American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860Just as she helped launch the rediscovery of literary texts by American women writers, Nina Baym now uncovers the work of history performed by over 150 writers in over 350 texts. Here she explores a world of important writing unknown even to most specialists. The novels, poems, plays, textbooks, and travel narratives written by women between 1790 and the Civil War defy current theories of women's writing that stress a female domain of the private, homebound, and emotional. History is inarguably public in its nature and these women wrote it. In doing so, they challenged the imaginative and intellectual boundaries that divided domestic and public worlds. They claimed on behalf of all women the rights to know and to speak about the world outside the home, as well as to circulate their knowledge and opinions among the public. Their work helped shape the enormous public interest in history characteristic of the antebellum nation, and ultimately to forge our national identity in the history of the world. Nina Baym deftly outlines the master narrative of history implied in women's writings of this period, and discusses in a completely revisioned context the emergence of women's history in public discourse.
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... Indian culture is inferior to white because it is not Chris- tian . But she is much more critical of white culture for falling short of its Christian ideals than of Indian culture with no such ideals to guide it . In her autobiography ...
... Indian survival and a much better understanding of the actualities of Indian social organization than the Washington bureaucracy . Implicit in Wau - bun is Kinzie's belief that a multicultural society really could have flourished in the ...
... Indian husband and Hope's companionship with Magawisca , daughter of an Indian chief ( the Indian connections in these books are always aristo- cratic ) , the outcomes of both novels show that the Indians were destined to be supplanted ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Maternal Historians Didactic Mothers | 29 |
History from the Divine Point of View | 46 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown