From Runaway Wives to Dancing Girls: Urban Women in the Long Nineteenth Century

This course explores the ways in which women - white and black, immigrant and native born, free and enslaved - lived and labored in American cities during the long nineteenth century. Together we will examine a variety of primary sources including diaries, municipal and institutional records, newspapers, memoirs, oral histories, and visual culture. We will also consider whose stories are told and explore how historians make sense of times very different from our own. Priority given to History majors and minors.