The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

 

THE TRIALS OF PHILLIS WHEATLEY: AMERICA'S FIRST BLACK POET AND HER ENCOUNTERS WITH THE FOUNDING FATHERS
By Henry Louis Gates Jr. 

While telling the astonishing and ultimately tragic story of Phillis Wheatley, he includes an equally compelling meditation on how the questions of race and equality that haunted our Founders 250 years ago are considerably changed from how we think about race today.
With a good flair for storytelling, Mr. Gates jump-starts us ahead to a day in October 1772 when 18-year-old Phillis is brought before a panel of the most powerful government and cultural officials of the Bay Colony to decide a momentous issue that had become an international cause celebre: Was it possible that an African slave - and a female slave at that - had the intellectual capacity to write classical poetry in English?
This was not an idle question of literary quibbling, as Mr. Gates emphasizes. The issue at root was whether Africans were, according to many of the leading thinkers of the day - such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - descendants of another "species of men," related more to apes than Europeans. The fundamental question of the basic humanity of African slaves underpinned the moral juggling that most found necessary to justify the forcible enslavement of fellow creatures.
That underpinning was already starting to crack. That same year, the British high courts ruled in the famed Somerset case that a slave brought into Britain could not be taken against his will out of the country and back to slavery. It was a long time before Britain outlawed slavery inside its borders, but the fact that anti-slavery advocates could bring such a legal action and win it was truly earthshaking.
As Mr. Gates tells it, the questioning of Phillis about her literary gifts was another such tremor that shook the moralistic justification for slavery. The incident also marked the seminal moment in the development of black American literature and, with irony, another of the trials she would undergo. As it turns out, the panel of Boston's great and good - most of them slave owners - came away convinced that the poems they examined had in fact been written by her.
It seems Phillis had been something of a prodigy from the start. John Wheatley testified that within 16 months of her arrival from Africa, Phillis had learned to speak and read English. Her first poem was written by the time she was 11, and at 13, she had her first poem published in a local newspaper. By 1772, Phillis was in correspondence with well-known literary figures in England and her owners were busy arranging for a London printer to publish a collection of her poetry, which became the first book ever to be published in English by a person of African descent. Its release in 1773 on both sides of the Atlantic made her a true international celebrity.MORE

Dreaming of Dior by Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Smith had already had more than her fair share of fabulous dresses and adventures. She lived life to the fullest in London, Paris and New York before falling in love with Australia and making it her home.

Then she discovered that she had inherited a priceless vintage clothing collection from her American Quaker godmother, Doris Darnell.

When the boxes started arriving, they were filled with more than three thousand pieces dating from 1790 to 1995, from Dior and Chanel originals to a dainty pioneer dress.

But when she unearthed her godmother’s book of stories, the true value of what she had been given hit home. This wasn’t merely a collection of beautiful things; it was a collection of lives. Women’s lives. Tiny snapshots of our joys and disappointments, our entrances and exits, triumphant and tragic.

This is a book for any woman who knows a dress can hold a lifetime of memories.MORE

The Aloha Quilt An Elm Creek Quilts Novel By Jennifer Chiaverini

Another season of Elm Creek Quilt Camp has come to a close, and Bonnie Markham faces a bleak and lonely winter ahead, with her quilt shop out of business and her divorce looming. A welcome escape comes when Claire, a beloved college friend, unexpectedly invites her to Maui to help launch an exciting new business: a quilter’s retreat set at a bed and breakfast amid the vibrant colors and balmy breezes of the Hawaiian Islands. Soon Bonnie finds herself looking out on sparkling waters and banyan trees, planning quilting courses, and learning the history and intricacies of Hawaiian quilting, all the while helping Claire run the inn.
As Bonnie’s adventure unfolds, it quickly becomes clear that Claire’s new business isn’t the only excitement in store for her. Her cheating, soon-to-be ex-husband decides he wants her stake in Elm Creek Quilts, which threatens not only her financial well-being but her dearest friendships as well. Luckily she has the artistic challenge of creating her own unique Hawaiian quilt pattern to distract her—and new friends like Hinano Paoa, owner of the Nä Mele Hawai‘i Music Shop, who introduces Bonnie to the fascinating traditions of Hawaiian culture and reminds her that love can be found when and where you least expect it.MORE