Offers a rare view inside the university boardroom, to show the vital role Black women educational leaders played in ensuring access and equity for all.

Demonstrates that the intersection between race, gender, and class formed the backbone of Progressive-Era debates over sex education, the policing of sexuality, and the prevention of venereal disease.

A look at how Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and American voters invoked ideas of gender and race in the fiercely contested 2016 US presidential election.

Examines material culture and the act of institution creation, especially through architecture and landscape, to recount a deeper history of the lives of African American women in the post-Civil War South.

Should immigrants have to pass a literacy test in order to enter the United States? Progressive-Era Americans debated this question for more than twenty years, and by the time the literacy test became law in 1917, the debate had transformed the way Americans understood immigration, and created the logic that shaped immigration restriction policies throughout the twentieth century. Jeanne Petit argues that the literacy test debate was about much more than reading ability or the virtues of education. It also tapped into broader concerns about the relationship between gender, sexuality, race, and American national identity. The congressmen, reformers, journalists, and pundits who supported the literacy test hoped to stem the tide of southern and eastern European immigration. To make their case, these restrictionists portrayed illiterate immigrant men as dissipated, dependent paupers, immigrant women as brood mares who bore too many children, and both as a eugenic threat to the nation's racial stock. Opponents of the literacy test argued that the new immigrants were muscular, virile workers and nurturing, virtuous mothers who would strengthen the race and nation. Moreover, the debaters did not simply battle about what social reformer Grace Abbott called 'the sort of men and women we want.' They also defined as normative the men and women they were - unquestionably white, unquestionably American, and unquestionably fit to shape the nation's future. Jeanne D. Petit is associate professor of history at Hope College.

Though Susan B. Anthony is best remembered for leading the campaign for women's suffrage, she worked in multiple movements for equality beyond women's right to vote, including antislavery, Native American rights, temperance, and labor reform. In doing so she forged alliances with other activists to forward a broad social justice agenda, but she also faced opposition from these reformers on how best to achieve this goal.

Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights explores the diversity of women's activism in nineteenth-century American reform movements, focusing on how Anthony and other women reformers shaped those movements and our memories of them. The essays here chart the long career of Anthony in this rich historical context of women's activism and display the efforts of a wide variety of women, and the challenges they faced, in the continued struggle for equality.

Christine L. Ridarsky, Rochester City Historian, is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Rochester. Mary M. Huth is retired assistant director of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester.

Manhood Enslaved reconstructs the lives of three male captives to bring greater intellectual and historical clarity to the muted lives of enslaved peoples in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century central New Jersey, where blacks were held in bondage for nearly two centuries. The book contributes to an evolving body of historical scholarship arguing that the lives of bond people in America were shaped not only by the powerful forces of racial oppression, but also by their own notions of gender. The book uses previously understudied, white-authored, nineteenth-century literature about central New Jersey slaves as a point of departure. Reading beyond the racist assumptions of the authors, it contends that the precarious day-to-day existence of the three protagonists -- Yombo Melick, Dick Melick, and Quamino Buccau (Smock) -- provides revealing evidence about the various elements of "slave manhood" that gave real meaning to their oppressed lives.

Kenneth E. Marshall is Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York at Oswego.

This collection builds on decades of interdisciplinary work by historians of African American women as well as scholars of feminist and critical race theory, bridging the gap between well-developed theories of race, gender, and power and the practice of historical research. It examines how racial and gender identity is constructed from individuals' lived experiences in specific historical contexts, such as westward expansion, civil rights movements, or economic depression as well as by national and transnational debates over marriage, citizenship and sexual mores. All of these essays considermultiple aspects of identity, including sexuality, class, religion, and nationality, among others, but the volume emphasizes gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history.

Contributors: Deborah Gray White, Michele Mitchell, Vivian May, Carol Moseley Braun, Rashauna Johnson, Hélène Quanquin, Kendra Taira Field, Michelle Kuhl, Meredith Clark-Wiltz. Carol Faulkner is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Syracuse University.
Alison M. Parker is Professor and Chair of the History Department at SUNY College at Brockport.

After her conversion to Christianity and baptism at sixteen, Jennie Johnson followed the call to preach. Raised in an African Canadian abolitionist community in Ontario, she immigrated to the United States to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Seminary at Wilberforce University. On an October evening in 1909 she stood before a group of Free Will Baptist preachers in the small town of Goblesville, Michigan, and was received into ordained ministry. She was the first ordained woman to serve in Canada, and spent her life building churches and working for racial justice on both sides of the national border. In this first extended study of Jennie Johnson's fascinating and understudied life, Nina Reid-Maroney reconstructs Johnson's nearly one-hundred-year story -- from her upbringing in a slave refugee settlement in nineteenth-century Canada to her work as an activist and Christian minister in the modern civil rights movement. This critical biography of a figure who outstripped the racial and religious barriers of her time offers a unique and powerful view of the struggle for freedom in North America. Nina Reid-Maroney is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Huron University College at Western (London, Ontario) and the coeditor of "The Promised Land: History and Historiography of Black Experience in Chatham-Kent's Settlements".