Diary of a Colonial Wife

Diary of a Colonial Wife PDF Author: Joan Sharwood-Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book tells the story of a colonial service wife extending nearly twenty years, from the beginning of World War II to the eve of Nigerian independence. No sooner had the author arrived in 1939 than she had to learn to deal with her husband's strange life of lonely stations, horse treks, encounters with snakes in bat-ridden rest houses, and to get to know the language in the people. With the fall of France in 1940, Nigeria became a frontier province and her husband became an army officer in cahrge of transfrontier intelligence. She became his adjutant and cypher clerk, and also hosted French officers and General de Gaulle.

Diary of a Colonial Wife

Diary of a Colonial Wife PDF Author: Joan Sharwood-Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book tells the story of a colonial service wife extending nearly twenty years, from the beginning of World War II to the eve of Nigerian independence. No sooner had the author arrived in 1939 than she had to learn to deal with her husband's strange life of lonely stations, horse treks, encounters with snakes in bat-ridden rest houses, and to get to know the language in the people. With the fall of France in 1940, Nigeria became a frontier province and her husband became an army officer in cahrge of transfrontier intelligence. She became his adjutant and cypher clerk, and also hosted French officers and General de Gaulle.

One Colonial Woman's World

One Colonial Woman's World PDF Author: Michelle Marchetti Coughlin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781558499669
Category : Connecticut
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book reconstructs the life of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (1673--1758), the author of what may be the earliest surviving diary by an American woman. A native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who later moved to Connecticut, she began her diary at the age of fifteen and kept it intermittently until she was well into her seventies. A previously overlooked resource, the diary contains entries on a broad range of topics as well as poems, recipes, folk and herbal medical remedies, religious meditations, and financial accounts. An extensive collection of letters by Coit and her female relatives has also survived, shedding further light on her experiences. Michelle Marchetti Coughlin combs through these writings to create a vivid portrait of a colonial American woman and the world she inhabited. Coughlin documents the activities of daily life as well as dramas occasioned by war, epidemics, and political upheaval. Though Coit's opportunities were circumscribed by gender norms of the day, she led a rich and varied life, not only running a household and raising a family, but reading, writing, traveling, transacting business, and maintaining a widespread network of social and commercial connections. She also took a lively interest in the world around her and played an active role in her community. Coit's long life covered an eventful period in American history, and this book explores the numerous -- and sometimes surprising -- ways in which her personal history was linked to broader social and political developments. It also provides insight into the lives of countless other colonial American women whose history remains largely untold.

The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker

The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker PDF Author: Elaine Forman Crane
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book Here

Book Description
The journal of Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker (1735-1807) is perhaps the single most significant personal record of eighteenth-century life in America from a woman's perspective. Drinker wrote in her diary nearly continuously between 1758 and 1807, from two years before her marriage to the night before her last illness. The extraordinary span and sustained quality of the journal make it a rewarding document for a multitude of historical purposes. One of the most prolific early American diarists—her journal runs to thirty-six manuscript volumes—Elizabeth Drinker saw English colonies evolve into the American nation while Drinker herself changed from a young unmarried woman into a wife, mother, and grandmother. Her journal entries touch on every contemporary subject political, personal, and familial. Focusing on different stages of Drinker's personal development within the domestic context, this abridged edition highlights four critical phases of her life cycle: youth and courtship, wife and mother, middle age in years of crisis, and grandmother and family elder. There is little that escaped Elizabeth Drinker's quill, and her diary is a delight not only for the information it contains but also for the way in which she conveys her world across the centuries.

Colonial Intimacies

Colonial Intimacies PDF Author: Ann Marie Plane
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1668 Sarah Ahhaton, a married Native American woman of the Massachusetts Bay town of Punkapoag, confessed in an English court to having committed adultery. For this crime she was tried, found guilty, and publicly whipped and shamed; she contritely promised that if her life were spared, she would return to her husband and "continue faithfull to him during her life yea although hee should beat her againe...."These events, recorded in the court documents of colonial Massachusetts, may appear unexceptional; in fact, they reflect a rapidly changing world. Native American marital relations and domestic lives were anathema to English Christians: elite men frequently took more than one wife, while ordinary people could dissolve their marriages and take new partners with relative ease. Native marriage did not necessarily involve cohabitation, the formation of a new household, or mutual dependence for subsistence. Couples who wished to separate did so without social opprobrium, and when adultery occurred, the blame centered not on the "fallen" woman but on the interloping man. Over time, such practices changed, but the emergence of new types of "Indian marriage" enabled the legal, social, and cultural survival of New England's native peoples. The complex interplay between colonial power and native practice is treated with subtlety and wisdom in Colonial Intimacies. Ann Marie Plane uses travel narratives, missionary tracts, and legal records to reconstruct a previously neglected history. Plane's careful reading of fragmentary sources yields both conclusive and fittingly speculative findings, and her interpretations form an intimate picture, moving and often tragic, of the familial bonds of Native Americans in the first century and a half of European contact.

Marriage and Modernity

Marriage and Modernity PDF Author: Rochona Majumdar
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390809
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book Here

Book Description
An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, “ancient” social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an “Indian” tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced “traditions”—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new “marketplace” for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India. Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.

Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806

Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806 PDF Author:
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 162466752X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This outstanding collection makes available for the first time a remarkable range of primary sources that will enrich courses on women as well as Latin American history more broadly. Within these pages are captivating stories of enslaved African and indigenous women who protest abuse; of women who defend themselves from charges of witchcraft, cross-dressing, and infanticide; of women who travel throughout the empire or are left behind by the men in their lives; and of women’s strategies for making a living in a world of cross-cultural exchanges. Jaffary and Mangan's excellent Introduction and annotations provide context and guide readers to think critically about crucial issues related to the intersections of gender with conquest, religion, work, family, and the law." —Sarah Chambers, University of Minnesota

Letters, Journals, & Diaries of ye Colonial America

Letters, Journals, & Diaries of ye Colonial America PDF Author: Don Corbly
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0557180732
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Get Book Here

Book Description
These 93 stories provide a unique insight into the lives of mostly ordinary colonial people who lived in extraordinary times. Read the first description of the New World in the exploring ship captain's logbook, a letter from the first indentured servant, and the trial of Bridget Bishop, the first person hung for witchcraft in Salem. Compare the diary of the richest man in Virginia to Mary Cooper's diary wherein she longed for rest from her labors.Read 16-year-old George Washington's Rules of Civility, the pathetic letter from near-destitute indentured Elizabeth Sprig, Benjamin Franklin's account of Grime's confession and hanging, John Adams' defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, and the first prayer given in the First Continental Congress.Read 16-year-old Sally Wister's diary of the battle of Germantown, a journal of the participants in the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere's account of his Midnight Ride, and newspaper accounts of President Washington's death and funeral.

Emma's Journal

Emma's Journal PDF Author: Marissa Moss
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780152163259
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 60

Get Book Here

Book Description
From 1774 to 1776, Emma describes in her journal her stay in Boston, where she witnesses the British blockade and spies for the American militia. Features hand-printed text, drawings, and marginal notes.

Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America

Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America PDF Author: William J. Scheick
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813158591
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book Here

Book Description
Should women concern themselves with reading other than the Bible? Should women attempt to write at all? Did these activities violate the hierarchy of the universe and men's and women's places in it? Colonial American women relied on the same authorities and traditions as did colonial men, but they encountered special difficulties validating themselves in writing. William Scheick explores logonomic conflict in the works of northeastern colonial women, whose writings often register anxiety not typical of their male contemporaries. This study features the poetry of Mary English and Anne Bradstreet, the letter-journals of Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince, the autobiographical prose of Elizabeth Hanson and Elizabeth Ashbridge, and the political verse of Phyllis Wheatley. These works, along with the writings of other colonial women, provide especially noteworthy instances of bifurcations emanating from American colonial women's conflicted confiscation of male authority. Scheick reveals subtle authorial uneasiness and subtextual tensions caused by the attempt to draw legitimacy from male authorities and traditions.

A Midwife's Tale

A Midwife's Tale PDF Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307772985
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 459

Get Book Here

Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, "A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" (The New York Times Book Review). Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale.