Pilgrim history gateway

For those with early New England ancestors, this book review is a gateway to several interesting books and ideas about how unplanned and rocky the Great Migration really was.

Belich's "Replenishing the Earth" reviewed

If you want to see the difference between a blog post and a published review of the same book, you can compare this 2009 post and my review published in the current APG Quarterly, the publication of the Association of Professional Genealogists. Replenishing the Earth remains an amazing new macrohistorical take on the mass settlement process of which the Midwest formed one part.

Book Review Blog

Sarah Kirby, fellow ProGen alum and neighbor (if you count everyone living somewhere not too far from the edge of Lake Michigan as neighbors), has added a section of "Genealogy Publication Reviews" to her web site , focusing at this point on books or things that started out as books.

If you don't have enough stuff to read already, check it out. If you have a yen to contribute a review, drop her a line via the site. This could be to genealogy book reviews what Miriam Midkiff's city directory site is to city directories!

She fought the law, and sometimes won

H-Net has a very handy review of A. Cheree Carlson's new book from University of Illinois Press, The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law. Carlson tells the stories of six prominent 19th- and early 20th-century cases involving women. Reviewer Tamar Carroll highlights the case of

Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, a Presbyterian minister's wife who drew her husband's ire when she took up Swedenborgianism, a mystical philosophy "at odds with traditional Christianity," and tried to convert to Methodism, more amenable to her newfound spiritual beliefs (p. 24). Before she could do so, Rev. Packer had her confined in the "maniac" ward of the Illinois State Hospital, where she remained until the superintendent released her three years later . . . . Upon her release, her husband took away Packard's clothes and locked his unrepentant wife in the nursery of their house; she managed to slide a note out the window frame to a neighbor, who sought judicial intervention.

What happened next? Read the whole thing. Sometimes clever lawyers were able to use 19th-century notions about feminity to win their clients' freedom.

For those of us who graze the banquet table of history, the review usefully contrasts and compares other books and articles on the legal perils of 19th-century women.

Hat tip to Legal History Blog.

Got Eugenics?

If this pseudo-science crops up in your research, check out this H-Net review of two new books on its history. (Indiana was the first state to mandate sterilization of supposedly defective individuals.)