Nell Irvin Painter

Historian Painter centers her momentous study of racial classification on the slave trade and the nation-building efforts which dominated the United States in the 18th century, when thinkers led by Ralph Waldo Emerson strove to explain the rapid progress of America within the context of white superiority. Her research is filled with frequent, startling realizations about how tenuous and temporary our racial classifications really are.

"Here is an account of a past rich in beauty and creativity, but also in tragedy and trauma. Historian Nell Irvin Painter blends a vivid narrative based on the latest research with a wonderful array of artwork by African-American artists, works which add a new depth to our understanding of black history." "Painter offers a history written for a new generation of African Americans, stretching from life in Africa before slavery to today's hip-hop culture. The book describes the staggering number of Africans - over ten million - forcibly transported to the New World, most doomed to brutal servitude in Brazil and the Caribbean. Painter looks at the free black population, numbering close to half a million by 1860 (compared to almost four million slaves), and provides a gripping account of the horrible conditions of slavery itself. The book examines the Civil War, revealing that it only slowly became a war to end slavery, and shows how Reconstruction, after a promising start, was shut down by terrorism by white supremacists. Painter traces how through the long Jim Crow decades, blacks succeeded against enormous odds, creating schools and businesses and laying the foundations of our popular culture. We read about the glorious outburst of artistic creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, the courageous struggles for Civil Rights in the 1960s, the rise and fall of Black Power, the modern hip-hop movement, and two black Secretaries of State. Painter concludes that African Americans today are wealthier and better educated, but the disadvantaged are as vulnerable as ever." "Painter deeply enriches her narrative with a series of striking works of art - more than 150 in total, most in full color - works that profoundly engage with black history and that add a vital dimension to the story, a new form of witness that testifies to the passion and creativity of the African-American experience."--Jacket.

"In this collection, Painter reaches across the color line to examine how race, gender, class, and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women and men in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. Through six essays, she explores such themes as interracial sex, white supremacy, and the physical and psychological violence of slavery by closely examining individuals like white plantation mistress turned feminist Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas and black Communist Hosea Hudson. Painter defies the usual boundaries of southern history, women's history, and African American history and transcends methodological barriers as well, using insights gleaned from psychology and feminist social science in addition to social, cultural and intellectual history."--BOOK JACKET.

"In 1879, fourteen years after the Emancipation Proclamation, thousands of blacks fled the South. They were headed for the homesteading lands of Kansas, the 'garden spot of the earth' and the 'quintessential Free State, the land of John Brown' ... Painter examines their exodus in fascinating detail. In the process, she offers a compelling portrait of the post-Reconstruction South and the desperate efforts by blacks and whites in that chaotic period to 'solve the race problem' once and for all."--Newseek. "What makes this book so important, is ... [that it] is the first full-length scholarly study of this migration and of the forces that produced it ... [Others] have focused on nationally recognized black leaders; [Painter] calls for attention to the black masses."--David H. Donald, New York Times Book Review.

Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school--in her sixties--to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived. How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, "You will never be an artist"? Who defines what "An Artist" is and all that goes with such an identity?--from publisher's description.

Surveys the life of Sojourner Truth, who escaped from slavery and became famous as an advocate of equal rights for women and blacks.