The Borning Room

Mothers give birth in the borning room. The dying take their departure there. Outside the Lott family's Ohio farmhouse, the Civil War rages, slavery falls, and the world marvels at the wonder of electricity. Inside, within the walls of the borning room, Georgina Lott will experience her life's greatest turnings. Across the years, she discovers womanhood and first love, experiences the mourning that comes with loss, and, as did her mother and grandmother, at last takes her place in the room as another precious life is about to begin.

Ask any child to draw a house, and what you will probably get is a symmetrical structure of one and a half stories with a door in the middle and a window on either side - in other words, a "Cape." From the mid-1600s to the 1850s, capes were the standard New England home, providing farmers and fishermen, city dwellers and country folk with houses that were easy to build, economical, and whose low-slung design stood up to the bracing winds that swept in from the ocean. After World War II, these straightforward practical designs were adapted to twentieth-century living. Here is the history of these charming homes, accompanied by detailed and elegant pencil drawings illuminating everything from the wallpapers to the floor plans.

This lively history of childbirth begins with colonial days, when childbirth was a social event, and moves on to the gradual medicalization of childbirth in America as doctors forced midwives out of business and to the home-birth movement of the 1980's. Widely praised when it was first published in 1977, the book has now been expanded to bring the story up to date. In a new chapter and epilogue, Richard and Dorothy Wertz discuss the recent focus on delivering perfect babies, with its emphasis on technology, prenatal testing, and Caesarean sections. They argue that there are many viable alternatives--including out-of-hospital births--in the search for the best birthing system. Review of the first edition: "Highly readable, extensively documented, and well illustrated...A welcome addition to American social history and women's studies. It can also be read with profit by health planners, hospital administrators, 'consumers' of health care, and all those who are concerned with improving the circumstances associated with childbirth."--Claire Elizabeth Fox, bulletin of the History of Medicine "A fascinating, brilliantly documented history not merely of childbirth, but of men's attitudes towards women, the effect of a burgeoning medical profession on our very conception of maternity and motherhood, and the influence of religion on medical technology and science."--Thomas J. Cottle, Boston Globe "This superb book...is both an impeccably documented recitation of the chronological history of medical intervention in American childbirth and a sociological analysis of the various meanings given to childbirth by individuals, interested groups, and American society as a whole."--Barbara Howe, American Journal of Sociology Richard W. Wertz, a builder in Westport, Massachusetts, is formerly an associate professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dorothy C. Wertz, is a research professor at the School of Public Health, Boston University

Take your students on a learning-packed trip across the U.S. with books they ll love! This resource includes background information, activity ideas, reproducibles, and Internet connections to help you use 35 great novels as springboards to social studies learning. A great way to get your kids to read more deeplyand learn about the seven U.S. regions. For use with Grades 4-8."

"Harper's poetry is not limited by color or attitude. In Images of Kin, Harper amazes with his keen sense of political and personal histories, his breadth of expression. This collection fixes Harper as one of the dominant poetic voices of his generation" -- Chicago Sun-Times "It is Mr. Harper's achievement to have projected his most difficult and complex insights and feelings through the epical manner, yet at the same time carried us along to identify with him." -- New York Times Book Review

Often slyly funny and always devastatingly observant, Jenny Irish writes about the precarities of our moment with gorgeous prose and heartbreaking acuity. --Laura Kipnis

The Sleeping Beauty in Roberta Seelinger Trites' intriguing text is no silent snoozer passively waiting for Prince Charming to energize her life. Instead she wakes up all by herself and sets out to redefine the meaning of “happily ever after.” Trites investigates the many ways that Sleeping Beauty's newfound voice has joined other strong female voices in feminist children's novels to generate equal potentials for all children. Waking Sleeping Beauty explores issues of voice in a wide range of children's novels, including books by Virginia Hamilton, Patricia MacLachlan, and Cynthia Voight as well as many multicultural and international books. Far from being a limiting genre that praises females at the expense of males, the feminist children's novel seeks to communicate an inclusive vision of politics, gender, age, race, and class. By revising former stereotypes of children's literature and replacing them with more complete images of females in children's books, Trites encourages those involved with children's literature—teachers, students, writers, publishers, critics, librarian, booksellers, and parents—to be aware of the myriad possibilities of feminist expression. Roberta Trites focuses on the positive aspects of feminism: on the ways females interact through family and community relationships, on the ways females have revised patriarchal images, and on the ways female writers use fictional constructs to transmit their ideologies to readers. She thus provides a framework that allows everyone who enters a classroom with a children's book in hand to recognize and communicate—with an optimistic, reality-based sense of “happily ever after”—the politics and the potential of that book.