Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we a dive into another selection of SIU Press titles in celebration of Women’s History Month.
In We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women, Shirley Wilson Logan analyzes the distinctive rhetorical features in the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women, concentrating on the public discourse of club and church women from 1880 until 1900. Logan develops each chapter in this illustrated study around a feature of public address as best exemplified in the oratory of a particular woman speaker of the era. She analyzes not only speeches but also editorials, essays, and letters. Joyce Irene Middleton from the University of Rochester says, “As a book that brings rhetorical theory, nineteenth-century African American women writers, and feminist discourse together in one source, this research and writing is extremely valuable both for future scholarship and classroom use.”
Written in 1927 but barred from timely publication by the Lincoln family, The Dark Days of Abraham Lincoln's Widow, as Revealed by Her Own Letters is based on nearly two dozen intimate letters written between Mary Lincoln and her close friend Myra Bradwell mainly during the former's 1875 incarceration in an insane asylum. By the 1920s most accounts of Mrs. Lincoln focused on her negative qualities and dismissed her as "crazy." Bradwell's granddaughter Myra Helmer Pritchard wrote this distinctly sympathetic manuscript at the behest of her mother, who wished to vindicate Mary Lincoln in the public eye by printing the private correspondence. Pritchard fervently defends Mrs. Lincoln's conduct and sanity, arguing that she was not insane but rather the victim of an overzealous son who had his mother committed. While leaving the manuscript intact, historian Jason Emerson has enhanced it with an introduction and detailed annotations, filling in factual gaps and analyzing Pritchard’s interpretations.
After portraying Mary Lincoln in hundreds of performances and giving lectures over a more than thirty-year career, Donna D. McCreary has fielded every imaginable inquiry about the First Lady. Gathered in her book Mary Lincoln Demystified: Frequently Asked Questions about Abraham’s Wife, which won a 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award in “Books, Scholarly,” readers will find answers to the most frequently asked questions to come from live audiences. This first question-and-answer book arises directly from a public’s enduring curiosity with one the country’s most important historical figures. Decades of conversations with audiences, scholars, and relatives of the Todd family frame McCreary’s intimate and devoted research to offer a new and unique portrait of the most tragic First Lady.
A look at these titles and more on this edition of Inside The Blanket Fort.
