Elleanor Eldridge, born of African and US indigenous descent in 1794, operated a lucrative domestic services business in nineteenth century Providence, Rhode Island. In defiance of her gender and racial background, she purchased land and built rental property from the wealth she gained as a business owner. In the 1830s, Eldridge was defrauded of her property by a white lender. In a series of common court cases as alternately defendant and plaintiff, she managed to recover it through the Rhode Island judicial system. In order to raise funds to carry out this litigation, her memoir, which includes statements from employers endorsing her respectable character, was published in 1838. Frances Harriet Whipple, an aspiring white writer in Rhode Island, narrated and co-authored Eldridge's story, expressing a proto-feminist outrage at the male ""extortioners"" who caused Eldridge's loss and distress. With the rarity of Eldridge's material achievements aside, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge forms an exceptional antebellum biography, chronicling Eldridge's life from her birth through the first publication of almost yearly editions of the text between 1838 and 1847. Because of Eldridge's exceptional life as a freeborn woman of color entrepreneur, it constitutes a counter-narrative to slave narratives of early 19th-century New England, changing the literary landscape of conventional American Renaissance studies and interpretations of American Transcendentalism. With an introduction by Joycelyn K. Moody, this new edition contextualizes the extraordinary life of Elleanor Eldridge - from her acquisition of wealth and property to the publication of her biography and her legal struggles to regain stolen property. Because of her mixed-race identity, relative wealth, local and regional renown, and her efficacy in establishing a collective of white women patrons, this biography challenges typical African and indigenous women's literary production of the early national period and resituates Elleanor Eldridge as an important cultural and historical figure of the nineteenth century.

The first biography of Frances Whipple, writer, reformer, abolitionist.

Combines histories of the complex interactions between blacks and Natives in North America with examples and readings of art that has emerged from those exchanges.

This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

For as long as there have been blacks in the Americas, there have been African-American entrepreneurs.

Since the founding of the United States, women have picked up their pens to write and express their ideas, affording them independence and self-sufficiency in days when they had little. By way of their poetry, essays, advice columns, investigative journalism and more, women like Helen Keller, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Shirley Jackson wrote not only to entertain and inform, but often to simply keep a roof over their heads. This text offers a unique examination of female New England writers, focusing on their homes. The women wrote in many genres and became literary entrepreneurs, bargaining with editors for higher fees and royalties, participating in marketing campaigns, and seeking advice and help. The homes women bought with their earnings included cottages, suburban houses, farms, and an occasional mansion. Whether modest or luxurious, these houses provided the "room of her own" that Virginia Woolf said every woman needs in order to write. Sometimes that room was an elegant study, and sometimes a corner of the kitchen.

In contrast to bourgeois churchgoers, who were wedded to decorum and rationality, the plebeians welcomed emotional outbursts and evinced an abiding belief in the supernatural. Schantz charts the ways in which these contrasting religious subcultures collided in the political turmoil of the Dorr Rebellion of 1842."--BOOK JACKET.