Swindler Spy Rebel

"One would not expect a police officer to describe a criminal as "remarkable," "well worth knowing," or "excellent." Yet some did when their quarry was a confidence woman. Blackmailer, swindler, or pickpocket: the confidence woman could take any form." "Regardless of their different motives and tactics, confidence women have much in common, for they have long been misrepresented in American literature and culture. In Swindler, Spy, Rebel: The Confidence Woman in Nineteenth-Century America, Kathleen De Grave redresses the exaggerations and distortions by examining how the line between fact and fiction blurs." "Drawing from a variety of sources, such as memoirs, diaries, detective reports, newspaper accounts, and sociological studies written during the period, De Grave first presents a historical context. By comparing the exploits of such women as "Chicago May" Churchill, "Big Bertha" Heyman, and Ellen Peck to those of fictional women who used the same strategies in noncriminal situations, De Grave broadens the definition of the confidence woman beyond criminality to include adventuresses, soldiers/spies, and "gold diggers." Next, she relates how the confidence woman appears in autobiographies and in fiction. She further expands her argument to include the narrative devices of nineteenth-century women writers who used a kind of confidence game as a way to lure their readers into the text."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

True stories of nineteenth-century crooks, con artists, and quacks—including the man who “sold” the Brooklyn Bridge. Gunslingers and outlaws weren’t the only ones who made the West wild. The nineteenth century was the golden era of riverboat gamblers, crooked railroad contractors, and filthy-rich medical quacks. These crooks made a living deceiving people who took a stranger at face value and left their doors unlocked. Throw in some get-rich-quick schemes and a generous mixture of whiskey and there was never a shortage of suckers. Conman George Parker was able to stay in business for forty years by “selling” public structures such as Madison Square Garden and the Statue of Liberty. He even “sold” the Brooklyn Bridge as often as twice a week. For most, the Salted Gold Mine or the Magic Wallet cons were enough to satisfy their greed. However, the more ambitious grifters tried the Big Store, an illegal underground betting parlor like the one seen in the movie The Sting. With an honest-looking face and a lack of morals, these scammers played a big role in giving the frontier its lawless reputation—and this book tells their stories.

She went by many names—Mary Ann Keith, Ann Williams, Lauretta Williams, and more—but history knows her best as Loreta Janeta Velasquez, a woman who claimed to have posed as a man to fight for the Confederacy. In Inventing Loreta Velasquez, acclaimed historian William C. Davis delves into the life of one of America’s early celebrities, peeling back the myths she herself created to reveal a startling and even more implausible reality. This groundbreaking biography reveals a woman quite different from the public persona she promoted. In her bestselling memoir, The Woman in Battle, Velasquez claimed she was an emphatic Confederate patriot, but in fact she never saw combat. Instead, during the war she manufactured bullets for the Union and persuaded her Confederate husband to desert the Army. After the Civil War ended, she wore many masks, masterminding ambitious confidence schemes worth millions, such as creating a phony mining company, conning North Carolina residents to back her financially in a fake immigration scheme, and attracting investors to build a railroad across western Mexico. With various husbands, Velasquez sought her fortune both in the American West and in the Klondike, though her endeavors cost one husband his life. She also became a social reformer advocating on behalf of better prison conditions, the Cuban revolt against Spain, and the plight of Cuban refugees. Further, Velasquez was one of the first women to venture into journalism and presidential politics. Always a sensational press favorite, she displayed throughout her life an uncanny ability to manipulate popular media and to benefit from her fame in a way that prefigured celebrities of our own time, including using her testimony in a Congressional inquiry about Civil War counterfeiting as a means of promoting her latest business ventures. So little has been known of Velasquez’s real life that some postmodern scholars have glorified her as a “woman warrior” and used her as an example in cross-gender issues and arguments concerning Hispanic nationalism. Davis firmly refutes these notions by bringing the historical Velasquez to the surface. The genuine story of Velasquez’s life is far more interesting than misguided interpretations and her own fanciful inventions.

DIVExamines what happens to our paradigms of the American south if we understand the "south" hemispherically, to include Latin America and the Caribbean./div

Popular entertainment in antebellum Cincinnati ran the gamut from high culture to shows barely above the level of the tawdry. Among the options for those seeking entertainment in the summer of 1856 was the display of a “Wild Woman,” purportedly a young woman captured while living a feral life beyond the frontier. The popular exhibit, which featured a silent, underdressed woman chained to a bed, was almost assuredly a hoax. Local activist women, however, used their influence to prompt a judge to investigate the display. The court employed eleven doctors, who forcibly subdued and examined the woman before advising that she be admitted to an insane asylum. In his riveting analysis of this remarkable episode in antebellum American history, Michael D. Pierson describes how people in different political parties and sections of the country reacted to the exhibit. Specifically, he uses the lens of the Wild Woman display to explore the growing cultural divisions between the North and the South in 1856, especially the differing gender ideologies of the northern Republican Party and the more southern focused Democrats. In addition, Pierson shows how the treatment of the Wild Woman of Cincinnati prompted an increasing demand for women’s political and social empowerment at a time when the country allowed for the display of a captive female without evidence that she had granted consent.

This engaging, deeply researched study provides the richest and most nuanced picture we have to date of cinema—both movies and movie-going—in the early 1910s. At the same time, it makes clear the profound relationship between early cinema and the construction of a national identity in this important transitional period in the United States. Richard Abel looks closely at sensational melodramas, including westerns (cowboy, cowboy-girl, and Indian pictures), Civil War films (especially girl-spy films), detective films, and animal pictures—all popular genres of the day that have received little critical attention. He simultaneously analyzes film distribution and exhibition practices in order to reconstruct a context for understanding moviegoing at a time when American cities were coming to grips with new groups of immigrants and women working outside the home. Drawing from a wealth of research in archive prints, the trade press, fan magazines, newspaper advertising, reviews, and syndicated columns—the latter of which highlight the importance of the emerging star system—Abel sheds new light on the history of the film industry, on working-class and immigrant culture at the turn of the century, and on the process of imaging a national community.

Raising key questions about race, class, sexuality, age, material culture, intellectual history, pedagogy, and gender, this book explores the myriad relationships between feminist thinking and Little Women, a novel that has touched many women's lives. A critical introduction traces 130 years of popular and critical response, and the collection presents 11 new essays, two new bibliographies, and reprints of six classic essays. The contributors examine the history of illustrating Little Women; Alcott's use of domestic architecture as codes of female self-expression; the tradition of utopian writing by women; relationship to works by British and African American writers; recent thinking about feminist pedagogy; the significance of the novel for women writers, and its implications from the vantage points of middle-aged scholar, parent, and resisting male reader.

Logan's study is distinguished by its exclusive focus on women writers, including Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence Nightingale, Sarah Grand, and Mary Prince. Logan utilizes primary texts from these Victorian writers as well as contemporary critics such as Catherine Gallagher and Elaine Showalter to provide the background on social factors that contributed to the construction of fallen-woman discourse.

Panic Fiction explores a unique body of antebellum American women’s writing that illuminates women’s relationships to the marketplace and the links between developing ideologies of domesticity and the formation of an American middle class. Between the mid-1830s and the late 1850s, authors such as Hannah Lee, Catharine Sedgwick, Eliza Follen, Maria McIntosh, and Maria Cummins wrote dozens of novels and stories depicting the effects of financial panic on the home and proposing solutions to economic instability. This unique body of antebellum American women’s writing, which integrated economic discourse with the language and conventions of domestic fiction, is what critic Mary Templin terms “panic fiction.” In Panic Fiction: Antebellum Women Writers and Economic Crisis, Templin draws in part from the methods of New Historicism and cultural studies, situating these authors and their texts within the historical and cultural contexts of their time. She explores events surrounding the panics of 1837 and 1857, prevalent attitudes toward speculation and failure as seen in newspapers and other contemporaneous texts, women’s relationships to the marketplace, and the connections between domestic ideology and middle-class formation. Although largely unknown today, the phenomena of “panic fiction” was extremely popular in its time and had an enormous influence on nineteenth-century popular conceptions of speculation, failure, and the need for marketplace reform, providing a distinct counterpoint to the analysis of panic found in newspapers, public speeches, and male-authored literary texts of the time.