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Description
Rebecca Dickinson’s powerful voice, captured through excerpts from the pages of her journal, allows life in colonial and revolutionary-era New England to come alive. Dickinson’s life illustrates the dilemmas faced by many Americans in the decades before, during, and after the American Revolution, as well as the paradoxes presented by an unmarried woman who earned her own living and made her own way in the small town where she was born. Rebecca Dickinson: Independence for a New England Woman, uses Dickinson’s life as a lens to introduce readers to the everyday experience of living in the colonial era and the social, cultural, and economic challenges faced in the transformative decades surrounding the American Revolution.
About the Lives of American Women series:
Selected and edited by renowned women’s historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a women’s life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a “good read,” featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject’s perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.
About the Author
Marla Miller is a professor of history and director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. An award winning essayist and author, Miller is best known for her essay on Rebecca Dickinson, “My Part Alone,” The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution, and Betsy Ross and the Making of America.
Series editor Carol Berkin is a well-known women’s historian and the author of many popular and scholarly books, including Civil War Wives. She is Professor of History Emerita at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and she is a member of the Society of American Historians.
Praise for the Lives of American Women Series:
“Finally! The majority of students—by which I mean women—will have the opportunity to read biographies of women from our nation’s past. (Men can read them too, of course!) The ‘Lives of American Women’ series features an eclectic collection of books, readily accessible to students who will be able to see the contributions of women in many fields over the course of our history. Long overdue, these books will be a valuable resource for teachers, students, and the public at large.”
—Cokie Roberts, author of Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty
“Just what any professor wants: books that will intrigue, inform, and fascinate students! These short, readable biographies of American women—specifically designed for classroom use—give instructors an appealing new option to assign to their history students.”
—Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Cornell University
“For educators keen to include women in the American story, but hampered by the lack of thoughtful, concise scholarship, here comes ‘Lives of American Women,’ embracing Abigail Adams’s counsel to John—‘remember the ladies.’ And high time, too!”
—Lesley S. Herrmann, Executive Director, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
“Students both in the general survey course and in specialized offerings like my course on U.S. women’s history can get a great understanding of an era from a short biography. Learning a lot about a single but complex character really helps to deepen appreciation of what women’s lives were like in the past.”
—Patricia Cline Cohen, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Biographies are, indeed, back. Not only will students read them, biographies provide an easy way to demonstrate particularly important historical themes or ideas. . . . Undergraduate readers will be challenged to think more deeply about what it means to be a woman, citizen, and political actor. . . . I am eager to use this in my undergraduate survey and specialty course.”
—Jennifer Thigpen, Washington State University, Pullman
“The Lives of American Women authors raise all of the big issues I want my classes to confront—and deftly fold their arguments into riveting narratives that maintain students’ excitement.”
—Woody Holton, author of Abigail Adams
Introduction: The Independence of Rebecca Dickinson
1. Origins and Awakenings
2. The Female Economy
3. A World at War, A Soul at Peace
4. The Unraveling
5. Revolutionary Hatfield
6. Rebellion, Redux
7. Reproducing the Nation
8. Singlehood and the “Bar in the Way”
9. The “most dark and puzzling affair”
10. Twilight
Conclusion: Remembering Independence
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