Sojourner Truth's America
About the Book
This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century America through the life of one of its most magnetic 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.Organized chronologically into three distinct eras of Truth's life, Sojourner Truth's America examines the complex dynamics of the times in which she acted, beginning with the transnational contours of her spirituality and early life as a slave. Washington then highlights Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge, which 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 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.
About the Author
Margaret Washington is a professor of history and American studies at Cornell University. She is the author of the award-winning book "A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs and the editor of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth.Reviews
"[A] wonderfully detailed and insightful account of Sojourner Truth's life."--The Journal of American History"This biography is admirable in its thoroughness and in Washington's commitment to her subject and is well worth consulting."--Publishers Weekly
"This scholarly biography, meticulously researched . . . is destined to be the definitive study for a generation. Highly recommended."--Choice
"An interesting and persuasive reading. By forcing us to give up a sanitized, desexualized picture of Truth . . . Washington does us a great service--one of many performed by this exciting and comprehensive book."--Women's Review of Books
"This landmark study sets a new standard for the life-and-times genre of biography writing."--The Journal of Southern History
"Sojourner Truth's America offers new insights into Truth's journey from slavery to self-emancipation. . . . Insightful and painstakingly researched."--Women: A Cultural Review
Blurbs
"A solid, welcome addition to the literature on antebellum women, blacks, religion, and reform. This book will be around for a very long time."--Paul E. Johnson, coauthor of The Early American Republic, 1789-1829
"In this beautifully rendered account, Margaret Washington wields the extraordinary life of a single black woman to illuminate and evaluate the dynamic cultural and political landscape of nineteenth-century America. Engaging enslavement and emancipation, religious perfectionism and social activism, civil war and civil rights, Sojourner Truth's America captures a radical vision of a better world and the challenges to achieving it."--Nancy A. Hewitt, author of Southern Discomfort: Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s
"In a tour de force of extraordinary research, powerful writing, and compassionate historical reconstruction, Margaret Washington has restored to us the full life of the woman later known as Sojourner Truth. I particularly appreciated the careful, original, illuminating account of Truth's early years as a Dutch-African slave. Women's history, the history of slavery, and U.S. history in general are the richer for this important book."--Ellen Carol DuBois, coauthor of Through Women's Eyes: An American History with Documents
Awards
• Winner, Darlene Clark Hine Award, 2010• Winner, Choice: Outstanding Academic Titles, 2010
• Winner, Letitia Woods Brown Prize, 2009
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