Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America

Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation's attention to issues of region, race, and labor. In Sisters and Rebels, National Humanities Award-winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were estranged and yet forever entangled by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood. Grounded in decades of research, the family's private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives and works of three Southern women.

About the Author :
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at UNC-Chapel Hill. She was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her efforts to deepen the nation's engagement with the humanities by recording history through the lives of ordinary people, and, in so doing, for making history. She is the author or coauthor of prizewinning books and articles, including Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching; Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World; and The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past, Journal of American History. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held numerous fellowships. Karen White is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and currently writes Southern women's fiction. She lives in Georgia with her husband and two Havanese dogs.

Review :
"Hall's evocative history refracts the post-Civil War South through sisters who responded to their Confederate heritage in different but equally powerful ways." -- "New York Times Book Review" "The word befitting this work is 'masterpiece.' Sisters and Rebels is an impassioned, elegant, evocative narrative that turns biography into art and scholarship into the profound understanding of a South searching for its soul." -- "-Paula J. Giddings, author of IDA: A Sword among Lions"