In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan published his groundbreaking work White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and opened up new avenues for thinking about sex, slavery, race, and religion in American culture. Over the course of a forty-year career at the University of California and the University of Mississippi, he continued to write about these issues and to train others to think in new ways about interactions of race, gender, faith, and power. Written by former students of Jordan, these essays are a tribute to the career of one of America's great thinkers and perhaps the most influential American historian of his generation. The book visits historical locales from Puritan New England and French Louisiana to nineteenth-century New York and Mississippi, all the way to Harlem swing clubs and college campuses in the twentieth century. In the process, authors listen to the voices of abolitionists and white supremacists, preachers and politicos, white farm women and black sorority sisters, slaves, and jazz musicians. Each essay represents an important contribution to the collection's larger themes and at the same time illustrates the impact Jordan exerted on the scholarly life of each author. Collectively, these pieces demonstrate the attentiveness to detail and sensitivity to sources that are hallmarks of Jordan's own work. David J. Libby, San Antonio, Texas, is the author of Slavery and Frontier Mississippi: 1720-1835 (University Press of Mississippi). Paul Spickard, Santa Barbara, California, is the co-editor of Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence and the author of Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. Susan Ditto, Oxford, Mississippi, is the associate editor of Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.

Celebrating the achievements of Mississippi women. This collection of seventeen fascinating biographies, produced by the Mississippi Women's History Project, is an important step toward gaining the state's women their due place in its written record. The women whose absorbing life stories are told here range from Felicite Girodeau of old Natchez, who was both a person of color and a slaveholder, to Vera Mae Pigee, who "mothered" the civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta. Some of the women are well known, others were prominent in their time but have since faded into obscurity, and a few have never received the attention they deserve. Readers may already know such figures as writer and photographer Eudora Welty, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, and poet and educator Margaret Walker Alexander. Others are probably less familiar: the microbiologist Elizabeth Lee Hazen, the black businesswoman and civic leader Sadye Wier, the flapper feminist Minnie Brewer, or the jurist Burnita Shelton Matthews. All the featured women, whether suffrage pioneers, champions for higher education for women, or luminaries in art and literature, shared similar experiences in their struggles for success. From Winnie Davis, daughter of the Confederacy's president, to Hazel Brannon Smith, the journalist and antilynching crusader, they had in common the pains and privileges that were part of womanhood in their times. As multifaceted as the state they helped to build, the women portrayed in this engaging volume will interest and inspire Mississippians of all ages. Scholars will find here a valuable resource that adds nuance and texture to southern and women's history.

Celebrating the achievements of Mississippi women. This collection of seventeen fascinating biographies, produced by the Mississippi Women's History Project, is an important step toward gaining the state's women their due place in its written record. The women whose absorbing life stories are told here range from Felicite Girodeau of old Natchez, who was both a person of color and a slaveholder, to Vera Mae Pigee, who "mothered" the civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta. Some of the women are well known, others were prominent in their time but have since faded into obscurity, and a few have never received the attention they deserve. Readers may already know such figures as writer and photographer Eudora Welty, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, and poet and educator Margaret Walker Alexander. Others are probably less familiar: the microbiologist Elizabeth Lee Hazen, the black businesswoman and civic leader Sadye Wier, the flapper feminist Minnie Brewer, or the jurist Burnita Shelton Matthews. All the featured women, whether suffrage pioneers, champions for higher education for women, or luminaries in art and literature, shared similar experiences in their struggles for success. From Winnie Davis, daughter of the Confederacy's president, to Hazel Brannon Smith, the journalist and antilynching crusader, they had in common the pains and privileges that were part of womanhood in their times. As multifaceted as the state they helped to build, the women portrayed in this engaging volume will interest and inspire Mississippians of all ages. Scholars will find here a valuable resource that adds nuance and texture to southern and women's history.