Crossing to Freedom assembles stirring stories of hundreds of kindred families. One of the lines is traced back to 540 A.D., but most of the spacious chronicle is set in the centuries following 1630, when members of these families began flocking to America’s shores to escape religious persecution in many parts of the Old World.
Finalist for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Religion category Invisible Hosts explores how the central tenets of Spiritualism influenced ways in which women conceived of their bodies and their civic responsibilities, arguing that Spiritualist ideologies helped to lay the foundation for the social and political advances made by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As public figures, female spirit mediums of the Victorian era were often accused of unfeminine (and therefore transgressive) behavior. A rhetorical analysis of nineteenth-century spirit mediums' autobiographies reveals how these women convinced readers of their authenticity both as respectable women and as psychics. The author argues that these women's autobiographies reflect an attempt to emulate feminine virtues even as their interpretation and performance of these virtues helped to transform prevailing gender stereotypes. She demonstrates that the social performance central to the production of women's autobiography is uniquely complicated by Spiritualist ideology. Such complications reveal new information about how women represented themselves, gained agency, and renegotiated nineteenth-century gender roles.
In this mystery by Agatha Christie’s favorite American author, an amateur sleuth deals with sinister spirits and murder at a New York country mansion. It’s mid-1943, and Henry Gamadge is up to his elbows in war work and longing for a quiet weekend. But when a half-forgotten classmate requests assistance, Gamadge is unable to refuse the tug of an old school tie. Sylvanus Hutter is concerned about his Aunt Florence, a giddy socialite terrified of Nazi bombs. Florence has moved her extensive household of hangers-on to the family mansion in upstate New York. But menace seems to have followed them, in the form of threatening messages inserted into the manuscript of Florence’s painfully bad novel in progress. Several members of the household are convinced the messages are emanating from Another World, but the politely pragmatic Gamadge suspects a culprit rather closer to home. “Deliciously gossipy, back-biting characters, an imposing mansion in upstate New York . . . altogether a pleasure.” —The New Yorker
The first and only comprehensive collection of writings by Elizabeth Garver Jordan, the groundbreaking journalist, suffragist, and editor whose fearless reporting on women preceded the #MeToo movement and popularized the true-crime genre A Penguin Classic The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings is the first to collect Garver Jordan’s fiction and journalism, much of which has been out of print for over a century. Jordan began her career as a reporter, making her name as one of few women journalists to cover the Lizzie Borden murder trial for the New York World in 1893. Jordan’s distinctive, narrative-driven coverage of the Borden and other high-profile murder cases brought her national visibility, and she turned increasingly to fiction writing. Drawing on her experiences as a true-crime reporter and newspaper editor, she published detective novels and short story collections such as Tales of the City Room that explored the fine line between women’s criminality and crimes against women. Employing popular genre conventions as a means of dealing with women’s issues, Jordan exposed gendered abuse in the workplace and the prevalence of sexual violence. The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings encourages readers to draw a historical trajectory from Jordan’s pioneering literary activism to the writings of contemporary journalists and novelists whose work continues to fuel discussions of gender, feminism, and crime, raising questions about who gets to tell women’s stories, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
This renowned history of intersex in America has been comprehensively updated to reflect recent shifts in attitudes, bioethics, and medical and legal practices. In Bodies in Doubt, Elizabeth Reis traces the changing definitions, perceptions, and medical management of intersex (atypical sex development) in America from the colonial period to the present. Arguing that medical practice must be understood within its broader cultural context, Reis demonstrates how deeply physicians have been influenced by social anxieties about marriage, heterosexuality, and same-sex desire throughout American history In this second edition, Reis adds two new chapters, a new preface, and a revised introduction to assess recent dramatic shifts in attitudes, bioethics, and medical and legal practices. Human rights organizations have declared early genital surgeries a form of torture and abuse, but doctors continue to offer surgical "repair," and parents continue to seek it for their children. While many are hearing the human rights call, controversies persist, and Reis explains why best practices in this field remain fiercely contested.
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