Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Hospital Sketches, Louisa May Alcott

Zea E-Books in American Studies

In November 1862, Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) signed up as a volunteer nurse for the Sanitary Commission charged with caring for the Civil War’s mounting casualties. From 13 December 1862 until 21 January 1863, Miss Alcott served at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown in the District of Columbia, where she ultimately contracted typhoid and pneumonia and very nearly died. This book is her account of her journey south from Concord and her six weeks in the nation’s wartime capital. Styling herself by the fanciful name “Tribulation Periwinkle,” she brought humor as well as pathos to her subject, making this …

Blessed Assurance: A Postmodern Midwestern Life, Marcelline Hutton

Zea E-Books Collection

In this book, a historian of women’s lives turns the lens on her own experience. Her story is “Midwestern” for its work ethic, modesty, faith, and resilience; “postmodern” for its sudden changes, strange juxtapositions, and retrospective deconstruction of the ideologies that shaped its progress. It describes a life in and out of academia and a search for acceptance, recognition, equality, and freedom.

The author of three books on women’s experiences in Russia and Europe, Dr. Marcelline Hutton traces her personal journey from traditional working-class La Porte, Indiana, through college, graduate school, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and independence in Iowa City, Southampton, …

Remarkable Russian Women In Pictures, Prose And Poetry, Marcelline Hutton

Zea E-Books Collection

Many Russian women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tried to find happy marriages, authentic religious life, liberal education, and fulfilling work as artists, doctors, teachers, and political activists. Some very remarkable ones found these things in varying degrees, while others sought unsuccessfully but no less desperately to transcend the generations-old restrictions imposed by church, state, village, class, and gender.

Like a Slavic “Downton Abbey,” this book tells the stories, not just of their outward lives, but of their hearts and minds, their voices and dreams, their amazing accomplishments against overwhelming odds, and their roles as feminists and …

La Grande Misère / Great Misery, Maisie Renault, Jeanne Armstrong , Translator

Zea E-Books Collection

In June 1942 Maisie Renault and her sister Isabelle were arrested in Paris by the Gestapo for their activities in support of the French Résistance cell directed by their brother Gilbert Renault, known by the code-name “Colonel Rémy.” Over the next two years they were held at La Santé prison in Paris, at Fresnes Prison, south of the city, at Fort de Romainville on the outskirts, and at the Royallieu-Compiègne internment camp in northeast France.

In August 1944 they were deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany, opened in 1939 and housing mainly women and children. By 1944 …