Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue our focus on “Our American Story.” This week another selection of SIU Press books that explore the individual and collective stories that have built our nation and our state. We'll explore biographies of famous figures to the histories of the groups who came together to form America as we know it.
Our focus remains on the diversity that has built our nation in the form of books addressing specific time periods in American history that underscore the role Illinois and the Midwest have played in weaving this national tapestry.
The twentieth century has redefined the meaning of combat and expanded the territory of war to include women in larger numbers than ever before. When the technological advances of modern war began to target civilians, the home front became the front line. Women took an active part in war whether or not by choice, often by moving into occupations previously closed to them. Women covered wars for their newspapers, wrote war propaganda for their governments, published their wartime diaries, described fighting alongside men, and used wartime experience for their fiction and poetry. In Her War Story: Twentieth-Century Women Write About War, Sayre P. Sheldon anthologizes the work of women writers documenting war from experience as well as those imagining it, just as male writers had done for centuries before them.
In Vote & Voice, Wendy B. Sharer explores the rhetorical and pedagogical practices through which two prominent postsuffrage organizations—the League of Women Voters and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—challenged the conventions of male-dominated political discourse and trained women as powerful rhetors. Vote and Voice is the first book-length study to address the writing and speaking practices of members of women’s political organizations in the decade after the suffrage movement. Because they were largely absent from diplomatic circles and political parties, post-suffrage women’s organizations developed rhetorical practices of public discourse to push for reform within traditional politics.
Kaskaskia, Illinois, once the state’s capital, torn from the state by flood waters, and now largely forgotten, was once the home to a couple who helped transform the region in the 1720s from a frontier village to a civil society. Indigenous and French intermarriages were central to colonial Illinois society, and the coupling of Marguerite, whose full name translates to Dawn’s Light Woman, and Nicolas Franchomme, in particular, was critical to expanding the jurisdiction of French law. Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person tell their story in Dawn's Light Woman & Nicolas Franchomme: Marriage and Law in the Illinois Country, which is also the story of the village of Kaskaskia during the 1720s.
a Look at these books and more this week on Inside The Blanket Fort.
