The field of black women's history gained recognition as a
legitimate field of study only late in the twentieth century.
Collecting stories that are both deeply personal and powerfully
political,
Telling Histories compiles seventeen personal
narratives by leading black women historians at various stages in
their careers. Their essays illuminate how--first as graduate
students and then as professional historians--they entered and
navigated the realm of higher education, a world concerned with and
dominated by whites and men. In distinct voices and from different
vantage points, the personal histories revealed here also tell the
story of the struggle to establish a new scholarly field.
Black women, alleged by affirmative-action supporters and opponents
to be "twofers," recount how they have confronted racism, sexism,
and homophobia on college campuses. They explore how the personal
and the political intersect in historical research and writing and
in the academy. Organized by the years the contributors earned
their Ph.D.'s, these essays follow the black women who entered the
field of history during and after the civil rights and black power
movements, endured the turbulent 1970s, and opened up the field of
black women's history in the 1980s. By comparing the experiences of
older and younger generations, this collection makes visible the
benefits and drawbacks of the institutionalization of African
American and African American women's history.
Telling
Histories captures the voices of these pioneers, intimately and
publicly.
Contributors:
Elsa Barkley Brown, University of Maryland
Mia Bay, Rutgers University
Leslie Brown, Washington University in St. Louis
Crystal N. Feimster, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill
Sharon Harley, University of Maryland
Wanda A. Hendricks, University of South Carolina
Darlene Clark Hine, Northwestern University
Chana Kai Lee, University of Georgia
Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University
Nell Irvin Painter, Newark, New Jersey
Merline Pitre, Texas Southern University
Barbara Ransby, University of Illinois at Chicago
Julie Saville, University of Chicago
Brenda Elaine Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles
Ula Taylor, University of California, Berkeley
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Morgan State University
Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University
