Sojourner Truth's America

Sojourner Truth's America PDF 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.

Sojourner Truth's America

Sojourner Truth's America PDF Author: Margaret Washington
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093747
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 522

Get Book Here

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.

Sojourner Truth's America

Sojourner Truth's America PDF Author: Margaret Washington
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093747
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 522

Get Book Here

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.

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth PDF Author: Isabelle Kinnard Richman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136175164
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Although Sojourner Truth was born into bondage and oppression, in liberation she emerged as a leader in the most radical causes of her era. She travelled the country as an outspoken and riveting presence, battling for the abolition of slavery and for women’s suffrage. While her role in these movements has been well-documented, biographers have frequently overlooked the influence of religion in Truth’s life. A participant in a number of the most significant religious movements of her day, including the Methodist Perfectionists, the Kingdom of Matthias, the Utopians, and the Spiritualists, Truth drew her notions of justice from religion. Sojourner Truth: Prophet of Social Justice provides a concise biography of this important figure, integrating her religious life in ways that shed light on Truth’s work and the religious movements of her day. Accompanied by primary source documents including political records, speech transcripts, and selections from her autobiography, Richman's biography provides a rich and accessible narrative of Truth's life and legacy.

Compelling Lives

Compelling Lives PDF Author: Christopher P. Momany
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666744646
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
What motivates people to work for justice? Recent studies have moved away from an emphasis on specific principles and toward an understanding of social and cultural forces. But what about times in history when distinct ideas were critical for positive change? The pre-Civil War abolitionist movement represents one such time. During an era when race-based slavery was buttressed by the machinery of civil law, many people developed arguments for freedom and equity that were grounded in divine law. There were Methodist witnesses for justice who lived by this distinction between civil and godly authority. While Methodism, as an institution, betrayed its founding opposition to slavery, many within the movement expressed a prophetic vision. A vibrant counterculture borrowed from Scripture and modern philosophy to argue for a “higher law” of justice. The world-changing ideas that overcame slavery in America were not disembodied and ethereal. They were mediated through the lives of multidimensional individuals. Sojourner Truth, Luther Lee, Laura Haviland, Henry Bibb, and Gilbert Haven were very different from one another. Yet they were animated by similar ideas, grounded in faith, and shaped by a common commitment to human rights.

The Dharma in Difficult Times

The Dharma in Difficult Times PDF Author: Stephen Cope
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 1401957285
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The sequel to the bestseller The Great Work of Your Life shows us the way through our darkest times to our truest calling. How do we make sense of our lives when our world seems to be falling apart? This beautifully written guide from scholar and teacher Stephen Cope shows that crises don’t have to derail us from our purpose—they can actually help us to find our purpose and step forward as our best selves. In this sequel to his best-loved book, The Great Work of Your Life, Cope again takes the ancient yogic text the Bhagavad Gita—the epic narrative of the warrior Arjuna’s odyssey of self-discovery—as a roadmap for our journey to our own true calling. Then he builds on that foundation using the stories and teachings of famous figures, as well as stories of ordinary people and his own rich personal experience. Along the way, we find striking examples for finding meaning and purpose in our lives: Gandhi shows how to tap our spiritual resources and listen for our inner voice Sojourner Truth and Henry David Thoreau inspire us to seek out the unmistakable signs of dharma in the midst of chaos Marian Anderson and Ruby Sales shed light on dharma’s mystic power and how we learn to trust in it And more In the spirit of Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, this book is required reading when you find yourself forging a path through crisis—or seeking a way through your darkest times to your truest self.

Four Steeples Over the City Streets

Four Steeples Over the City Streets PDF Author: Kyle T. Bulthuis
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479831344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In the fifty years after the Constitution was signed in 1787, New York City grew from a port town of 30,000 to a metropolis of over half a million residents. This rapid development transformed a once tightknit community and its religious experience. These effects were felt by Trinity Episcopal Church, which had presented itself as a uniting influence in New York, that connected all believers in social unity in the late colonial era. As the city grew larger, more impersonal, and socially divided, churches reformed around race and class-based neighborhoods. Trinity’s original vision of uniting the community was no longer possible. In Four Steeples over the City Streets, Kyle T. Bulthuis examines the histories of four famous church congregations in early Republic New York City—Trinity Episcopal, John Street Methodist, Mother Zion African Methodist, and St. Philip’s (African) Episcopal—to uncover the lived experience of these historical subjects, and just how religious experience and social change connected in the dynamic setting of early Republic New York. Drawing on a range of primary sources, Four Steeples over the City Streets reveals how these city churches responded to these transformations from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century. Bulthuis also adds new dynamics to the stories of well-known New Yorkers such as John Jay, James Harper, and Sojourner Truth. More importantly, Four Steeples over the City Streets connects issues of race, class, and gender, urban studies, and religious experience, revealing how the city shaped these churches, and how their respective religious traditions shaped the way they reacted to the city. (Publisher).

Enduring Truths

Enduring Truths PDF Author: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619213X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Richly illustrated, Enduring Truths examines the freed slave Sojourner Truth, who achieved fame in the nineteenth century as an orator and abolitionist, and who, though illiterate, earned a living on the anti-slavery lecture circuit in part by selling cartes-de-visite of herself. Cartes-de-visitesimilar in format to post cardsoffered a mode of mass communication back in the day. Even then, they were collectible novelties. Virtually every celebrity used them to purvey their own countenance in order to become part of the popular imagination of a society. Sojourner Truth aspired to nothing less. These photographs of her are famous, and they have been commented upon before, but they have not received the kind of in-depth, nuanced cultural analysis offered in this book."

We Will Be Free

We Will Be Free PDF Author: Nancy Koester
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467466808
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Sojourner Truth’s powerful voice calls to us through this evocative narrative of faith in action—and her words are more relevant than ever. Though born into slavery, Sojourner Truth would defy the limits placed upon her as a Black woman to become one of the nineteenth century’s most renowned female preachers and civil rights advocates. In We Will Be Free, Nancy Koester chronicles her spiritual journey as an enslaved woman, a working mother, and an itinerant preacher and activist. On Pentecost in 1827, the course of Sojourner Truth’s life was changed forever when she had a vision of Jesus calling her to preach. Though women could not be trained as ministers at the time, her persuasive speaking, powerful singing, and quick wit converted many to her social causes. During the Civil War, Truth campaigned for the Union to abolish slavery throughout the United States, and she personally recruited Black troops for the effort. Her activism carried her to Washington, DC, where she met Abraham Lincoln and ministered to refugees of Southern slavery. Truth’s faith-driven action continued throughout Reconstruction, as she aided freed people, campaigned for reparations, advocated for women’s rights, and defied segregation on public transportation. Sojourner Truth’s powerful voice once echoed in the streets of Washington and New York. Her passion rings out again in Nancy Koester’s vivid writing. As the legacy of slavery and segregation still looms over the United States today, students of American history, Christians, and all interested readers will find inspiration and illumination in Truth’s story.

Quaker Women, 1800–1920

Quaker Women, 1800–1920 PDF Author: Robynne Rogers Healey
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271096241
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This collection investigates the world of nineteenth-century Quaker women, bringing to light the issues and challenges Quaker women experienced and the dynamic ways in which they were active agents of social change, cultural contestation, and gender transgression in the nineteenth century. New research illuminates the complexities of Quaker testimonies of equality, slavery, and peace and how they were informed by questions of gender, race, ethnicity, and culture. The essays in this volume challenge the view that Quaker women were always treated equally with men and that people of color were welcomed into white Quaker activities. The contributors explore how diverse groups of Quaker women navigated the intersection of their theological positions and social conventions, asking how they challenged and supported traditional ideals of gender, race, and class. In doing so, this volume highlights the complexity of nineteenth-century Quakerism and the ways Quaker women put their faith to both expansive and limiting ends. Reaching beyond existing national studies focused solely on white American or British Quaker women, this interdisciplinary volume presents the most current research, providing a necessary and foundational resource for scholars, libraries, and universities. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Joan Allen, Richard C. Allen, Stephen W. Angell, Jennifer M. Buck, Nancy Jiwon Cho, Isabelle Cosgrave, Thomas D. Hamm, Julie L. Holcomb, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Linda Palfreeman, Hannah Rumball, and Janet Scott.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History

The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History PDF Author: Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019090657X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
From the first European encounters with Native American women to today's crisis of sexual assault, The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History boldly interprets the diverse history of women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America. Over twenty-nine chapters, this handbook illustrates how women's and gender history can shape how we view the past, looking at how gender influenced people's lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter is alive with colorful historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, and transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars across multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women's opinions to the suppression of Indian women's involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. Together and separately, these essays offer readers a deep understanding of the variety and centrality of women's lives to all dimensions of the American past, even as they show that the boundaries of "women," "American," and "history" have shifted across the centuries.