Review of Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919 (Gender and American Culture) (Hardcover)

This is a compelling exploration of the efforts made by US government field agents in the last quarter of the 19th century to "domesticate" Native Americans: to teach them how to live and work Euro-American style, in nuclear rather than extended families, in square houses rather than round teepees, and within patriarchal gender relations and divisions of labor.The really interesting thing is that these field agents were very often women, for whom the value of "women's work"--its economic as well as its moral value--occasionally became destabilized even as they insisted upon native adoption of it for its "civilizing" influence.Simonsen gets at all of this (and more) by examining an array of evidence: popular domestic literature of the time, photographs taken by ethnologists and amateurs alike, and model homes run by graduates of such Indian schools as Virginia's Hampton Institute.A terrific, must-read for anyone interested in the history of domesticity, of labor relations among American whites and natives, and of western settlement.

Product Description
During the westward expansion of America, white middle-class ideals of home and domestic work were used to measure differences between white and Native American women. Yet the vision of America as "home" was more than a metaphor for women's stake in the process of conquest--it took deliberate work to create and uphold. Treating white and indigenous women's struggles as part of the same history, Jane E. Simonsen argues that as both cultural workers and domestic laborers insisted upon the value of their work to "civilization," they exposed the inequalities integral to both the nation and the household.

Simonsen illuminates discussions about the value of women's work through analysis of texts and images created by writers, women's rights activists, reformers, anthropologists, photographers, field matrons, and Native American women. Simonsen argues that women such as Caroline Soule, Alice Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, Anna Dawson Wilde, and Angel DeCora called upon the rhetoric of sentimental domesticity, ethnographic science, public display, and indigenous knowledge as they sought to make the gendered and racial order of the nation visible through homes and the work performed in them. Focusing on the range of materials through which domesticity was produced in the West, Simonsen integrates new voices into the study of domesticity's imperial manifestations.



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Review of The Robert E. Lee Family Cooking and Housekeeping Book (Hardcover)

This book is a great one for providing us a glimpse into life over 100 years ago.It is hard to imagine what a woman had to do back then to create the genteel life.Every household had to be self-sufficient, as this remarkable volume shows, making its own foodstuff, soap and cleansers.I loved this book and have shared it with good friends.

Product Description
Part cookbook, part culinary history, part family history, this book is an engaging and enlightening glimpse into the household of a well-to-do, mid-nineteenth-century Virginia family. Seeking to learn more about her ancestors' daily lives, Anne Zimmer, great-granddaughter of Robert E. and Mary Lee, turned to her great-grandmother's small, now shabby notebook. Packed with recipes, shopping lists, and other domestic jottings, the notebook opened an intimate window onto an earlier way of life.

With recipes for breads, cakes, puddings, sweets, soups, main dishes, vegetables, drinks, and home remedies, The Robert E. Lee Family Cooking and Housekeeping Book will serve as a ready reference on traditional American cookery. For each entry, the author provides the original recipe, helpful notes on the ingredients and techniques employed, and instructions--based on careful kitchen testing--for adapting the recipe in the modern kitchen. Peppered throughout with family stories and illustrated with photographs from the Lee family and other archives, the book is both an informative investigation of southern foodways and a fascinating look at one family's household history.



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Review of Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia (Civil War America) (Hardcover)

The Civil War's reconstruction process in Piney Woods Georgia is the narrowed focus of Plain Folk's Fight, an in-depth examination of the efforts to the Civil War on the rural South. Race consciousness was at the forefront of a fight by rural whites to defend their way of life in their neighborhood. These rural folk helped tip Georgia toward secession in 1861, supplied troops during the war, and found themselves divided in loyalty to the Confederate nation and their neighbors. Chapters focus on volunteer units, family organization, stories of hardship and independence, and black/white relationships affected by terrorism. Not for the casual Civil War student, but a 'most' for any serious discussion or collection.



Product Description
In an examination of the effects of the Civil War on the rural Southern home front, Mark V. Wetherington looks closely at the experiences of white "plain folk"--mostly yeoman farmers and craftspeople--in the wiregrass region of southern Georgia before, during, and after the war. Although previous scholars have argued that common people in the South fought the battles of the region's elites, Wetherington contends that the plain folk in this Georgia region fought for their own self-interest.

Plain folk, whose communities were outside areas in which slaves were the majority of the population, feared black emancipation would allow former slaves to move from cotton plantations to subsistence areas like their piney woods communities. Thus, they favored secession, defended their way of life by fighting in the Confederate army, and kept the antebellum patriarchy intact in their home communities. Unable by late 1864 to sustain a two-front war in Virginia and at home, surviving veterans took their fight to the local political arena, where they used paramilitary tactics and ritual violence to defeat freedpeople and their white Republican allies, preserving a white patriarchy that relied on ex-Confederate officers for a new generation of leadership.



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