Women in Agriculture examine how rural women's expertise was disseminated and how it was received. Through these essays, readers meet subversively lunching ladies in Ontario and African American home demonstration agents in Arkansas. The rural sociologist Emily Hoag made a place for women at the US Department of Agriculture as well as in agricultural research. Canadian rural reformer Madge Watt, British radio broadcaster Mabel Webb, and US ethnobotanists Mary Warren English and Frances Densmore developed new ways to share and preserve rural women's knowledge. These and the other women profiled here updated and expanded rural women's roles in shaping their communities and the broader society. Their stories broaden and complicate the history of agriculture in North America and Western Europe.
     

    Cover ArtWomen who dig : farming, feminism, and the fight to feed the world by Moyles, Trina

    Weaving together the narratives of female farmers from across three continents, Women Who Dig offers a critical look at how women are responding to and increasingly rising up against the injustices of the global food system. Beautifully written with spectacular photos, it examines gender roles, access to land, domestic violence, maternal health, political and economic marginalization, and a rapidly changing climate. It also shows the power of collective action. With women from Guatemala, Nicaragua, the United States, Canada, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, and Cuba included, this book explores the ways women are responding, both individually and collectively, to the barriers they face in providing the world a healthy diet.
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtOn behalf of the family farm : Iowa farm women's activism since 1945 by Devine, Jenny Barker

    In on behalf of the family farm, Jenny Baker Devine demonstrates that in an era where technology, depopulation and rapid economic change dramatically altered rural life, Midwestern women met those challenges with an activism that reflected their own feminine vision of farm life. Focusing on women in four national farm organizations in Iowa -- the Farm Bureau, the Farmers Union, the National Farmers Organization, and the Porkettes -- Devine highlights specific movements in time when farm women had to reassess their roles and strategies for preserving and improving their way of life.
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtWild mares : my lesbian back-to-the-land life by Hunter, Dianna

    Dianna Hunter was a softball-loving, working-class tomboy in North Dakota, surviving the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Mutually Assured Destruction in the shadow of a strategic air command base. Communists and antiwar hippies were the enemy, but lesbians were a threat, too: they were unhealthy, criminal, and downright insane. It took Dianna a while to figure out that she was one, a little longer to discover how she fit in with her new communities in the city and the countryside. This is her story-a frank account by turns comic and painful of a well-behaved Midwestern girl finding her way through polite denial and repression and running head-on into the eye-opening events of the 1960s and '70s before landing on a dairy farm. A bumpy route takes Dianna to the Twin Cities, then to rural Minnesota and Wisconsin as-by way of the antiwar movement, women's liberation, and a dose of lesbian feminism-she and her friends try to establish a rural utopia free of sexual oppression, violence, materialism, environmental degradation-and men. They dream big, love as they see fit, and make do until they don't. Dianna buys a dairy farm and, with it, a new set of problems thanks to the Reagan-era farm crisis. A firsthand account of the lesbian feminist movement at its inception, Wild Mares is a deeply personal, wryly wise, and always engaging view of identity politics lived and learned in real life and, literally, on the ground, flourishing in the fertile soil of a struggling dairy farm in the American heartland.
     
     

    Cover ArtPig years by Gaydos, Ellyn

    This captivating memoir is a "startling testimony to the glories and sorrows of raising and harvesting plants and animals" (Anthony Doerr, best-selling author of All the Light We Cannot See), as an itinerant farmhand chronicles the wonders hidden within the ever-blooming seasons of life, death, and rebirth. Pig Years catapults American nature writing into the 21st century, and has been hailed by Lydia Davis and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as "engrossing" and "a marvel." As a farmer in Upstate New York and Vermont, Ellyn Gaydos lives on the knife edge between loss and gain. Her debut memoir draws us into this precarious world, conjuring with stark simplicity the lifeblood of the farm: its livestock and stark full moons, the sharp cold days lives near to the land. Joy and tragedy are frequent bedfellows. Fields go barren and animals meet their end too soon, but then their bodies become food in a time-old human ritual. Seasonal hands are ground down by the hard work, but new relationships are formed, love blossoms and Gaydos yearns to become a mother. As winter's dark descends, Pig Years draws us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are star-bright symbols of hope and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, even in the slaughter. In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor, and loss within a landscape given to flux.
     

    Cover ArtEveryday sustainability : gender justice and fair trade tea in Darjeeling by Sen, Debarati

    Everyday Sustainability takes readers to ground zero of market-based sustainability initiatives--Darjeeling, India--where Fair Trade ostensibly promises gender justice to minority Nepali women engaged in organic tea production. These women tea farmers and plantation workers have distinct entrepreneurial strategies and everyday practices of social justice that at times dovetail with and at other times rub against the tenets of the emerging global morality market. The author questions why women beneficiaries of transnational justice-making projects remain skeptical about the potential for economic and social empowerment through Fair Trade while simultaneously seeking to use the movement to give voice to their situated demands for mobility, economic advancement, and community level social justice.
     
     
     

    Cover ArtTurn here sweet corn : organic farming works by Diffley, Atina

    When the hail starts to fall, Atina Diffley doesn't compare it to golf balls. She's a farmer. It's "as big as a B-size potato." As her bombarded land turns white, she and her husband Martin huddle under a blanket and reminisce: the one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds; the eleven-inch rainfall ("that broccoli turned out gorgeous"); the hail disaster of 1977. The romance of farming washed away a long time ago, but the love? Never. In telling her story of working the land, coaxing good food from the fertile soil, Atina Diffley reminds us of an ultimate truth: we live in relationships--with the earth, plants and animals, families and communities. A memoir of making these essential relationships work in the face of challenges as natural as weather and as unnatural as corporate politics, her book is a firsthand history of getting in at the "ground level" of organic farming. One of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest, the Diffleys' Gardens of Eagan helped to usher in a new kind of green revolution in the heart of America's farmland, supplying their roadside stand and a growing number of local food co-ops. This is a story of a world transformed--and reclaimed--one square acre at a time. And yet, after surviving punishing storms and the devastating loss of fifth-generation Diffley family land to suburban development, the Diffleys faced the ultimate challenge: the threat of eminent domain for a crude oil pipeline proposed by one of the largest privately owned companies in the world, notorious polluters Koch Industries. As Atina Diffley tells her David-versus-Goliath tale, she gives readers everything from expert instruction in organic farming to an entrepreneur's manual on how to grow a business to a legal thriller about battling corporate arrogance to a love story about a single mother falling for a good, big-hearted man.
     

    Cover ArtBeyond the kitchen table : Black women and global food systems

    Over the last decade, there has been an increasing amount of scholarship focused on race and food inequity. Much of this research is focused on the United States and its densely populated urban centers. Looking deeply into Black women?s roles?economically, environmentally, and socially?in food and agriculture systems in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, the contributors address the ways Black women, both now and in the past, have used food as a part of community building and sustenance. They also examine matrilineal food-based education; the importance of Black women?s social, cultural, and familial networks in addressing nutrition and food insecurity; the ways gender intersects with class and race globally when thinking about food; and how women-led science and technology initiatives can be used to create healthier and more just food systems. Contributors include Agnes Atia Apusigah, Neela Badrie, Kenia-Rosa Campo, Dara Cooper, Kelsey Emard, Claudia J. Ford, Hanna Garth, Shelene Gomes, Veronica Gordon, Wendy-Ann Isaac, Lydia Kwoyiga, Gloria Sanders McCutcheon, Eveline M. F. W. Sawadogo/Compaore, Ashanté M. Reese, Sakiko Shiratori, shakara tyler, and Marquitta Webb.

    Cover ArtThe rise of women farmers and sustainable agriculture by Sachs, Carolyn E.

    A profound shift is occurring among women working in agriculture--they are increasingly seeing themselves as farmers, not only as the wives or daughters of farmers. The authors draw on more than a decade of research to document and analyze the reasons for the transformation. As their sense of identity changes, many female farmers are challenging the sexism they face in their chosen profession. In this book, farm women in the northeastern United States describe how they got into farming and became successful entrepreneurs despite the barriers they encountered in agricultural institutions, farming communities, and even their own families. Their strategies for obtaining land and labor and developing successful businesses offer models for other aspiring farmers. Pulling down the barriers that women face requires organizations and institutions to become informed by what the authors call a feminist agrifood systems theory (FAST). This framework values women's ways of knowing and working in agriculture: emphasizing personal, economic, and environmental sustainability, creating connections through the food system, and developing networks that emphasize collaboration and peer-to-peer education. The creation and growth of a specific organization, the Pennsylvania Women's Agricultural Network, offers a blueprint for others seeking to incorporate a feminist agrifood systems approach into agricultural programming. The theory has the potential to shift how farmers, agricultural professionals, and anyone else interested in farming think about gender and sustainability, as well as to change how feminist scholars and theorists think about agriculture. 
     

    Cover ArtThe Midwest farmer's daughter : in search of an American icon by Jack, Zachary Michael

    The Midwest Farmer's Daughter presents the untold history and renewed cultural currency of an American icon at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the United States are woman-owned. It ranges widely from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres to Laura Ingalls Wilder's commentaries for the Missouri Ruralist; from the critical importance of rural girls and young women to organizations such as the Farm Bureau, 4-H, and FFA to the entrepreneurial role today's female agriculturalists and sustainable farm advocates play in farmers' markets, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture.

    Cover ArtPutting the barn before the house : women and family farming in early-twentieth-century New York by Osterud, Nancy Grey

    Putting the Barn Before the House features the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in south-central New York. As she did in her previous book, Bonds of Community, for an earlier period in history, Grey Osterud explores the flexible and varied ways that families shared labor and highlights the strategies of mutuality that women adopted to ensure they had a say in family decision making. Sharing and exchanging work also linked neighboring households and knit the community together. Indeed, the culture of cooperation that women espoused laid the basis for the formation of cooperatives that enabled these dairy farmers to contest the power of agribusiness and obtain better returns for their labor. Osterud recounts this story through the words of the women and men who lived it and carefully explores their views about gender, labor, and power, which offered an alternative to the ideas that prevailed in American society. Most women saw "putting the barn before the house" - investing capital and labor in productive operations rather than spending money on consumer goods or devoting time to mere housework - as a necessary and rational course for families who were determined to make a living on the land and, if possible, to pass on viable farms to the next generation. Some women preferred working outdoors to what seemed to them the thankless tasks of urban housewives, while others worked off the farm to support the family. Husbands and wives, as well as parents and children, debated what was best and negotiated over how to allocate their limited labor and capital and plan for an uncertain future. Osterud tells the story of an agricultural community in transition amid an industrializing age with care and skill.
     

    Cover ArtVermont farm women by Miller, Peter

    Photographs and text of farm women'dairy, pigs, sheep, goats, emus, christmas trees, horses, beef cattle, cheese who work the small farm as owners and are passionate about their responsibility to the land, the animals and their community.

    Cover ArtQueen of American agriculture : a biography of Virginia Claypool Meredith by Whitford, Fred

    Virginia Claypool Meredith's role in directly managing the affairs of a large and prosperous farm in east-central Indiana opened doors that were often closed to women in late nineteenth century America. Her status allowed her to campaign for the education of women, in general, and rural women, in particular. While striving to change society's expectations for women, she also gave voice to the important role of women in the home. A lifetime of dedication made Virginia Meredith "the most remarkable woman in Indiana" and the "Queen of American Agriculture." Meredith was also an integral part of the history of Purdue University. She was the first woman appointed to serve on the university's board of trustees, had a residence hall named in her honor, and worked with her adopted daughter, Mary L. Matthews, in creating the School of Home Economics, the predecessor of today's College of Consumer and Family Sciences.
     
     

    Cover ArtMore than a farmer's wife : voices of American farm women, 1910-1960 by Lauters, Amy Mattson

    Examining how women were presented in farming and mainstream magazines over fifty years and interviewing more than 180 women who lived on farms, Lauters reveals that, rather than being victims of patriarchy, most farm women were astute businesswomen, working as partners with their husbands and fundamental to the farming industry.
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtFruits of victory : the Woman's Land Army of America in the Great War by Weiss, Elaine F.

    Imagine a more controversial Rosie the Riveter--a generation older and more outlandish for her time. She was the "farmerette" of the Woman's Land Army of America (WLA), doing a man's job on the home front during World War I. From 1917 to 1920 the WLA sent more than twenty thousand urban women into rural America to take over farm work after the men went off to war and food shortages threatened the nation. These women, from all social and economic strata, lived together in communal camps and did what was considered "men's work": plowing fields, driving tractors, planting, harvesting, and hauling lumber. The Land Army was a civilian enterprise organized and financed by women. It insisted on fair labor practices and pay equal to male laborers' wages for its workers and taught women not only agricultural skills but also leadership and management techniques. Despite their initial skepticism, farmers became the WLA's loudest champions, and the farmerette was celebrated as an icon of American women's patriotism and pluck.The WLA's short but spirited life foreshadowed some of the most significant social issues of the twentieth century: women's changing roles, the problem of class distinctions in a democracy, and the physiological and psychological differences between men and women. The dramatic story of the WLA is vividly retold here using long-buried archival material, allowing a fascinating chapter of America's World War I experience to be rediscovered.
     

    Cover ArtWomen and sustainable agriculture : interviews with 14 agents of change by Anderson, Anna

    This book looks deeply into the American food system and closely examines the need for change in the way food is grown and distributed in the United States. It is composed of twelve interviews with dynamic women who work on issues surrounding modern agriculture. These women are producers, academicians, advocates and activists. Some work in agricultural law and policy. All are devoted to changing the current system. Within a framework that offers brief overviews of the development of U.S. agriculture, the interviews allow the reader to hear firsthand what has gone wrong and what we can do about it. Part One focuses on concepts of traditional agriculture, organic growing and market viability. Part Two discusses pioneering agriculture and the process of restoring our farms to thriving habitats of biodiversity with clean water and healthy soil. Part Three considers the issues of industrial agriculture, exploring the controversy of genetically modified foods, farm foreclosures and the 2002 Farm Bill. Part Four returns us to sustainable agriculture and how we can make sustainability work for us. It includes discussions of farmers' markets, co-ops and local food systems.
     

    Cover ArtLiving off the land : women farmers of today by Russell, Josephine

    Based on extensive interviews with twelve varied and representative women farmers in County Kerry, Josephine Russell's text provides a unique insight into farming women of all ages and types: dairy, sheep, and organic, from the four corners and the three peninsulas of Kerry. Some remember the old life of physical work; others are as familiar with the computer as the animals. All the stories are engaging and entertaining.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtWorking the land : the stories of ranch and farm women in the modern American West by Schackel, Sandra

    Helen Tiegs didn't take to driving a tractor when she became a farmer's wife, but after fifty years she considers herself the hub of the family operation. Lila Hill taught piano, then ultimately took a job off the farm to augment the family income during a period of rising costs. From Montana's cattle pastures to New Mexico's sagebrush mesas, women on today's ranches and farms have played a crucial role in a way of life that is slowly disappearing from the western landscape. Recalling her own family-farm ties, Sandra Schackel set out to learn how these women's lives have changed over the second half of the twentieth century. In Working the Land, she collects oral histories from more than forty women--in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas--recalling their experiences as ranchers and farmers in a modernizing West. Through this diverse group of women-white and Hispanic, rich and poor, ranging in age from 24 to 83--we gain a new perspective on their ties to the land. Although western ranch and farm women have often been portrayed as secondary figures who devoted themselves to housekeeping in support of their husbands' labors, Schackel's interviews reveal that these women have had a much more active role in defining what we know as the modern American West. As Schackel listened to their stories, she found several currents running through their recollections, such as the satisfaction found in living the rural lifestyle and the flexibility of gender roles. She also learned how resourceful women developed new ways to make their farms work--by including tourism, summer camps, and bed-and-breakfast operations--and how many have become activists for land-based issues. And while some like Lila made the difficult decision to work off the farm, such sacrifices have enabled families to hold onto their beloved land. Rich with memory and insight into what makes America's family farms and ranches tick, Working the Land provides a deeper understanding of the West's development over the last fifty years along with new perspectives on shifting attitudes toward women in the workforce. It is both a long-overdue documentation of the lives of hard-working farm women and a celebration of their contributions to a truly American way of life.

  • National Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2025

    National Eating Disorder Awareness Week is February 24 – March 2 and we have put together a reading list that explores topics related to anti-fat bias, body image, diet culture, and fat phobia. All of these books can be found in our collection and are on display at the Dana Health Sciences Library during this awareness week. See a full list with descriptions below.  

    Cover ArtFat talk by Sole-Smith, Virginia

    "By the time they reach kindergarten, most kids have learned that "fat" is bad. As they get older, kids learn to pursue thinness in order to survive in a world that ties our body size to our value. Multibillion-dollar industries thrive on consumers believing that we don't want to be fat. Our weight-centric medical system pushes "weight loss" as a prescription, while ignoring social determinants of health and reinforcing negative stereotypes about the motives and morals of people in larger bodies. And parents today, having themselves grown up in the confusion of modern diet culture, worry equally about the risks of our kids caring too much about being "thin" and about what happens if our kids are fat. Sole-Smith shows how the reverberations of this messaging and social pressures on young bodies continue well into adulthood--and what we can do to fight them. Fat Talk argues for a reclaiming of "fat," which is not synonymous with "unhealthy," "inactive," or "lazy." Talking to researchers and activists, as well as parents and kids across a broad swath of the country, Sole-Smith lays bare how America's focus on solving the "childhood obesity epidemic" has perpetuated a second crisis of disordered eating and body hatred for kids of all sizes. She exposes our society's internalized fatphobia and elucidates how and why we need to stop "preventing obesity" and start supporting kids in the bodies they have. Continuing conversations started by works like Girls & Sex, Under Pressure, and Essential Labor, Fat Talk is a stirring, deeply researched, and groundbreaking book that will help parents learn to reckon with their own body biases, identify diet culture messaging, and ultimately empower their kids to navigate this challenging landscape. Sole-Smith offers an alternative framework for parenting around food and bodies, and a way for us all to work toward a more weight-inclusive world--because it's not our kids, or their bodies, who need fixing"
     

    Cover ArtWhat we don't talk about when we talk about fat by Gordon, Aubrey

    Anti-fatness is everywhere. In What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Aubrey Gordon unearths the cultural attitudes and social systems that have led to people being denied basic needs because they are fat and calls for social justice movements to be inclusive of plus-sized people's experiences. Unlike the recent wave of memoirs and quasi self-help books that encourage readers to love and accept themselves, Gordon pushes the discussion further towards authentic fat activism, which includes ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increased access to public spaces, and ending anti-fat violence. As she argues, "I did not come to body positivity for self-esteem. I came to it for social justice." By sharing her experiences as well as those of others--from smaller fat to very fat people--she concludes that to be fat in our society is to be seen as an undeniable failure, unlovable, unforgivable, and morally condemnable. Fatness is an open invitation for others to express disgust, fear, and insidious concern. To be fat is to be denied humanity and empathy. Studies show that fat survivors of sexual assault are less likely to be believed and less likely than their thin counterparts to report various crimes; 27% of very fat women and 13% of very fat men attempt suicide; over 50% of doctors describe their fat patients as "awkward, unattractive, ugly and noncompliant"; and in 48 states, it's legal--even routine--to deny employment because of an applicant's size. Advancing fat justice and changing prejudicial structures and attitudes will require work from all people. What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat is a crucial tool to create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike.
     

    Cover ArtUnshrinking by Manne, Kate

    The definitive takedown of fatphobia, drawing on personal experience as well as rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it--from the acclaimed author of Down Girl and Entitled. For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not. Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates--how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of "body reflexivity"--a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
     

    Cover ArtYou have the right to remain fat by Tovar, Virgie

    Growing up as a fat girl, Virgie Tovar believed that her body was something to be fixed. But after two decades of dieting and constant guilt, she was over it--and gave herself the freedom to trust her own body again. Ever since, she's been helping others to do the same. Tovar is hungry for a world where bodies are valued equally, food is free from moral judgment, and you can jiggle through life with respect. In concise and candid language, she delves into unlearning fatphobia, dismantling sexist notions of fashion, and how to reject diet culture's greatest lie: that fat people need to wait before beginning their best lives.
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtFraming fat : competing constructions in contemporary culture by Kwan, Samantha

    According to public health officials, obesity poses significant health risks and has become a modern-day epidemic. A closer look at this so-called epidemic, however, suggests that there are multiple perspectives on the fat body, not all of which view obesity as a health hazard. Alongside public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are advertisers of the fashion-beauty complex, food industry advocates at the Center for Consumer Freedom, and activists at the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Framing Fat takes a bird's-eye view of how these multiple actors construct the fat body by identifying the messages these groups put forth, particularly where issues of beauty, health, choice and responsibility, and social justice are concerned. Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves examine how laypersons respond to these conflicting messages and illustrate the gendered, raced, and classed implications within them. In doing so, they shed light on how dominant ideas about body fat have led to the moral indictment of body nonconformists, essentially "framing" them for their fat bodies.
     
     

    Cover ArtFat shame : stigma and the fat body in American culture by Farrell, Amy Erdman

    Locating the origins of the cultural denigration of fatness in the mid 19th century, Amy Erdman Farrell argues that the stigma associated with a fat body preceded any health concerns about a large body size. Farrell draws on a wide array of sources, including political cartoons, popular literature, postcards, advertisements, and physician's manuals to explore the link between our historic denigration of fatness and our contemporary concern over obesity. She explores the ways that those who seek to shed stigmatized identities, whether of gender, race, ethnicity or class, often take part in weight reduction schemes and fat mockery in order to validate themselves as "civilized."
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtThe body is not an apology : the power of radical self-love by Taylor, Sonya Renee

    Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies. The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world--for us all. This second edition includes stories from Taylor's travels around the world combating body terrorism and shines a light on the path toward liberation guided by love. In a brand new final chapter, she offers specific tools, actions, and resources for confronting racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia. And she provides a case study showing how radical self-love not only dismantles shame and self-loathing in us but has the power to dismantle entire systems of injustice. Together with the accompanying workbook, Your Body Is Not an Apology, Taylor brings the practice of radical self-love to life.
     
     
     

    Cover ArtFat girls in black bodies : creating communities of our own by Cox, Joy

    Combatting fatphobia and racism to reclaim a space of belonging at the intersection of fat, Black, and female. into three sections--"belonging," "resistance," and "acceptance"--and informed by personal history, community stories, and deep research, Fat Girls in Black Bodies breaks down the myths, stereotypes, tropes, and outright lies we've been sold about race, body size, belonging, and health. Cox's razor-sharp cultural commentary exposes the racist roots of diet culture, healthism, and the ways we erroneously conflate body size with personal responsibility. She explores how to reclaim space and create belonging in a hostile world, pushing back against tired pressures of "going along just to get along," and dismantles the institutionally ingrained myths about race, size, gender, and worth that deny fat Black women their selfhood.
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtFearing the black body : the racial origins of fat phobia by Strings, Sabrina

    There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals;where fat bodies were once praised;showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of "savagery" and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.
     

    Cover ArtThings no one will tell fat girls : a handbook for unapologetic living by Baker, Jes

    Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls is a manifesto and call to arms for women of all sizes and ages. With smart and sassy eloquence, veteran blogger Jes Baker calls on women to be proud of their bodies, fight against fat-shaming, and embrace a body-positive worldview to change public perceptions and help women maintain mental health. With the same straightforward tone that catapulted her to national attention when she wrote a public letter addressing the sexist comments of Abercrombie & Fitch's CEO, Jes shares personal experiences along with in-depth research in a way that is approachable, digestible, and empowering. Featuring notable guest authors, Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls is an invitation for all women to reject fat prejudice, learn to love their bodies, and join the most progressive, and life-changing revolution there is: the movement to change the world by loving their bodies.
     
     
     

    Cover ArtThe body liberation project : how understanding racism and diet culture helps cultivate joy and build collective freedom by King, Chrissy

    When King first joined a gym, she fell into the all-too-common cycle of "not enough-ness": no matter what she achieves, there was always something she felt she needed to change about her body, her appearance, herself. She came to understand that diet and fitness industries rooted in white supremacy were the problem: Euro-centric beauty standards were the problem. Here King shares the wisdom, the tools, and the inspiration to motivate readers to find body liberation. Even more important, to pass it on.
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtMore of you the fat girl's field guide to the modern world by Beck, Amanda Martinez

    Too often, fatness has been viewed as a moral failing. Fat Christian women in particular are shamed and marginalized by the message that they are failing God because they can't change their bodies. More of You will challenge that status quo, teaching readers to resist the shame and guilt that is pressed onto them by the world and instead to embrace their bodies, take up space, and learn to navigate the world in ways that allow them to flourish. With wit and candor, Amanda Martinez Beck, a fat woman herself, compiles her hard-won wisdom to give the skinny on thriving in a fat body to others who have been pushed to the margins of acceptance. Offering helpful tools like The Fat Girl's Bill of Rights and a script for a weight-neutral doctor's visit, this book addresses real needs in the fat acceptance community, from how to find self-love in a thin-obsessed world, to navigating a world built for butts smaller than yours, to advocating for equality and justice for fat women's medical care.
     
     
     

    Cover ArtUnashamed : musings of a fat, black Muslim by Vernon, Leah

    Ever since she was little, Leah Vernon was told what to believe and how to act. There wasn't any room for imperfection. Good Muslim girls listened more than they spoke. They didn't have a missing father or a mother with mental illness. They didn't have fat bodies or grow up wishing they could be like the white characters they saw on TV. They didn't have husbands who abused and cheated on them. They certainly didn't have secret abortions. In Unashamed, Vernon takes to task the myth of the perfect Muslim woman with frank dispatches on her love-hate relationship with her hijab and her faith, race, weight, mental illness, domestic violence, sexuality, the millennial world of dating, and the process of finding her voice. She opens up about her tumultuous adolescence living at the poverty line with her fiercely loving but troubled mother, her deadbeat dad, and her siblings, and the violent dissolution of her 10-year marriage. Tired of the constant policing of her clothing in the name of Islam and Western beauty standards, Vernon reflects on her experiences with hustling paycheck to paycheck, body-shaming, and redefining what it means to be a "good" Muslim"
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtBody stories in and out and with and through fat

    Body stories capture a nuanced, interconnected, interactive, and complex telling of our understanding, perception, and experience of and through our bodies. Plenty has been published on body image but image suggests a static fixed body, unmitigated through our social interactions and varying times and spaces. This book is not a "how-to" guide for fat confidence. It's not a compendium of fat suffering. It's simply a collection of narratives about what it's like to survive in a weight-hating world. It resists the ways that marginalized bodies are being written and researched and put into other people's ideas about our existence. The stories in this book are celebratory and are painful. They look at intersections of race and queerness; they destabilize womanhood by presenting a range of possible female embodiments. They explore issues of disability and madness. The full range of possibilities that are collected here give a picture of what it means to live in a society with strong and powerful messages about size, about normalcy, about what a moral and healthy life and body look like. This book is a snapshot of its place and time, but these stories remind us that we're here to stay. The body stories will change but we will keep owning our own narratives. While story, especially written by women, is often seen as outside the academic canon, these stories, these creative offerings, are theory, are research, and are activism. They are nothing less than the blueprint for liberation. Writing about fat and about bodies outside of medicalized narratives, without ignoring the impact of race, sexuality, class, ability, gender, fashion, appearance, and beyond, is radical and rigorous. It is impossible to think about the future without wishing for liberation. Liberation can come in many forms. It can mean an awareness, the ability to confront. The stories in this book display the ways that liberation isn't a finish line or a thing we can complete—rather it is a million small actions
     

    Cover ArtThe full body project by Nimoy, Leonard

    In his provocative new book, photographer and actor Leonard Nimoy captures images of full-bodied women, some of whom are involved in what is known as the "fat acceptance" movement. "The average American woman," Nimoy writes, "weighs 25 percent more than the models selling the clothes. There is a huge industry built up around selling women ways to get their bodies closer to the fantasy ideal. Pills, diets, surgery, workout programs. . . . The message is 'You don't look right. If you buy our product, you can get there.'" Leonard Nimoy, best known to the public from his role as Spock on Star Trek, has been a lifelong photographer. His work has been widely exhibited and is in numerous private and public collections. A previous book of his photographs, Shekhina, was published in 2002.
     

    Cover ArtSupporting fat birth supporting body positive birth by Silver, A. J.

    This pioneering guide provides birth professionals, pregnant people, and advocates with comprehensive insight into navigating conception, pregnancy, birth, and the perinatal period whilst fat. Drawing on the author's decade of experience as well as evidence-based research and case studies from people sharing their own perspectives and stories, this authoritative and compassionate book provides practical and effective advice on how to improve quality of care for fat parents. It covers a wide range of topics across the birth journey and beyond including interviews with a number of high-profile people including Nicola Salmon and Amber Marshall and empowers readers to feel reassured and confident in their choices and rights. This ground-breaking resource challenges the pervasive bias against fat service users in the birthing world and acts as a call to action to dismantle the fatphobic stigma present in our healthcare systems in order to create an environment that is inclusive of all bodies.
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtIt's always been ours : rewriting the story of Black women's bodies by Wilson, Jessica

    A dietitian, storyteller, and community organizer offers a cultural discussion of body image, food, health and wellness by focusing on the bodies of Black women and how our culture's obsession with thin, white women reinforces racist ideas and ideals.
  • New Fiction by Black Authors

    Celebrate Black History Month with Howe Library by checking-out new fiction titles in our collection by Black authors. See also, our featured books post for “African Americans and Labor”, the theme selected for 2025 Black History Month by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. 

     

    Find these books and more at the Howe Library Lobby display. 

    Cover ArtGreat expectations : a novel. by Cunningham, Vinson

    I'd seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency. When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator's idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he'll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States's first Black president. Great Expectations is about David's eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions-questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood, all of which force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.
     
     
     

    Cover ArtLet us descend : a novel. by Ward, Jesmyn

    Let Us Descend describes a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. A journey that is as beautifully rendered as it is heart wrenching, the novel is "[t]he literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours" (NPR). Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Annis leads readers through the descent, hers is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation. From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this "[s]earing and lyrical...raw, transcendent, and ultimately hopeful" ( The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ) novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward's most magnificent novel yet.
     

    Cover ArtRedwood court by Dameron, DéLana R. A.

    Mika, you sit at our feet all these hours and days, hearing us tell our tales. You have all these stories inside you: all the stories everyone in our family knows and all the stories everyone in our family tells. You write 'em in your books and show everyone who we are." So begins DéLana R.A. Dameron's stunning novel-in-stories, Redwood Court. The baby of the family, Mika Mosby spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their stories and secrets, witnessing their struggles. Growing up on Redwood Court, the cul-de-sac in the working-class suburb of Columbia, South Carolina where her grandparents live, Mika learns important, sometimes difficult lessons from the people who raise her: Her exhausted parents, who work long hours at multiple jobs while still making sure their kids experience the adventure of family vacations; her older sister, who, in a house filled with Motown would rather listen to Alanis Morrisette, and can't wait to taste real independence; her retired grandparents, children of Jim Crow, who realized their own vision of success when they bought their house on Redwood Court in the 1960s, imagining it filled with future generations; and the many neighbors on the Court who hold tight to the community they've built, committed to fostering joy and love in an America so insistent on seeing Black people stumble and fall.
     

    Cover ArtChain gang all stars by Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame

    The explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black, about two top women gladiators fighting for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences. Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a "new and necessary American voice"
     

    Cover ArtCome and get it by Reid, Kiley

    It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue.
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtWe are all so good at smiling by McBride, Amber

    When hospitalized for her clinical depression, Whimsy connects with a boy named Faerry, who also suffers from the traumatic loss of a sibling, and together they work to unearth buried memories and battle the fantastical physical embodiment of their depression.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtKin : rooted in hope by Weatherford, Carole Boston

    A multi-generational family history told in the voices of the author's ancestors, spanning enslavement alongside Frederick Douglass at Maryland's Wye House plantation, service in the U.S. Colored Troops, and the founding of all-Black Reconstruction-era communities.
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtWhat Napoleon could not do by Nnuro, DK

    One of the Books Barack Obama Is Reading This Summer One of Vulture's Best Books of 2023 One of Goodreads' Buzziest Debut Novels of 2023 One of Essence's 31 Books You Must Read One of the most anticipated books by Town & Country and Elle America is seen through the eyes and ambitions of three characters with ties to Africa in this gripping novel When siblings Jacob and Belinda Nti were growing up in Ghana, their goal was simple: to move to America. For them, the United States was both an opportunity and a struggle, a goal and an obstacle. Jacob, an awkward computer programmer who still lives with his father, wants a visa so he can move to Virginia to live with his wife--a request that the U.S. government has repeatedly denied. He envies his sister, Belinda, who achieved, as their father put it, "what Napoleon could not do": she went to college and law school in the United States and even managed to marry Wilder, a wealthy Black businessman from Texas. Wilder's view of America differs markedly from his wife's, as he's spent his life railing against the racism and marginalization that are part of life for every African American living here. For these three, their desires and ambitions highlight the promise and the disappointment that life in a new country offers. How each character comes to understand this and how each learns from both their dashed hopes and their fulfilled dreams lie at the heart of what makes What Napoleon Could Not Do such a compelling, insightful read.
     

    Cover ArtCool. Awkward. Black by Strong, Karen (Editor)

    A girl who believes in UFOs; a boy who might have finally found his Prince Charming; a hopeful performer who dreams of being cast in her school's production of The Sound of Music; a misunderstood magician of sorts with a power she doesn't quite understand. These plotlines and many more compose the eclectic stories found within the pages of this dynamic, exciting, and expansive collection featuring exclusively Black characters. From contemporary to historical, fantasy to sci-fi, magical to realistic, and with contributions from a powerhouse list of self-proclaimed geeks and bestselling, award-winning authors, this life-affirming anthology celebrates and redefines the many facets of Blackness and geekiness--both in the real world and those imagined.
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtForever is now by Lockington, Mariama

    When sixteen-year-old Sadie, a Black bisexual recluse, develops agoraphobia the summer before her junior year, she relies on her best friend, family, and therapist to overcome her fears.
    "I'm safe here. That's how Sadie feels, on a perfect summer day, wrapped in her girlfriend's arms. School is out, and even though she's been struggling to manage her chronic anxiety, Sadie is hopeful better times are ahead. Or at least, she thought she was safe. When her girlfriend reveals some unexpected news and the two witness an incident of police brutality, Sadie's whole world is upended in an instant. I'm not safe anywhere. That's how Sadie feels every day after -- vulnerable, uprooted. She retreats as the weeks slip by. When Sadie's therapist gives her a diagnosis for her debilitating panic -- agoraphobia -- she starts on a path of acceptance and healing. Meanwhile, protests are taking place all over the city. Sadie wants to be a part of it, to use her voice and effect change. But how do you show up for your community when you can't even leave your house? I can build a safe place inside myself. That's what Sadie learns over the course of one life-changing summer. From critically acclaimed and Stonewall Honor-winning author Mariama J. Lockington comes a powerful young adult novel in verse about mental health, love, family, Black joy, and finding your voice and power in an unforgiving world.
     

    Cover ArtThe Davenports by Marquis, Krystal

    The Davenports are one of the few Black families of immense wealth and status in a changing United States, their fortune made through the entrepreneurship of William Davenport, a formerly enslaved man who founded the Davenport Carriage Company years ago. Now it's 1910, and the Davenports live surrounded by servants, crystal chandeliers, and endless parties, finding their way and finding love--even where they're not supposed to. There is Olivia, the beautiful elder Davenport daughter, ready to do her duty by getting married... until she meets the charismatic civil rights leader Washington DeWight and sparks fly. The younger daughter, Helen, is more interested in fixing cars than falling in love--unless it's with her sister's suitor. Amy-Rose, the childhood friend turned maid to the Davenport sisters, dreams of opening her own business--and marrying the one man she could never be with, Olivia and Helen's brother, John. But Olivia's best friend, Ruby, also has her sights set on John Davenport, though she can't seem to keep his interest... until family pressure has her scheming to win his heart, just as someone else wins hers.
     

    Cover ArtThe probability of everything by Everett, Sarah

    When an asteroid has an 84.7% chance of colliding with the Earth in four days, eleven-year-old Kemi, who loves scientific facts and probability, assembles a time capsule to capture her family's truth as she tries to come to terms with saying goodbye.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtThe Heaven and Earth grocery store by McBride, James

    From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah's Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe. As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community--heaven and earth--that sustain us. Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
     

    Cover ArtMoonrise over New Jessup by Minnicks, Jamila

    It's 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. She falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup's status quo and could lead to the young couple's expulsion-or worse-from the home they hold dear. But as Raymond continues to push alternatives for enhancing New Jessup's political power, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheavals both in and out of town.
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtMagic Enuff : poems by Stringfellow, Tara M.

    An electrifying collection of poems that tells a universal tale of survival and revolution through the lens of Black femininity. Tara M. Stringfellow embraces complexity, grappling with the sometimes painful, sometimes wonderful way two conflicting things can be true at the same time. How it's possible to have a strong voice and also feel silenced. To be loyal to things and people that betray us. To burn as hot with rage as we do with love. Each poem asks how we can heal and sustain relationships with people, systems, and ourselves. How to reach for the kind of real love that allows for the truth of anger, disappointment, and grief. Unapologetic, unafraid, and glorious in its nuance, this collection argues that when it comes to living in our full humanity, we have-and we are-magic enough.
  • African Americans and Labor

    This year's theme for Black History month, set by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, is African Americans and Labor. Check-out this featured books lists for titles in Howe Library that highlight and celebrate this theme. 

     

    “African Americans, and Labor, focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people. Indeed, work is at the very center of much of Black history and culture.” Read more in the executive summary by the Association. 

     

    Be sure to also visit our featured book list “New Fiction by Black Authors” and find these books and more at the Howe Library Lobby display. 

    Cover ArtBlack folk : the roots of the Black working class by Kelley, Blair Murphy

    An award-winning historian illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America through a stunning narrative centered on her forebears. There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic 'white working class,' a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story.
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtSoft power for the journey : the life of a STEM trailblazer by Johnson, Sandra K.

    This is a story of an African American woman working at the highest levels in STEM. Dr. Sandra K. Johnson earned a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University in May 1988, the first black woman to do so.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtFight like hell : the untold history of American labor by Kelly, Kim

    Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America's civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor's relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law. The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories get cut from the final copy: those of women, people of color, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, sex workers, prisoners, and the poor. In this volume, Kelly excavates that untold history and shows how the rights the American worker has today--the forty-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job--were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears.
     

    Cover ArtRacing the Great White Way : Black performance, Eugene O'Neill, and the transformation of Broadway by Johnson, Katie N

    The early drama of Eugene O'Neill, with its emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black performers to challenge racist structures in modern theater and cinema. By adapting O'Neill's dramatic text-changing scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism-theater artists of color have used O'Neill's dramatic texts to raze barriers in American and transatlantic theater. Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of U.S. theater during the early 20th century, author Katie Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theater scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theater. In spite of their dichotomous (and at times problematic) representation of Blackness, O'Neill's plays such as The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings make ideal case studies because his work stimulated extraordinary, and underappreciated, traffic between Broadway and Harlem-between white and Black America. While it focuses on investigating Broadway productions of O'Neill, the book also attends to the vibrant transnational exchange in early to mid-20th century artistic production. Anchored in archival research, Racing the Great White Way recovers not only vital lost performance histories, but also the layered contexts for performing bodies across the Black Atlantic and the Circum-Atlantic.
     

    Cover ArtDear Department Chair : letters from Black women leaders to the next generation

    Practical and candid, this book offers actionable steps to help Black women leaders create meaningful success. The reflections and recommendations of the contributors forge a critical and transformative analysis of race, gender, and higher education leadership. With insights from humanities, social sciences, art, and STEM, this essential resource helps to redefine the academy to meet the challenges of the future. Dear Department Chair is comprised of personal letters from prominent Black women department chairs, deans, vice provosts, and university presidents, addressed to current and future Black women academic professionals, and offers a rich source of peer mentorship and professional development. These letters emerged from Chair at the Table, a research collective and peer-mentoring network of current and former Black women department chairs at colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. The collective's works, including this volume, serve as tools for faculty interested in administration, current chairs seeking mentorship, and upper-level administrators working to diversify their ranks.
     

    Cover ArtHousehold workers unite : the untold story of African American women who built a movement by Nadasen, Premilla

    Premilla Nadasen recounts in this powerful book a little-known history of organizing among African American household workers. She uses the stories of a handful of women to illuminate the broader politics of labor, organizing, race, and gender in late 20th-century America. At the crossroads of the emerging civil rights movement, a deindustrializing economy, a burgeoning women's movement, and increasing immigration, household worker activists, who were excluded from both labor rights and mainstream labor organizing, developed distinctive strategies for political mobilization and social change. We learn about their complicated relationship with their employers, who were a source of much of their anguish, but, also, potentially important allies. And equally important they articulated a profound challenge to unequal state policy. Household Workers Unite offers a window into this occupation from a perspective that is rarely seen. At a moment when the labor movement is in decline; as capital increasingly treats workers as interchangeable or dispensable; as the number of manufacturing jobs continues to dwindle and the number of service sector jobs expands; as workers in industrialized countries find themselves in an precarious situation and struggle hard to make ends meet without state support or protection--the lessons of domestic worker organizing recounted here might prove to be more important than just a correction of the historical record. The women in this book, as Nadasen demonstrates, were innovative labor organizers. As a history of poor women workers, it shatters countless myths and assumptions about the labor movement and proposes a very different vision.
     

    Cover ArtWorkers on arrival : Black labor in the making of America by Trotter, Joe William

    From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as "consumers" rather than "producers," as "takers" rather than "givers," and as "liabilities" instead of "assets."In his engrossing new history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr. refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class's vast contributions to the making of America. Covering the last four hundred years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces black workers' complicated journey from the transatlantic slave trade through the American Century to the demise of the industrial order in the 21st century. At the center of this compelling, fast-paced narrative are the actual experiences of these African American men and women. A dynamic and vital history of remarkable contributions despite repeated setbacks, Workers on Arrival expands our understanding of America's economic and industrial growth, its cities, ideas, and institutions, and the real challenges confronting black urban communities today.
     

    Cover ArtRichard L. Davis and the color line in Ohio coal : a Hocking Valley Mine labor organizer, 1862-1900 by Doppen, Frans H.

    Richard Davis wrote the first of many letters to the National Labor Tribune. One of the few African Americans at the founding convention of United Mine Workers of America in 1890, he served as one of the union's National Executive Board members. This biography provides a detailed portrait of one of America's more influential labor leaders.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtSuccessful Black entrepreneurs : hidden histories, inspirational stories, and extraordinary business achievements : case studies by Harvard Business School by Rogers, Steven

    A few years ago, while serving as a Professor at Harvard Business School, Rogers created a new course titled "Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurship." After learning of the new course, a white professor asked, "Why do we need this course? What is the difference between Black and white entrepreneurs?" In response, Rogers identified the following differences: Black entrepreneurs cannot access capital from traditional financial institutions including banks and private equity firms Many Black entrepreneurs who want to sell to white customers must practice "racial concealment" to be successful Successful Black entrepreneurs who are not athletes or entertainers are virtually invisible in the minds of the general public All of these reasons have a negative impact on Black entrepreneurship which hurts the Black community and the entire country. Successful Black entrepreneurs create jobs for Black, white, and other racial groups. They also have created companies that provide products and services that has benefited society-at-large. For the Black community, Black entrepreneurship has been synonymous with freedom and self-sufficiency. For example, Black entrepreneurs are the largest private employers of Black people in the country. The government is the top public employer. The book will be largely comprised of case studies that Rogers wrote and have been published by Harvard Business School (HBS). These are all case studies that have been individually sold by Harvard Business Publishing, proving that there is a market for this content. A book made up primarily of HBS case studies about Black entrepreneurs has never been published
     

    Cover ArtSouthern Labor and Black Civil Rights : Organizing Memphis Workers. by Honey, Michael K.

    Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study,Southern Labor and Black Civil Rightschronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise.Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994. Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.
     
     

    Cover ArtReverend Addie Wyatt faith and the fight for labor, gender, and racial equality by Walker-McWilliams, Marcia

    Labor leader, civil rights activist, outspoken feminist, African American clergywoman--Reverend Addie Wyatt stood at the confluence of many rivers of change in twentieth century America. The first female president of a local chapter of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, Wyatt worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt and appeared as one of Time magazine's Women of the Year in 1975. Marcia Walker-McWilliams tells the incredible story of Addie Wyatt and her times. What began for Wyatt as a journey to overcome poverty became a lifetime commitment to social justice and the collective struggle against economic, racial, and gender inequalities. Walker-McWilliams illuminates how Wyatt's own experiences with hardship and many forms of discrimination drove her work as an activist and leader. A parallel journey led her to develop an abiding spiritual faith, one that denied defeatism by refusing to accept such circumstances as immutable social forces
     

    Cover ArtMarching together : women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters by Chateauvert, Melinda

    The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first national trade union for African Americans. Standard BSCP histories focus on the men who built the union: few acknowledge the important role of the Ladies' Auxiliary in shaping public debates over black manhood and unionization, setting political agendas for the black community, and crafting effective strategies to win racial and economic justice.
    In this first book-length history of the women of the BSCP, Melinda Chateauvert brings to life an entire group of women ignored in previous histories of the Brotherhood and of working-class women, situating them in the debates among women's historians over the ways that race and class shape women's roles and gender relations. Chateauvert's work shows how the auxiliary, made up of the wives, daughters, and sisters of Pullman porters, used the Brotherhood to claim respectability and citizenship. Pullman maids, relegated to the auxiliary, found their problems as working women neglected in favor of the rhetoric of racial solidarity.
    The auxiliary actively educated other women and children about the labor movement, staged consumer protests, and organized local and national civil rights campaigns ranging from the 1941 March on Washington to school integration to the Montgomery bus boycott.
     

    Cover ArtReal role models successful African Americans beyond pop culture by Spearman, Joah

    All young people need good role models, and black youth especially need positive and real examples beyond the famous and wealthy people they see on SportsCenter highlights and MTV Cribs. While success as a celebrity athlete or entertainer may seem like an achievable dream, the reality is that young African Americans have a much greater chance of succeeding in the professions through education and hard work--and a mentor to show them the path. Real Role Models introduces high school and college-age African Americans to twenty-three black professionals who have achieved a high level of success in their chosen fields and who tell their stories to inspire young people to pursue a professional career and do the work necessary to achieve their dreams.
     
     
     
     

    Cover ArtBlack workers remember : an oral history of segregation, unionism, and the freedom struggle by Honey, Michael K.

    The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. This work tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words from the 1930s to the present. It provides first-hand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee, the place where Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated during a strike by black sanitation workers. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era.
    Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history.
     

    Cover ArtBuilding the black metropolis African American entrepreneurship in Chicago by Weems, Robert E.; Chambers, Jason

    From Jean Baptiste Point DuSable to Oprah Winfrey, Black entrepreneurship has helped define Chicago. Robert E. Weems, Jr. and Jason P. Chambers curate a collection of essays that place the city as the center of the Black business world in the United States. Ranging from titans like Anthony Overton and Jesse Binga to McDonald's operators to Black organized crime, the scholars shed light on the long-overlooked history of African American work and entrepreneurship since the Great Migration. Together they examine how factors like the influx of southern migrants and the city's unique segregation patterns made Chicago a prolific incubator of productive business development -- and made building a Black metropolis as much a necessity as an opportunity
     
     
     

    Cover ArtFor jobs and freedom : selected speeches and writings of A. Philip Randolph by Randolph, A. Philip

    As the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a tireless advocate for civil rights, A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) served as a bridge between African Americans and the labor movement. During a public career that spanned more than five decades, he was a leading voice in the struggle for black freedom and social justice, and his powerful words inspired others to join him. This volume documents Randolph's life and work through his own writings. The editors have combed through the files of libraries, manuscript collections, and newspapers, selecting more than seventy published and unpublished pieces that shed light on Randolph's most significant activities. The book is organized thematically around his major interests--dismantling workplace inequality, expanding civil rights, confronting racial segregation, and building international coalitions. The editors provide a detailed biographical essay that helps to situate the speeches and writings collected in the book. In the absence of an autobiography, this volume offers the best available presentation of Randolph's ideas and arguments in his own words.

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