Selected Books
A Black Women's History of the United States by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9780807033555Publication Date: 2020-02-042021 NAACP Image Award Nominee: Outstanding Literary Work - Non-Fiction A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are--and have always been--instrumental in shaping our country In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today.
A Companion to American Women's History by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9781119522690Publication Date: 2020-11-13This collection incorporates the most influential and groundbreaking scholarship in the area of American women's history, featuring twenty-three original essays on critical themes and topics. It assesses the past thirty years of scholarship, capturing the ways that women's historians confront issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This second edition updates essays related to Indigenous women, slavery, the American Revolution, Civil War, the West, activism, labor, popular culture, civil rights, and feminism.
Decolonizing the Body by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9781648480621Publication Date: 2023-03-01Powerful, body-based practices to help you reclaim confidence, dignity, and self-worth. As a woman of color, you are more likely to experience oppression, discrimination, and physical or sexual violence in your lifetime. In addition, your family may have experienced generational trauma and systemic racism going back for centuries. This old and new trauma can manifest in both the mind and body. However, there are ways you can free yourself from this trauma, build confidence in yourself and your abilities, and restore your powerful sense of self. Written by a woman of color for women of color, Decolonizing the Body offers proven-effective somatic, body-centered practices to help you heal from systemic oppression, trust the profound wisdom of your own body, and reconnect with your true self. And by slowing down, cultivating a daily ritual, and setting strong boundaries, you can reclaim your inherent dignity and worth--as well as those aspects of yourself that you may have cast aside in an effort to survive. With this empowering guide, you'll discover: How bodies are colonized through systems of oppression Why slowing down is essential for healing How to listen to what your body needs How to create a space for ritual in your daily life How to strengthen feelings of capability How to cultivate community--starting with yourself. To decolonize the body is to become whole again, and to come home again. Let this book be your guide on this crucial journey.
Reshaping Women's History by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9780252042003Publication Date: 2018-09-18Award-winning women scholars from nontraditional backgrounds have often negotiated an academic track that leads through figurative--and sometimes literal--minefields. Their life stories offer inspiration, but also describe heartrending struggles and daunting obstacles. Reshaping Women's History presents autobiographical essays by eighteen accomplished scholar-activists who persevered through poverty or abuse, medical malpractice or family disownment, civil war or genocide.
Articles & Essays
- "Being a Trans Woman During Women's History Month" by Mari Brighe"The traditional writing of history would give you the impression that anything important ever accomplished was accomplished by men alone, ignoring the contributions of half the world's population most of the time. It's for this reason that March has been designated Women's History Month in the U.S. since 1987, when, for at least one month out of the year, the accomplishments of women throughout history are actually acknowledged. But, as a transgender woman, Women's History Month doesn't feel like it's for me."
- "How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect" by Martha S. Jones"Consider how black women did not take part in the mythical 1848 women’s meeting in Seneca Falls, New York. When we look for them in that year, we find that, instead, some of them were already at work demanding women’s rights, but they were doing so in black churches rather than in women’s conventions. And what about 1920 and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? Study of that hallmark moment reveals that, while some black women in the North and West had reason to celebrate, it was but a brief pause in their ongoing struggle for voting rights."
- "Meet Wendy Carlos: The Trans Godmother of Electronic Music" by Natasha MacDonald-Dupuis"In 1968, Wendy Carlos took a Moog synthesizer, an unknown instrument at the time, and electronically reconstructed Johann Sebastian Bach's "Brandenburg Concerto No. 3," among other pieces, into the world's first-ever platinum-selling classical album, "Switched on Bach." The record became the most influential "electronic" classical recording of all time, smashing the borders between classical and synthesized music. It won her three Grammys and sent a message to the world that a synthesizer was a musical instrument, rather than just an obscure machine used by professors in labs to make weird robot sounds"
US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed Joy Harjo as the 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress on June 19, 2019. Harjo was reappointed to a second term on April 30, 2020, and a third term on Nov. 19, 2020.
Joy Harjo is the first Native American poet to serve in the position—she is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 9, 1951, and is the author of nine books of poetry.
