Essays on the roles played by women in forming American attitudes about benevolence and poverty reliefAmerican culture has long had a conflicted relationship with assistance to the poor. Cotton Mather and John Winthrop were staunch proponents of Christian charity as fundamental to colonial American society, while transcendentalists harbored deep skepticism towards benevolence in favor of Emersonian self-reliance and Thoreau’s insistence on an ascetic life....

Representing Rural Women highlights the complexity and diversity of representations of rural women in the U.S. and Canada from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The 15 chapters in this collection offer fresh perspectives on representations of rural women in literature, popular culture, and print, digital, and social media. They explore a wide range of time periods, geographic spaces, and rural women’s experiences, including Mormon pioneer women, rural lesbians in the 1970s, Canadia...

Race and Transatlantic Identities provides a rich overview of the complex relationship between the construction of race and transatlantic identity as expressed in a variety of cultural forms, refracted through different disciplinary and critical perspectives, and manifested at different historical moments. Spanning a period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributions provide a panorama of the wealth and variety of contemporary approaches to grappling with notio...