"1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Threatened by Elizabeth's intellect, independence, and outspokenness, her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her and makes a plan to put her back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum. The horrific conditions...

"Sarah and Angelina Grimke--the Grimke sisters--are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents...

"Almost 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, Sojourner Truth was mistreated by a streetcar conductor. She took him to court--and won! Before she was Sojourner Truth, she was known simply as Belle. Born a slave in New York sometime around 1797, she was later sold and separated from her family. Even after she escaped from slavery, she knew her work was not yet done. She changed her name and traveled, inspiring everyone she met...

Picking up where Infidel, her last memoir, left off, Ayaan Hirsi Ali chronicles her struggle with culture shock as she adapts to life in America.

"...this audiobook, which was dictated in the last year of King's life, put's both her and her husband's struggles in cultural and historical context. This is a must-listen." — The Berkshire Edge
The life story of Coretta Scott King—wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular twentieth-century American civil rights activist—as told fully for the first

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A new portrait of Betty Friedan, the author and activist acclaimed as the mother of second-wave feminism. The feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan (1921-2006), pathbreaking author of The Feminine Mystique, was powerful and polarizing. In this biography, the first in more than twenty years, Rachel Shteir draws on Friedan's papers and on interviews with family, colleagues, and friends to create a nuanced portrait.

Ever since she was a little girl, Jane Addams hoped to help people in need. She wanted to create a place where people could find food, work, and community. In 1880, she chose a house in a run-down Chicago neighborhood in which she lived and tuned it into Hull House, a settlement home for the needy. She eventually added a playground, kindergarten, and a public bath. By 1907, Hull House included thirteen buildings and by the early 1920s, more...

Pearl Buck was one of the most renowned, interesting, and controversial figures ever to influence American and Chinese cultural and literary history - yet she remains one of the least studied, honored, or remembered. Peter Conn's Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography sets out to reconstruct Buck's life and significance, and to restore this remarkable woman to visibility. Born into a missionary family, Pearl Buck lived the first half of her life in...

Illustrations and simple text describe the experiences Anna Howard Shaw had while living in the North American wilderness.