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“A Gentleman and an Officer”: A Military and Social History of James B. Griffin's Civil War

James B. Griffin

Judith N. McArthur and Orville Vernon Burton (eds)

In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina, and rode off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and the owner of ... More

In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina, and rode off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and the owner of sixty-one slaves when he joined Wade Hampton's elite Legion as a major of cavalry. This book features eighty of Griffin's letters written at the Virginia front, and during later postings on the South Carolina coast, to his wife Leila Burt Griffin. The letters encompass Griffin's entire Civil War service, detailing living conditions and military maneuvers, the jockeying for position among officers, and the different ways in which officers and enlisted men interacted. The letters shed light on the life of a middle officer—a life of extreme military hardship, complicated further by the need for reassurance about personal valor and status common to men of the southern gentry. Griffin describes secret troop movements, such as the Hampton Legion's role in the Peninsula Campaign. Here he relates the march from Manassas to Fredricksburg, the siege of Yorktown and the retreat to Richmond, and the fighting at Eltham's landing and Seven Pines, where Griffin commanded the Legion after Hampton was wounded. Griffin recounts day-to-day issues, from the weather to gossip. Monumental historical events sent Griffin off to war but his heartfelt considerations were about his family, his community, and his own personal pride. Griffin's letters present the Civil War as the ordeal by fire that tested and verified—or modified—Southern upperclass values.Less

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South

Diane Miller Sommerville

Aberration of Mind is a social history of suicide in the American South during the Civil War era. The book casts a wide net, focusing on Confederate soldiers and veterans and their families, and the ... More

Aberration of Mind is a social history of suicide in the American South during the Civil War era. The book casts a wide net, focusing on Confederate soldiers and veterans and their families, and the enslaved and newly freed. The central question is, how did the Civil War and the suffering it generated shape suicidal thoughts and behavior? The author seeks to understand how the suffering experienced by southerners living in a war zone contributed to psychological distress that, in extreme cases, led southerners to contemplate or act on suicidal thoughts. The unprecedented human toll the war took on southerners created a psychological crisis that has not been fully explored. Drawing on sources like letters, diaries, military service records, coroners’ reports, and asylum patient case histories, the work recovers myriad stories, previously hidden, of individuals exhibiting suicidal activity or aberrant psychological behavior linked to the war and its aftermath. In addition to expanding our understanding of the full human costs of the Civil War, the book concludes that southerners transformed the meaning of suicide from an act of cowardice to a heroic symbol of white southern identity. The book fills a neglected niche in an otherwise crowded field of Civil War scholarship – the psychological impact of war and defeat on southerners.Less

The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America

Molly A. McCarthy

In this era of tweets and blogs, it is easy to assume that the self-obsessive recording of daily minutiae is a recent phenomenon. But Americans have been navel-gazing since nearly the beginning of ... More

In this era of tweets and blogs, it is easy to assume that the self-obsessive recording of daily minutiae is a recent phenomenon. But Americans have been navel-gazing since nearly the beginning of the republic. The daily planner—variously called the daily diary, commercial diary, and portable account book—first emerged in colonial times as a means of telling time, tracking finances, locating the nearest inn, and even planning for the coming winter. They were carried by everyone from George Washington to the soldiers who fought in the Civil War. And by the twentieth century, this document had become ubiquitous in the American home as a way of recording a great deal more than simple accounts. This history of the daily act of self-reckoning explores just how vital these unassuming and easily overlooked stationery staples are to those who use them. From their origins in almanacs and blank books through the nineteenth century and on to the enduring legacy of written introspection, the author has penned a biography of an almost ubiquitous document that has borne witness to American lives in all of their complexity and mundanity.Less

Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America

Martha H. Verbrugge

This book examines the philosophies, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and universities, including ... More

This book examines the philosophies, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and universities, including coed and single-sex, public and private, and predominantly white or black institutions. Working primarily with female students, women physical educators had to consider what an active female could and should do compared to an active male. Applying concepts of sex differences, they debated the implications of female anatomy, physiology, reproductive functions, and psychosocial traits for achieving gender parity in the gym. Teachers’ interpretations were contingent on where they worked and whom they taught. They also responded to broad historical conditions, including developments in American feminism, law, and education, society’s changing attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality, and scientific controversies over sex differences and the relative weight of nature versus nurture. While deliberating fairness for female students, white and black women physical educators also pursued equity for themselves, as their workplaces and nascent profession often marginalized female and minority personnel. Questions of difference and equity divided the field throughout the twentieth century; while some women teachers favored moderate views and incremental change, others promoted justice for their students and themselves by exerting authority at their schools, critiquing traditional concepts of “difference,” and devising innovative curricula. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book sheds new light on physical education’s application of scientific ideas, the politics of gender, race, and sexuality in the domain of active bodies, and the enduring complexities of difference and equity in American culture.Less

After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915

John M. Giggie

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great ... More

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration. It argues that Delta blacks, who were overwhelmingly rural sharecroppers and tenant farmers, developed a rich and complex sacred culture during this era. They forged a new religious culture by integrating their spiritual life with many of the defining features of the post‐Reconstruction South, including the rise of segregation and racial violence, the emergence of new forms of technology like train travel, the growth of black fraternal orders, and the rapid expansion of the consumer market. Experimenting with new symbols of freedom and racial respectability, forms of organizational culture, regional networks of communication, and popular notions of commodification and consumption enabled them to survive, make progress, and at times resist white supremacy. The book then evaluates the social consequences of these changes and shows in particular how the Holiness‐Pentecostal developed in large part as a rejection of them. It ends by probing how this new religious world influenced the Great Migration and black spiritual life in the 1920s and 1930s.Less

Aggressive Nationalism: McCulloch v. Maryland and the Foundation of Federal Authority in the Young Republic

Richard E. Ellis

This book examines the public debate that took place over Chief Justice John Marshall's famous decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). It sheds new light on how the case came before the US Supreme ... More

This book examines the public debate that took place over Chief Justice John Marshall's famous decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). It sheds new light on how the case came before the US Supreme Court. It also examines many of the key issues involved in the case that John Marshall either slighted or totally ignored: the private profit-making nature of the Second Bank of the United States (2 BUS); the power of the 2 BUS to create branches in the states without their consent, which many people viewed as a direct assault upon the sovereignty of the states and which they feared would lead to the creation of other privately controlled profit-making national corporations that could operate within a state and yet be beyond its control; and the differences between a tax levied by a state for the purposes of raising revenue and one which was meant to destroy the operations of the branches of the 2 BUS. These issues are particularly important to understand because they were at the heart of Ohio's unwillingness to abide by the Supreme Court's decision and which eventually led to Osborn et. al. v. Bank of the United States (1824) and formed the basis for Andrew Jackson's famous veto for the rechartering of the 2 BUS in 1832. The book also examines the relationship between McCulloch v. Maryland and the creation of a federal program of internal improvements.Less

America's First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837

Alasdair Roberts

For a while, it seemed impossible to lose money on real estate. But then the bubble burst. The financial sector was paralyzed and the economy contracted. State and federal governments struggled to ... More

For a while, it seemed impossible to lose money on real estate. But then the bubble burst. The financial sector was paralyzed and the economy contracted. State and federal governments struggled to pay their domestic and foreign creditors. Washington was incapable of decisive action. The country seethed with political and social unrest. This book describes how the United States dealt with the economic and political crisis that followed the Panic of 1837. As the book shows, the two decades that preceded the Panic had marked a democratic surge in the United States. However, the nation’s commitment to democracy was tested severely during this crisis. Foreign lenders questioned whether American politicians could make the unpopular decisions needed on spending and taxing. State and local officials struggled to put down riots and rebellion. A few wondered whether this was the end of America’s democratic experiment. The book explains how the country’s woes were complicated by its dependence on foreign trade and investment, particularly with Britain. Aware of the contemporary relevance of this story, the book examines how the country responded to the political and cultural aftershocks of 1837, transforming its political institutions to strike a new balance between liberty and social order, and uneasily coming to terms with its place in the global economy.Less

America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson

J. Matthew Gallman

One of the most celebrated women of her time, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next ... More

One of the most celebrated women of her time, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next three decades. This book offers a full-length biography of Dickinson. The book describes how Dickinson's passionate patriotism and fiery style, coupled with her abolitionism and biting critiques of anti-war Democrats struck a nerve with her audiences. In barely two years, she rose from being an unknown young Philadelphia radical, to becoming a successful New England stump speaker and eventually a national celebrity. At the height of her fame, Dickinson counted many of the nation's leading reformers, authors, politicians, and actors among her friends. Among the famous figures who populate this book are Susan B. Anthony, Whitelaw Reid, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book explores Dickinson's public triumphs but also discloses how, as her public career waned, she battled with her managers, critics, audiences, and family. The book demonstrates how Dickinson's life illustrates the possibilities and barriers faced by 19th-century women, revealing how their behavior could at once be seen as worthy, highly valued, shocking, and deviant.Less

American Capitals: A Historical Geography

Christian Montès

This book will be the first to offer a comprehensive study of American State capitals. Drawing from a historical geography perspective, it gives an insight into the complex processes leading to the ... More

This book will be the first to offer a comprehensive study of American State capitals. Drawing from a historical geography perspective, it gives an insight into the complex processes leading to the selection of state capitals as well as a first assessment of their subsequent evolution and of their integration to the broader processes of territorial and urban building. The book is divided in three sections. The first addresses state capitals as places of memory and studies the urban fabric as well as their symbolic value. The second section studies the capitals’ selection processes. Searching the most suitable location for a capital revealed the way citizens defined democracy (“the people” seldom had to choose directly), territory (through the multifold concept of centrality), and their relationships with the urban world that was beginning to arise and dominate America. The third section tries to explain the developmental delay of most capitals even with the advent of the knowledge economy which should dwell upon their learned workforce and amenities. After the study of the fate of former capitals (for which heritage plays a large part), the book closes by looking at the real extent of changes in state capitals’ place in today’s United States.Less

American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment

Jason Edward Black

Situating U.S. governmental and American Indian rhetoric in a colonial context, Native Dualities examines the ways that both the government’s rhetoric and American Indian voices contributed to the ... More

Situating U.S. governmental and American Indian rhetoric in a colonial context, Native Dualities examines the ways that both the government’s rhetoric and American Indian voices contributed to the policies of Native-U.S. relations throughout the removal and allotment eras. These discourses co-constructed the silhouette of both the U.S. government and American Indian communities and contributed textures to the relationship. Such interactions – though certainly not equal between the two – illustrated the hybrid-like potentialities of Native-U.S. rhetoric in the nineteenth century. That is, both colonizing discourse and decolonizing discourse added arguments, identity constructions, and rhetorical moves to the colonizing relationship. Native Dualities demonstrates how American Indians decolonized dominant rhetoric in terms of impeding the realization of the removal and allotment policies. Likewise, by turning around the U.S. government’s discursive frameworks and inventing their own rhetorical tactics, American Indian communities helped restyle their own and the government’s identities. Interestingly, during the first third of the twentieth century, Native decolonization was shown to impact the Native-U.S. relationship as American Indians urged for the successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934. In the end, Native communities were granted increased rhetorical power through decolonization, though the U.S. government still retained a powerful colonial influence over them. This duality of inclusion (controlled citizenship) and exclusion (controlled sovereignty) was built incrementally through the removal and allotment periods, and existed as residues of nineteenth century Native-U.S. rhetorical relations.Less

An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States

Rosina Lozano

An American Language is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States. The nation has always been multilingual and the Spanish language in particular has remained as an important ... More

An American Language is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States. The nation has always been multilingual and the Spanish language in particular has remained as an important political issue into the present. After the U.S.-Mexican War, the Spanish language became a language of politics as Spanish speakers in the U.S. Southwest used it to build territorial and state governments. In the twentieth century, Spanish became a political language where speakers and those opposed to its use clashed over what Spanish's presence in the United States meant. This book recovers this story by using evidence that includes Spanish language newspapers, letters, state and territorial session laws, and federal archives to profile the struggle and resilience of Spanish speakers who advocated for their language rights as U.S. citizens. Comparing Spanish as a language of politics and as a political language across the Southwest and noncontiguous territories provides an opportunity to measure shifts in allegiance to the nation and exposes differing forms of nationalism. Language concessions and continued use of Spanish is a measure of power. Official language recognition by federal or state officials validates Spanish speakers' claims to US citizenship. The long history of policies relating to language in the United States provides a way to measure how U.S. visions of itself have shifted due to continuous migration from Latin America. Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are crucial arbiters of Spanish language politics and their successes have broader implications on national policy and our understanding of Americans.Less

American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports

Miriam Reumann

When Alfred Kinsey's massive studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared in 1948 and 1953 respectively, their detailed data spurred an unprecedented ... More

When Alfred Kinsey's massive studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared in 1948 and 1953 respectively, their detailed data spurred an unprecedented public discussion of the nation's sexual practices and ideologies. As they debated what behaviors were normal or average, abnormal or deviant, Cold War Americans also celebrated and scrutinized the state of their nation, relating apparent changes in sexuality to shifts in its political structure, economy, and people. This book employs the studies and the myriad responses they evoked to examine national debates about sexuality, gender, and Americanness after World War II. Focusing on the mutual construction of postwar ideas about national identity and sexual life, it explores the many uses to which these sex surveys were put at a time of extreme anxiety about sexual behavior and its effects on the nation. Looking at real and perceived changes in masculinity, female sexuality, marriage, and homosexuality, the author develops the notion of “American sexual character,” sexual patterns and attitudes that were understood to be uniquely American and to reflect contemporary transformations in politics, social life, gender roles, and culture. She considers how apparent shifts in sexual behavior shaped the nation's workplaces, homes, and families, and how these might be linked to racial and class differences.Less

American Zion

Eran Shalev

The Bible has always been an integral part of American political culture. Yet in the years before the Civil War, it was the Old Testament, not the New Testament, that pervaded political rhetoric. ... More

The Bible has always been an integral part of American political culture. Yet in the years before the Civil War, it was the Old Testament, not the New Testament, that pervaded political rhetoric. From Revolutionary times through about 1830, numerous American politicians, commentators, ministers, and laymen depicted their young nation as a new, God-chosen Israel and relied on the Old Testament for political guidance. This book closely examines how this powerful predilection for Old Testament narratives and rhetoric in early America shaped a wide range of debates and cultural discussions—from republican ideology, constitutional interpretation, southern slavery, and, more generally, the meaning of American nationalism to speculations on the origins of American Indians and to the emergence of Mormonism. The author argues that the effort to shape the United States as a biblical nation reflected conflicting attitudes within the culture—proudly boastful on the one hand but uncertain about its abilities and ultimate destiny on the other. This book explores the meaning and lasting effects of the idea of the United States as a new Israel, and sheds new light on our understanding of the nation's origins and culture during the founding and antebellum decades.Less

Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling

Benjamin N Lawrance

The lives of six African children, ages nine to sixteen, were forever altered by the revolt aboard the Cuban schooner La Amistad in 1839. Like their adult companions, all were captured in Africa and ... More

The lives of six African children, ages nine to sixteen, were forever altered by the revolt aboard the Cuban schooner La Amistad in 1839. Like their adult companions, all were captured in Africa and illegally sold as slaves. In this fascinating revisionist history, the author reconstructs six entwined stories and brings them to the forefront of the Amistad conflict. Through eyewitness testimonies, court records, and the children's own letters, the author recounts how their lives were inextricably interwoven by the historic drama, and casts new light on illegal nineteenth-century transatlantic slave smuggling.Less

The Angola Horror: The 1867 Train Wreck That Shocked the Nation and Transformed American Railroads

Charity Vogel

On December 18, 1867, an eastbound New York Express train derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York. The last two ... More

On December 18, 1867, an eastbound New York Express train derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York. The last two cars of the express train were pitched completely off the tracks and plummeted into the creek bed below. When they struck bottom, one of the wrecked cars was immediately engulfed in flames as the heating stoves in the coach spilled out coals and ignited its wooden timbers. The other car was badly smashed. About fifty people died at the bottom of the gorge or shortly thereafter, and dozens more were injured. The next day and in the weeks that followed, newspapers across the country carried news of the “Angola Horror,” one of the deadliest railroad accidents to that point in U.S. history. This book tells the gripping story of the train crash and the characters involved in the tragedy. It weaves together the stories of the people caught up in the disaster, the facts of the New York Express's fateful run, the fiery scenes in the creek ravine, and the subsequent legal, legislative, and journalistic search for answers to the question: what had happened at Angola, and why? The book sets the Angola Horror against a broader context of the developing technology of railroads, the culture of the nation's print media, the public policy legislation of the post-Civil War era, and the culture of death and mourning in the Victorian period.Less

The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the Antebellum South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi

Paul Hardin Kapp

The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi is the first comprehensive biography and monograph of a significant, yet overlooked, architect in ... More

The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi is the first comprehensive biography and monograph of a significant, yet overlooked, architect in the American South. William Nichols designed three major university campuses: the University of North Carolina, the University of Alabama, and the University of Mississippi. He also designed the first state capitols of North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. Nichols’s architecture profoundly influenced the built of landscape of the South but due fire, neglect, and demolition, most of his work was lost and his legacy was forgotten. Paul Hardin Kapp copiously researched through archives in North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi and produced a narrative of the life and times of William Nichols. This latest book on Nichols’s life and career as an architect is over eighty-six thousand words in length and is richly illustrated with over two hundred archival photographs, drawings from the Historic American Building Survey, current photographs and sketches of architectural details by the author. It is an important and timely contribution to the architecture history of the American South.Less

Art for the Middle Classes: America's Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s

Cynthia Lee Patterson

How did the average American learn about art in the mid-nineteenth century? With public art museums still in their infancy, and few cities and towns large enough to support art galleries or print ... More

How did the average American learn about art in the mid-nineteenth century? With public art museums still in their infancy, and few cities and towns large enough to support art galleries or print shops, Americans relied on mass-circulated illustrated magazines. One group of magazines in particular, known collectively as the Philadelphia pictorials, circulated fine art engravings of paintings, some produced exclusively for circulation in these monthlies, to an eager middle-class reading audience. These magazines achieved print circulations far exceeding those of other print media (such as illustrated gift books, or catalogs from art-union membership organizations). Godey’s, Graham’s, Peterson’s, Miss Leslie’s, and Sartain’s Union Magazine included two to three fine art engravings monthly, “tipped in” to the fronts of the magazines, and designed for pull-out and display. Featuring the work of a fledgling group of American artists who chose American rather than European themes for their paintings, these magazines were crucial to the distribution of American art beyond the purview of the East Coast elite to a widespread middle-class audience. Contributions to these magazines enabled many an American artist and engraver to earn, for the first time in the young nation’s history, a modest living through art. This book examines the economics of artistic production, innovative engraving techniques, regional imitators, the textual “illustrations” accompanying engravings, and the principal artists and engravers contributing to these magazines.Less

At Home in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History

Amy G. Richter

At Home in Nineteenth-Century America uses primary documentsto revisit the variety of places Americans called home—middle-class suburban houses, slave cabins, working-class tenements, frontier ... More

At Home in Nineteenth-Century America uses primary documentsto revisit the variety of places Americans called home—middle-class suburban houses, slave cabins, working-class tenements, frontier dugouts, urban settlement houses—and explore the shifting interpretations and experiences of these spaces from within and without. The selection and juxtaposition of primary sources compresses the insights of several historical fields and approaches, including house history, social history, and cultural history. It also draws heavily from the work of women’s history, particularly scholarship exploring the separate spheres ideal. Rather than offering an account of material culture, architectural history, or Victorian domesticity, this volume uses the home as a synthetic tool to pull together stories of nineteenth-century America. The result is less a tidy account of shared domestic values, or a straightforward chronology of change over time, than an opportunity to eavesdrop on a wide-ranging conversation recounting the ways in which a variety of women and men created, conformed to, critiqued, and transformed the ideal of home. This conversation included a diverse group of historical actors: a domestic servant and Herman Melville, a newlywed housewife and W.E.B. Du Bois, an interior designer and Theodore Roosevelt, all of whom contemplated the power and boundaries of the American home. Together, these voices offer an intimate yet broad view of nineteenth-century American history and sketch a narrative of both inclusion and difference.Less

Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa

Lisa A. Lindsay

Through the contextualized biography of a previously unknown African American immigrant to Africa, this book illuminates slavery and freedom in multiple parts of the nineteenth century Atlantic ... More

Through the contextualized biography of a previously unknown African American immigrant to Africa, this book illuminates slavery and freedom in multiple parts of the nineteenth century Atlantic world. A decade before the American Civil War, James Churchwill Vaughan (1828-93) set out to fulfill his formerly enslaved father’s dying wish: that he should leave his home in South Carolina for a new life in Africa. Over the next forty years, Vaughan was taken captive, fought in African wars, built and rebuilt a livelihood, and led a revolt against white racism, finally becoming a successful merchant and founder of a wealthy, educated, and politically active family in Lagos, Nigeria. Tracing Vaughan’s journey from South Carolina to Liberia to several parts of Yorubaland (present-day southwestern Nigeria), the book documents this “free” man’s struggle to find economic and political autonomy in an era when freedom was not clear and unhindered anywhere for people of African descent. By following Vaughan’s transatlantic journeys and comparing his experiences to those of his parents, contemporaries, and descendants in Nigeria and South Carolina, the book reveals the expansive reach of slavery, the ambiguities of freedom, and the surprising ways that Africa, rather than America, offered new opportunities for people of the African diaspora.Less

The Beecher Sisters

Barbara A. White

This book is a joint biography of the famous Beecher sisters, who lived and worked in nineteenth-century America. Daughters of the well-known evangelist Lyman Beecher, the three sisters, who were not ... More

This book is a joint biography of the famous Beecher sisters, who lived and worked in nineteenth-century America. Daughters of the well-known evangelist Lyman Beecher, the three sisters, who were not allowed to follow their father and seven brothers to college and into the ministry, all had successful careers at a time when few women entered the public sphere. Catharine Beecher, who became a pioneer educator, founded the Hartford Female Seminary in the 1820s, devoted her life to improving women's schooling, and wrote some thirty books on education, religion, and health. Harriet Beecher Stowe became world famous in 1852 as the author of the explosive anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and went on to write a series of novels about New England, initiating the women's tradition of local-color realism in the United States. The youngest Beecher sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, devoted herself to her husband and children until middle age. After the Civil War, she began to speak out on women's rights and quickly found herself a leader in the movement. Isabella was a friend and colleague of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In her suffrage work, she became associated with the flamboyant feminist Victoria Woodhull, also known as Mrs. Satan.Less