Book Under Contract

I'm delighted to share some great news: my book, A Right To Learn: African American Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, is under contract with New York University Press as part of the Early American Places series. As stated on their website, this series "focuses on the history of North America from contact to the Mexican War, locating historical developments in the specific places where they occurred and were contested."

My book will fit nicely in this series since it examines one historical development that has been overlooked: African American women's education in the antebellum Northeast. It examines the role of African American women and girls in the fight for educational opportunity in private and public schools in the Northeast between 1820 and 1860. It argues that women like Sarah Mapps Douglass, Susan Paul, Rosetta Morrison, Mary E. Miles, and Charlotte L. Forten fought for their right learn as they desegregated female seminaries and high schools, and embarked upon teaching careers. These girls and women sought to create a self-perpetuating system of black intellectual achievement to overthrow slavery and advance African American civil rights in the United States. A Right To Learn offers a corrective to the current scholarship that suggests that African American women were merely bystanders to educational reform in the antebellum era.

The book should be in print and available for purchase in late 2019.