This detailed study of the life of a Jamaican plantation community during slavery and the post-emancipation period is based on archaeological investigations as well as more traditional documentary sources. The family and household structure of the slave population is analysed and linked to the physical layout of the village. A comprehensive picture of the material culture of the plantation workers is facilitated by sources, and covers everything from foodways to clothing, ornament and architecture.
Conventional wisdom holds that same-sex marriage is a purely modern innovation, a concept born of an overtly modern lifestyle that was unheard of in nineteenth century America. But as Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates in this eye-opening book, same-sex marriage is hardly new. Born in 1777, Charity Bryant was raised in Massachusetts. A brilliant and strong-willed woman with a clear attraction for her own sex, Charity found herself banished from her family home at age twenty. She spent the next decade of her life traveling throughout Massachusetts, working as a teacher, making intimate female friends, and becoming the subject of gossip wherever she lived. At age twenty-nine, still defiantly single, Charity visited friends in Weybridge, Vermont. There she met a pious and studious young woman named Sylvia Drake. The two soon became so inseparable that Charity decided to rent rooms in Weybridge. In 1809, they moved into their own home together, and over the years, came to be recognized, essentially, as a married couple. Revered by their community, Charity and Sylvia operated a tailor shop employing many local women, served as guiding lights within their church, and participated in raising their many nieces and nephews. Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of their extraordinary forty-four year union. Drawing on an array of original documents including diaries, letters, and poetry, Cleves traces their lives in sharp detail. Providing an illuminating glimpse into a relationship that turns conventional notions of same-sex marriage on their head, and reveals early America to be a place both more diverse and more accommodating than modern society might imagine, Charity and Sylvia is a significant contribution to our limited knowledge of LGBT history in early America.
A well-researched historical novel about Achsa Sprague (1827-1862), a Vermont woman and itinerant medium who gave popular lectures on Spiritualism, the abolition of slavery, women's rights, and prison reform.
Experience Civil War historic sites and small towns that can be found nowhere else in America Today, throughout Vermont, it is possible to identify hundreds and hundreds of Civil War–related sites. Throughout Vermont are soldier homes, halls where war meetings encouraged enlistments, churches where soldier funerals were held and abolitionists spoke, monuments to those who served, hospital sites, and homes where women gathered to make items for the soldiers. The Vermont State House is a virtual Civil War museum. A building survives in Woodstock where the war was administered. Cemeteries hold the gravestones of many of the 34,000 who fought. A field even exists where in 1803 a Quaker preacher heard a voice from above fortell a bloody war over slavery. With the help of this book, Civil War sites can be located as in no other state, taking the reader through the beautiful Vermont landscape of hill farms and small towns that looks more like the Civil War era than that of any other state.
'Luminous and moving. A story that asks who you can love and how, and a novel that gets to the heart of things; it certainly got to the heart of me.' Sunjeev Sahota, author of The Year of the Runaways The house is on Montpelier Parade- just across town, but it might as well be a different world. Working on the garden with his father one Saturday, Sonny is full of curiosity. Then the back door eases open and she comes down the path towards him. Vera. Chance meetings become shy arrangements, and soon Sonny is in love for the first time. Casting off his lonely life of dreams and quiet violence for this new, intoxicating encounter, he longs to know Vera, even to save her. But what is it that Vera isn't telling him? Unfolding in the sea-bright, rain-soaked Dublin of early spring, Montpelier Parade is a beautiful, cinematic novel about desire, longing, grief, hope and the things that remain unspoken. It is about how deeply we can connect with one another, and the choices we must also make alone.
