Author: Margaret Washington
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093747
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description
This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century America through the life of one of its most charismatic and influential characters: Sojourner Truth. In an in-depth account of this amazing activist, Margaret Washington unravels Sojourner Truth's world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation's most significant reform era. Born into bondage among the Hudson Valley Dutch in Ulster County, New York, Isabella was sold several times, married, and bore five children before fleeing in 1826 with her infant daughter one year before New York slavery was abolished. In 1829, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a domestic, preached, joined a religious commune, and then in 1843 had an epiphany. Changing her name to Sojourner Truth, she began traveling the country as a champion of the downtrodden and a spokeswoman for equality by promoting Christianity, abolitionism, and women's rights. Gifted in verbal eloquence, wit, and biblical knowledge, Sojourner Truth possessed an earthy, imaginative, homespun personality that won her many friends and admirers and made her one of the most popular and quoted reformers of her times. Washington's biography of this remarkable figure considers many facets of Sojourner Truth's life to explain how she became one of the greatest activists in American history, including her African and Dutch religious heritage; her experiences of slavery within contexts of labor, domesticity, and patriarchy; and her profoundly personal sense of justice and intuitive integrity. Organized chronologically into three distinct eras of Truth's life, Sojourner Truth's America examines the complex dynamics of her times, beginning with the transnational contours of her spirituality and early life as Isabella and her embroilments in legal controversy. Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge then propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write. Throughout the book, Washington explores Truth's passionate commitment to family and community, including her vision for a beloved community that extended beyond race, gender, and socioeconomic condition and embraced a common humanity. For Sojourner Truth, the significant model for such communalism was a primitive, prophetic Christianity. Illustrated with dozens of images of Truth and her contemporaries, Sojourner Truth's America draws a delicate and compelling balance between Sojourner Truth's personal motivations and the influences of her historical context. Washington provides important insights into the turbulent cultural and political climate of the age while also separating the many myths from the facts concerning this legendary American figure.

Author: Carleton Mabee
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814754848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Using original sources, Mabee and Newhouse construct a biography of Truth that seeks to shed the myths that have grown up around her. Though serving a positive function, these myths, they say, distort perceptions about the history of blacks and women in America. While they preserve her reputation as a leader and visionary, they burst some bubbles--among them, the authenticity of the famous "Ar'n't I A Woman?" speech. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Larry G. Murphy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This simple narrative of an extraordinary life explores the power of a disinterested commitment to right and truth. Sojourner Truth: A Biography traces this remarkable woman's life from her birth through adulthood and to her death in 1883. Drawing from public pronouncements, personal correspondence, and journalistic accounts of key historical actors, it follows her extraordinary career and sets the events of her life in the larger context of U.S. social and political history. The years during which Truth lived bore witness to tremendous social and religious ferment in the United States, including, of course, the Civil War. Truth was directly involved, indeed an influential figure, in many contentious issues of the period, from slavery and abolition to religious revivalism, women's rights, temperance, racial reconciliation, and more. Her story serves as a prism through which readers will better understand how these complex matters were adjudicated in 19th-century America. More than that, her life demonstrates what courage, character, and principle can accomplish against all odds.

Author: Sojourner Truth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
At a time when the cooperation between white abolitionists and African Americans was limited, as was the alliance between the woman suffrage movement and the abolitionists, Sojourner Truth was a figure that brought all factions together by her skills as a public speaker and by her common sense. She worked with acumen to claim and actively gain rights for all human beings, starting with those who were enslaved, but not excluding women, the poor, the homeless, and the unemployed. Truth believed that all people could be enlightened about their actions and choose to behave better if they were educated by others, and persistently acted upon these beliefs.

Author: Sojourner Truth
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241472377
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
'I am a woman's rights. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I am as strong as any man that is now' A former slave and one of the most powerful orators of her time, Sojourner Truth fought for the equal rights of Black women throughout her life. This selection of her impassioned speeches is accompanied by the words of other inspiring African-American female campaigners from the nineteenth century. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

Author: W. Terry Whalin
Publisher: Barbour Publishing
ISBN: 1624160840
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
For challenge and encouragement in your Christian life, read the life stories of the Heroes of the Faith. The novelized biographies of this series are inspiring and easy-to-read, ideal for Christians of any age or background. In Sojourner Truth, you’ll get to know the tall, powerful former slave whose biblically-based call for equality—for both blacks and women—secured her a place in American history. Appropriate for readers from junior high through adult, helpful for believers of any background, these biographies encourage greater Christian commitment through the example of heroes like Sojourner Truth.

Author: Andrea Pinkney
Publisher: Jump At The Sun
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
Biography of the life and times of a woman born into slavery who became a well-known abolitionist and crusader for women's rights.

Author: Gee Monte
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
A slave woman escapes with her infant daughter in the dead of winter then returns to the town she had escaped from to legally outwit her former master, winning freedom for her abused son. She then went on to fight for women's rights and laid the groundwork for allowing women to vote. All the while, risking her life to help other slaves and abolish slavery. Amazingly, she wasn't able to read or write but met with three presidents, hundreds of politicians, gave speeches to crowds all over the country, found jobs for freed slaves. She spoke in front of congress. Challenged the first desegregation laws and helped shape the future of America becoming a national hero during the Civil War. America's First Real Superhero nobody hears about, The Traveler of Truth (Sojourner Truth). This is not the normal boring documentary about Sojourner Truth. This is real. Her personal story. Why she escaped. The people she met. The problems she had to overcome. How she became so intertwined into American History and why the nation loved her. Quotes from my editor, "Gee. You slayed me. I am a better woman having read this. Thank You.""...You did such a tribute to her, bringing her to life and showing just how vibrant, honest and good this woman was. She is a yardstick to be measured by.... I am still crying."

Author: Yona Zeldis McDonough
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399539786
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
Almost 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, Sojourner Truth was mistreated by a streetcar conductor. She took him to court--and won! Before she was Sojourner Truth, she was known simply as Belle. Born a slave in New York sometime around 1797, she was later sold and separated from her family. Even after she escaped from slavery, she knew her work was not yet done. She changed her name and traveled, inspiring everyone she met and sharing her story until her death in 1883 at age eighty-six. In this easy-to-read biography, Yona Zeldis McDonough continues to share that remarkable story.

Author: Michael Staudenmaier
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849350981
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Founded in Chicago in 1969 from the rubble of the recently crumbled SDS, the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) brought working-class consciousness to the forefront of New Left discourse, sending radicals back into the factories and thinking through the integration of radical politics into everyday realities. Through the influence of founding members like Noel Ignatiev and Don Hamerquist, STO took a Marxist approach to the question of race and revolution, exploring the notion of “white skin privilege,” and helping to lay the groundwork for the discipline of critical race studies. Michael Staudenmaier is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois-Urbana.