Illinois Press Book Blog

Searching for illustrations for my book, Breadwinners, recapped the challenges—and rewards—of writing about working women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Documentation of women who worked as servants, seamstresses, saleswomen, and factory hands has always been thin. The popular press tended to depict working women as unruly servants or downtrodden seamstresses.

My book contests these stereotypes by telling the stories of women who used their wage work to articulate a new sense of independence and to claim full rights of citizenship. After weeks of archival research, I was thrilled when I found images that captured the spirit of the women I knew so well from their diaries, letters, speeches, and investigations. My favorite discovery now graces the cover of the book: Maggie Hinchey, an Irish American laundry worker leading a parade of working women dressed in white to signal their support for suffrage.

In 1913 and 1914, Hinchey, an organizer for the Women’s Trade Union League, stormed the states of New York and New Jersey to explain working women’s need for the ballot. Her powerful appeal earned her an invitation to spread her message west, to union men in Montana and Nevada. This picture of Maggie Hinchey captures working women’s determination to be recognized as breadwinners and shows how they organized to achieve their goals.

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Lara Vapnek, assistant professor of history at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, is author of the new book Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920.

 
Gary Cialdella discusses his new book The Calumet Region: An American Place on WGN-TV’s Midday News.

As a first-time author, the whole meeting-the-readers idea is still pretty new to me. I’ve spent virtually all of my writing life working in a vacuum, very rarely having any contact with anyone who reads my work. That suits the shy side of my nature just fine, but promoting a new book offered a different experience that I thought might be interesting, or with luck, maybe even fun. It turned out to be that and more.

My book, King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records, tells the tale of an innovative and important record company that operated in Cincinnati, Ohio, from 1943 to 1971. I know that many people in Cincinnati are interested in the history and legacy of King Records—and feel strongly that King has never received the credit it deserves as a pioneering American record company—so I obviously hoped to reach that core group with the book. I was fairly confident they’d at least appreciate King of the Queen City. What I hadn’t expected was their gratitude.

I felt that gratitude most strongly at two Cincinnati events, the annual multi-author Books by the Banks festival, sponsored by the Cincinnati Public Library and held downtown at the Duke Energy Convention Center, and a book signing the next day at Shake It Records, the coolest record store I’ve ever had the pleasure of shopping at.

The first book I signed at Shake It was for a woman who had to rush off to catch her daughter’s soccer game. She bought a couple of books and promised to buy several more for holiday presents. She then said, sort of apologetically, “I know you’ve heard this a million times already, but I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing this book. I know it must have been hard, and my husband and I thank you for sticking with it.”

Well, no, I haven’t heard that a million times already, but I heard it over and over at those two gatherings. Most of the thanks came from folks who said they “had been waiting years for this” and/or that it was a story “that needed to be told.” The high point for me was hearing that from Zella Nathan, the nonagenarian widow of King Records founder Syd Nathan.

It was highly gratifying for a new author to sell some books at these two functions and fairly surreal to be asked to autograph them. I look forward to hearing from people that they enjoyed reading it and that they’ve recommended it to friends. But being thanked so profusely by so many people for doing what was essentially a labor of love—that goes way beyond gratifying. That will take some thinking about.

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Jon Hartley Fox is the author of King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records.

Coming to New York to launch I Feel a Song Coming On, my new biography of songwriter Jimmy McHugh, was certainly quite a contrast to the way any of my previous books has entered the world. Leaving my home in Oxford, UK, at 5.30 am for London’s Heathrow airport was an early start on the first day, and by the time I reached the Zankel Hall for Michael Feinstein’s McHugh concert that same evening, it was half past midnight—British time—when the show began. I mustered some kind of coherence for an onstage interview with Michael, helped by McHugh’s grandson Jim’s excellent and witty memories of the great songsmith.

By the time I left the after show reception at the Russian Tea Room, I had been awake for 24 hours. But after a brief sleep it was time to be up bright and early for a visit to WGBO in Newark. The same studio and the same interviewer (Andrew Meyer) whom I’d met on the promo tour for my New History of Jazz in 2001. That book had originally been scheduled to be launched on 12 September 2001 with a party at the Knitting Factory. Obviously the tragic events of the previous day made that impossible, and so my tour took place in October, with a launch party at a hastily cleaned up Knitting Factory club that still looked and smelt somewhat like a Pompeii exhibit.

Obviously traveling around talking about a jazz book in those somber times was light relief for some radio and tv shows, but I remember that entire fall book tour of 2001 had an air of unreality about it.

This time any air of unreality was to do with the marvelous events that had been organized in New York to get the McHugh book going. On the Friday of my brief tour, after a couple of other short interviews and much discussion of future marketing, there was a signing at Barnes and Noble, opposite Lincoln Center. Some of my author friends had been pessimistic— “You won’t get many people along,” “If anybody is there they won’t be in a book buying mood,”—that kind of thing. They could hardly have been more wrong. A great, friendly crowd, marvelous music from Wesla Whitfield, and a gracious interview by Tom Santopietro. And judging by the ache in my right wrist afterwards, I must have sold and signed a lot of books!

Thanks to everyone at Illinois University Press, Barnes and Noble, and Jimmy McHugh Music for making this flying visit a musical, social and commercial success!

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Alyn Shipton is a jazz critic for the Times of London and a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio. He is the author of the new book I Feel a Song Coming On: The Life of Jimmy McHugh.

Jennifer Ring, author of the new book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball, was interviewed by Baseball Digest.

BBD: Why do you think Ken Burns gave women’s baseball very little coverage in the Baseball documentary series?

JR: For the same reason that most people don’t think that excluding women from baseball is an issue. We tend to just assume that baseball is for boys…because it was intentionally presented, or marketed, as a “maker of men” throughout the twentieth century. As Zane Grey wrote, “All boys love baseball. If they don’t, they’re not boys.” I don’t think Ken Burns was particularly interested in documenting the history of women in baseball…it didn’t occur to him, or he didn’t know the history existed, and didn’t go looking for it. Bottom line: he didn’t put it in the documentary because he didn’t care about women’s baseball.

The Church of Jesus Christ blog has posted an engaging interview with Richard Hughes, author of the new book Christian America and the Kingdom of God.

Q: Professor, this book was published this year, and I assume finished late last year. If you could write an epilogue, what would you include?

A: An epilogue could well focus on the health care debate — an issue that clearly reveals how profoundly unchristian “Christian America” really is. The biblical vision of the kingdom of God calls on Christians to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, and to heal the suffering.  Remember Matthew 25 where those kinds of questions are really the only criteria for entering the kingdom of God, and the health care debate fits beautifully into the struggle between the sheep and the goats that we find depicted in Matthew 25.

I might also include the current flap in the state of Texas over the role Christianity should play in the history books adopted for the school children of that state. The Texas Board of Education has appointed six “experts” to offer advice on what should be included in those books and what should not. 

Richard Hughes, author of the new book Christian America and the Kingdom of God, was quoted yesterday in a San Antonio Express-News column on the debate in Texas over how Christianity’s role in the founding of America should be portrayed in public school textbooks.

“It is absolutely right to suggest that Puritans who settled New England came here with a vision for a Christian commonwealth. It is absolutely wrong to suggest that America’s founders had that same vision. They simply didn’t.”

Many of the Founding Fathers were connected with churches and many were not, he said. Letters written by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, indicated he held the Christian church in utter contempt, the religion professor said. Jefferson viewed Jesus as a moral teacher but believed that churches had corrupted those teachings, Hughes said.

At Bully Bloggers, Ira Livingston, co-editor of the recent University of Illinois Press book Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader, takes on Michael Berube’s recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay “What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies.”

Cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall is Berube’s primary foil in the essay—the one alongside whom all others fail to measure up– but Berube also cites approvingly the hard-hitting early work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson; the unflinchingly reflexive work on academic labor by Marc Bosquet, Cary Nelson, Andrew Ross, and Jeffrey Williams; and the work of cultural-studies emissaries into other disciplines; Berube mentions Mike Davis and Edward Soja in urban studies.

Notice anything about the scholars in this list?  Yep, they’re all men.

Mia Mask, author of the new book Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, was interviewed on New York’s CBS affiliate WCBS-TV .

David Beito and Linda Royster Beito, authors of the new book Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power, penned an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times championing Howard’s influence on the civil rights movement.

Fifty-four years ago today, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy visiting family in Mississippi, was abducted, mutilated and slain after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. Several days later, his horribly disfigured body was fished out of the Tallahatchie River. Many such tragedies had previously happened to black Americans and then been ignored. The Till case was different because of the efforts of a flamboyant and wealthy black planter and surgeon, T.R.M. Howard.

Howard’s place in history has been woefully slighted. Without him, we might never have heard of Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers or Operation PUSH. Howard was the crucial link connecting the Till slaying and the rise of the modern civil rights movement.