History 246 Reading Guide


“Women’s History”—“Women History”:  Introduction

Thinking Historically, and Thinking about the Historical Past

  • "What’s past is prologue." William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c.1610-11)
  • "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
  • "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing." Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change (1935)
  • "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)

Short readings

  • Conversation between Miss Tilney and Miss Morland from Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1803).  LINK
  • Victor Konrad, "Seasonal Round of Activities, 1850s, Tobias Walker Farm, Kennebunk, Maine," The Harraseeket Project, Freeport, Maine (1984).  LINK

Course Texts:

  • Laurel Ulrich, Good Wives:  Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (1982; reprinted 1991).
  • Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett:  The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-century New York (1998).
  • Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow:  Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (2nd edition 2010; orig. pub. 1986).
  • Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (1925; new edition 1999).