summary
The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city s Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender.
At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how these women enslaved, fugitive, and free imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power.
Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley pl
by Sarah Lindenfeld Hall
Family history was a spark for
Better Luck Next Time, the latest novel by Julia Claiborne Johnson (Col ’81). Set in 1938 Reno, Nevada, then dubbed the world’s divorce capital, the action primarily takes place on the Flying Leap dude ranch, which provided a place for women to stay as they established state residency so they could get divorced. During the Depression, Johnson’s father worked as a cowboy at a Nevada divorce ranch. The similarities between the book and real life mostly end there, Johnson says, but the setting seemed like fertile territory to explore a place where men were the eye candy and women had some control. “A flip of the usual situation,” says Johnson, whose first book,