Sisters and Rebels, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Sisters and Rebels, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
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Sisters and Rebels
A Struggle for the Soul of America

Author: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Narrator: Karen White

Unabridged: 25 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/30/2019


Synopsis

Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation's attention to issues of region, race, and labor.

In Sisters and Rebels, National Humanities Award–winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were "estranged and yet forever entangled" by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood.

Grounded in decades of research, the family's private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives and works of three Southern women.

About Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at UNC-Chapel Hill. She was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her efforts to deepen the nation's engagement with the humanities by "recording history through the lives of ordinary people, and, in so doing,for making history." She is the author or coauthor of prizewinning books and articles, including Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching; Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World; and "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," Journal of American History. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held numerous fellowships.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Brad

Hall invested decades in research and has great feeling for the material. This is an exceptionally fine investigation of the complex and contradictory feelings Southerners have toward their region's history. It reads like a good novel, too. Perhaps the best book I've read this year.......more

Goodreads review by Sherry

Excellent book. It is well-written and extensively researched. I moved to the southeastern US nearly 40 years ago, and I am still trying to understand its history. I learned so much from this book about the complexity of this history.......more

Goodreads review by Caitie

So I liked this book in the beginning and it could've been at least four stars, but it really began going down hill. I thought this book was going to be about this family, the Lumpkins, and how their views may have actually shaped the South. Instead, it was more of a biography of the three sisters,......more