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Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy during Jim Crow presents the first comprehensive story of Walker’s philanthropic giving arguing that she was a significant philanthropist who challenged Jim Crow and serves as a foremother of African American philanthropy today. Born Sarah Breedlove (1867-1919) to formerly enslaved parents on a cotton plantation during Reconstruction, Madam C. J. Walker became a beauty-culture entrepreneur and was known as America’s first self-made female millionaire. This book presents the story of Madam Walker’s philanthropic actions through the author’s use of historical methods and archival research. The result is a philanthropic biography that reinterprets Walker’s life, legacy, and meaning through giving. Using analytical frameworks from philanthropic studies and black women’s history, the author constructs the appropriate lenses for interpreting Walker’s lived experiences as a philanthropist through her own words, motivations, relationships, and actions. Organized around five types of gifts that Walker made—opportunity, education, activism, material resources, and legacy—the text illustrates the broader cultural contexts and philanthropic practices of generosity that informed black women’s lives and giving at the beginning of the twentieth century. Madam Walker’s Gospel of Giving provides a different view of who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropy in the public and scholarly conversations dominated by the perspectives of white wealthy elite donors. It reclaims and names black women as philanthropists using Walker as an example.

Star actresses and dancers were among the most publicly visible, celebrated, and often polarizing female public figures in the early United States. This book examines the careers and celebrity of the women and girls from Europe and America whose fame drove the growth and transformation of theater between 1790 and 1850 from the Atlantic seaboard to the trans-Appalachian West. Starring women introduced new repertoire—melodramas, breeches roles, dance pantomime and ballet—that catalyzed debates about social ownership of American culture, regional and national identity, and women’s place in public life. This book transforms existing understandings of early U.S. theater and culture by examining a broad cohort of understudied figures and argues that women stars were vital to the development of transatlantic and U.S. entertainment, celebrity culture, and gender ideology. Most significantly, starring women lived and performed the tensions and contradictions of changing nineteenth-century gender roles. As this book demonstrates, even while they achieved unprecedented levels of wealth and prominence through the “starring system,” the patriarchal family structures that governed women’s lives and careers conditioned their participation in the industry. The celebrity culture that expanded from the 1820s demanded that starring women conform to new standards of sentimental domestic femininity, even as the structural realities of their lives defied such standards. Starring women were exceptional figures who mapped the margins of a narrowing white middle-class domestic ideal.

This narrative is about Greek immigrants to America from 1880 to 1930. Unlike previous studies focusing on immigrant communities in major cities, this is a rural study, examining the Greeks who settled in central Illinois’s small towns and opened confectioneries and soda fountains. The author’s grandfather Gus Flesor was one of these, coming to Tuscola, Illinois, in 1901 and taking over the candy shop there. Gus’s shop is still in business today, run by the author and her sister. Gus’s experience serves as a case study that informs the stories of more than 100 other Greek confectioners who settled in over forty towns in central Illinois. The author describes why the Greeks came to America and recounts the obstacles they faced after arrival and their attempts to acculturate and assimilate and become confectioners. A significant amount of the narrative recounts the ethnic and racial hostility the Greeks faced, especially from the Ku Klux Klan. But the bulk of the text is about the Greek immigrant confectioners themselves who fulfilled the American dream by settling in a new land, raising families, operating profitable businesses, and contributing to their communities. As the author’s father once observed, “It’s a good story.”

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.