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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A Princeton professor-turned-artist recounts her late-in-life career change in this “feisty and delightfully irreverent memoir” about art and coming-of-age in your 60s (Boston Globe). “A glorious achievement . . . a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives.” —Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school—in her sixties—to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to th...
A New York Times Bestseller This terrific new book…[explores] the ‘notion of whiteness,’ an idea as dangerous as it is seductive." —Boston Globe Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events.
Blending a vivid narrative with more than 150 images of artwork, Painter offers a history--from before slavery to today's hip-hop culture--written for a new generation.
This work reaches across the colour line to examine how race, gender, class and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women in the 19th- and 20th-century American South.
This simple narrative of an extraordinary life explores the power of a disinterested commitment to right and truth. Sojourner Truth: A Biography traces this remarkable woman's life from her birth through adulthood and to her death in 1883. Drawing from public pronouncements, personal correspondence, and journalistic accounts of key historical actors, it follows her extraordinary career and sets the events of her life in the larger context of U.S. social and political history. The years during which Truth lived bore witness to tremendous social and religious ferment in the United States, including, of course, the Civil War. Truth was directly involved, indeed an influential figure, in many contentious issues of the period, from slavery and abolition to religious revivalism, women's rights, temperance, racial reconciliation, and more. Her story serves as a prism through which readers will better understand how these complex matters were adjudicated in 19th-century America. More than that, her life demonstrates what courage, character, and principle can accomplish against all odds.
The first major migration to the North of ex-slaves.
Standing at Armageddon is a comprehensive and lively historical account of America's shift from a rural and agrarian society to an urban and industrial society. Nell Irvin Painter will be featured in the PBS multipart series The Progressive Era with Bill Moyers, which coincides with the release of the updated edition of this acclaimed work.
Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, historian Painter traces the invention of the idea of a white race, reminding readers that the concept of race is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed over time.
Drawing upon psychological paradigms, Professor Painter examines the history of child and sexual abuse within American slave society by employing the concept of soul murder.
At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns,...