Americans and Their Servants

Americans and Their Servants
Author: Daniel E. Sutherland
Publisher: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 1981-01-01
Genre: Women domestics
ISBN: 9780807108604

The Maid Narratives

The Maid Narratives
Author: Katherine Van Wormer
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2012-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807149705

The Maid Narratives shares the memories of black domestic workers and the white families they served, uncovering the often intimate relationships between maid and mistress. Based on interviews with over fifty people -- both white and black -- these stories deliver a personal and powerful message about resilience and resistance in the face of oppression in the Jim Crow South. The housekeepers, caretakers, sharecroppers, and cooks who share their experiences in The Maid Narratives ultimately moved away during the Great Migration. Their perspectives as servants who left for better opportunities outside of the South offer an original telling of physical and psychological survival in a racially oppressive caste system: Vinella Byrd, for instance, from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, recalls how a farmer she worked for would not allow her to clean her hands in the family's wash pan. These narratives are complemented by the voices of white women, such as Flora Templeton Stuart, from New Orleans, who remembers her maid fondly but realizes that she knew little about her life. Like Stuart, many of the white narrators remain troubled by the racial norms of the time. Viewed as a whole, the book presents varied, rich, and detailed accounts, often tragic, and sometimes humorous. The Maid Narratives reveals, across racial lines, shared hardships, strong emotional ties, and inspiring strength.

Confessions of a Civil Servant

Confessions of a Civil Servant
Author: Bob Stone
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2004-07-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780742527652

Confessions of a Civil Servant is filled with lessons on leading change in government and the military. Bob Stone based the book on thirty years as a revolutionary in government. It comes at a time when the events of 9-11 are sharpening America's demands for government at all levels that works.

John Adams

John Adams
Author: Bonnie L. Lukes
Publisher: Morgan Reynolds Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2001
Genre: Presidents
ISBN: 9781883846800

A young adult biography of U.S. statesman and diplomat John Adams

The House Servant's Directory, Or, A Monitor for Private Families

The House Servant's Directory, Or, A Monitor for Private Families
Author: Robert Roberts
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1998
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780765601148

An annotated introduction exploring the contemporary importance of the book "The House Servants Directory", the identity and character of the author, and its significance in American history.

Between Women

Between Women
Author: Judith Rollins
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1985
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780877224914

Between Women is the result of forty in-depth interviews, interviews enhanced by the author's own experience as a domestic worker for ten employers in the greater Boston area. The reader is quickly drawn into the world of domestic workers as the author allows the women to speak for themselves whenever possible. Clearly relevant to labor studies, women's studies and black studies, at its essence this book is a study of the social psychology of relationships of domination. Yet, while focusing on these relationships, the author never loses sight of the larger social structure and how it affects and is affected by employer-domestic dyads. The opening chapter provides an overview of domestic service in the Western tradition, most notably a detailed history of servitude in the South and northeastern United States, with brief attention to a few non-Western locales. Then, what follows is a description of the conditions of work--the physical labor, hours, compensation, and problems--with the focus on the women and the major dynamics of their relationships. Unlike many works on domination, this book gives as much attention to the effects on the minds and lives of the employers as it does to the effects on the domestics. And it is this exploration, in particular--of the demands, reactions, preferences and perceptions of employers--that reveals how this labor arrangement functions ideologically as well as materially to support the class, gender and racial hierarchies of this country. Author note: Judith Rollins is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Simmons College in Boston.

Servants and Servitude in Colonial America

Servants and Servitude in Colonial America
Author: Russell M. Lawson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2018-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1440841802

The dispossessed people of Colonial America included thousands of servants who either voluntarily or involuntarily ended up serving as agricultural, domestic, skilled, and unskilled laborers in the northern, middle, and southern British American colonies as well as British Caribbean colonies. Thousands of people arrived in the British-American colonies as indentured servants, transported felons, and kidnapped children forced into bound labor. Others already in America, such as Indians, freedmen, and poor whites, placed themselves into the service of others for food, clothing, shelter, and security; poverty in colonial America was relentless, and servitude was the voluntary and involuntary means by which the poor adapted, or tried to adapt, to miserable conditions. From the 1600s to the 1700s, Blacks, Indians, Europeans, Englishmen, children, and adults alike were indentured, apprenticed, transported as felons, kidnapped, or served as redemptioners. Though servitude was more multiracial and multicultural than slavery, involving people from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds, far fewer books have been written about it. This fascinating new study of servitude in colonial America provides the first complete overview of the varied lives of the dispossessed in 17th- and 18th-century America, examining colonial American servitude in all of its forms.

The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Total Pages: 974
Release: 1995
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781564780881

"Essential for all literature collections . . . Several of Stein's titles returned to print in 1995, but none more important than The Making of Americans." Library Journal

American Work

American Work
Author: Jacqueline Jones
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 548
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780393318333

"[Jones's] painstakingly researched volume is an invaluable antidote to those who argue that our shameful past has no relevance to our perplexing present." --David Kusnet, Baltimore Sun