Andrew Sheffield's letters help us better understand the full range of behavior among women in the Victorian South & the limits of Southern womanhood near the end of the nineteenth century.

"In 1903, Atlas built a plant on the border of the small community of Ilasco, located just outside Hannibal - home of the infamous cave popularized in Mark Twain's most acclaimed novels. The rich and powerful Atlas quickly appointed itself as caretaker of Twain's heritage and sought to take control of Ilasco. However, its authority was challenged in 1910 when Heinbach inherited her husband's tract of land that formed much of the unincorporated town site. On grounds that Heinbach's husband had been in the advanced stages of alcoholism when she married him the year before, some of Ilasco's political leaders and others who had ties to Atlas challenged the will, charging Heinbach with undue influence."--Jacket.

Wilson 1835-1909) is little known now, but was one of the most popular authors of the 19th century, with most of her nine novels becoming best sellers. Sexton (writing, Morehead State U.) selects and annotates letters to her friends, among them well known literary and political figures, that illuminate her life and times. With this volume, the series expands from the 19th to encompass the 20th as well. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people's lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as "lunacy laws." Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of "insanity." The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic "mad writers."

This book is an examination of South African mental institutions and policy from 1939-1994. It examines how racial, gender and sexual discrimination affected practitioners' views and practices, and also reveals the role that patients and international events played in shaping mental health policy.

In both locales she created for herself the life of an artist and southern expatriate." "From Italy, Carson wrote hundreds of discursive letters to her younger son in America. Gathered in this collection, these narratives offer intimate insights into the emotional life of a mature woman, the accomplishments of an artist determined both to perfect her craft and sell her work, and the intellectual and social pursuits of a well-educated, vivacious American living abroad."

Mary and Louisa describe in elaborate detail every aspect of their collegiate experiences, furnishing an intimate view of the experiences of female college students at the turn of the century and of the power of education on the lives of young women.".

Echoes from a Distant Frontier is an edited, annotated selection of the correspondence of Corinna and Ellen Brown, two single women in their twenties, who left a comfortable New England home in 1835 for the Florida frontier. Within a month of their arrival, the frontier erupted in Indian war. The Browns witnessed the terror and carnage firsthand, and their letters paint a vivid picture of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842).

Emily Wharton, a Philadelphian, in 1842 married Charles Sinkler, a midshipman in the US Navy. Sinkler took his 19-year-old wife to live among his family, wealthy cotton planters outside Charleston, SC. For much of her married life Emily traveled between the two places; her letters, edited by her great-great-granddaughter (a librarian at the U. of Tennessee), were retrieved from the attics of relatives Northern and Southern. LeClercq sees her forebear as a pioneer of sorts, adapting well to the rural, antebellum South--a paternalistic society where opportunities for women were circumscribed--while also thriving in cosmopolitan Philadelphia and endearing herself to the people whose lives she touched in both worlds. c. Book News Inc.

Emmala Reed's journals from 1865 and 1866 present a detailed account of life in western South Carolina as war turned to reconstruction. Reed's postwar writings are particularly important given their rarity - many Civil War diarists stopped writing at war's end. Also unlike many diarists of the period, Reed lived in a small town rather than on a plantation or in an urban center.