Posts by Christopher Barnes

While the start of the 2017 college football season is still a long way off, you can binge on the glorious and fascinating history of Michigan Football year round by visiting the library. The Hatcher and Shapiro Libraries have enough books about Bo Schembechler, the Big House, and our famous football rivalries to satisfy even the strongest appetite for gridiron history.

Women in Early America (NYU, 2015), edited by Thomas Foster, is the latest in a line of scholarly histories examining the ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women were actually key players in the economic, cultural, and political life of the American colonies despite the many legal and societal obstacles they had to overcome due to their gender. Most chapters in this wide-ranging work, each written by an expert in the field, focus on specific regions or identities. There is a chapter on the gendering of slave ownership in colonial Jamaica, for example, and another on trade and power in Early French America and Detroit. More familiar topics are also covered, like the connections between witchcraft and resistance to patriarchy or the lives of loyalist women in British-occupied New York City. Our own Mary C. Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies, contributes the final chapter of the book. As in her well-known work Learning to Stand And Speak: Women, Education, And Public Life In America's Republic (UNC, 2006), Kelley discusses the ramifications of a revolution in women’s educational opportunities between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars that enabled many to take up positions in the public sphere as writers, educators, and reformers.