Julie Des Jardins – författare

To a handful of colleagues, Walter Camp was a clock-company executive. To nearly everyone else, he was the quintessential gentleman athlete and the Father of American Football. Born in Connecticut in 1859, he attended Yale University just as collegiate sport was growing organized and competitive in the United States. In college, he was a varsity letterman who led the earliest efforts to codify the rules of football and to make it distinct from English rugby. As the creator of the All-America football team and the writer of some of the first football fiction, guides, and sports page coverage, Camp popularized the game like no other. For four decades, he was the most influential regulator in college football, making him the target of charges that the game was too brutal. Under his watch, dozens of college and high school players were killed or maimed on the gridiron. President Theodore Roosevelt urged him to reform football to prevent administrators from banning it, but Camp was ambivalent about removing the very physicality from the game that made it man-making in his eyes. Although he made his greatest contributions to football, he also had a hand in developing college baseball, crew, and track and field, as well as amateur boxing, tennis, and Olympic teams, making him one the nation's foremost propagators of amateur sport. The greatest proof of his contention that athletics, football especially, cultivated effective, courageous men came in World War I, when massive numbers of college football players enlisted for military service and the Allies defeated the Germans; Camp insisted that American athleticism was the reason. Along with cultivating his own body, he popularized strength training and the ideal of the muscular physique for American boys, helping to redefine the ideal man of modern times.

Lillian Gilbreth is a stunning example of female ingenuity in the early twentieth century. At a time when women were standard fixtures in the home and barely accepted in many professions, Gilbreth excelled in both spheres, concurrently winning honors as 'Engineer of the Year' and 'Mother of the Year'. This accessible, engaging introduction to the life of Lillian Gilbreth examines her pivotal role in establishing the discipline of industrial psychology, her work as an engineer of domestic management and home economics, and her role as mother of twelve children - made famous by the book, and later movie, Cheaper by the Dozen. This book examines the life of an exceptional woman who was able to negotiate the divide between the public and domestic spheres and define it on her terms.About the Lives of American Women series: selected and edited by renowned women's historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a women's life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a 'good read' featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject's perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.

In Women and the Historical Enterprise in America , Julie Des Jardins explores American women's participation in the practice of history from the late nineteenth century through the end of World War II, a period in which history became professionalized as an increasingly masculine field of scientific inquiry. Des Jardins shows how women nevertheless transformed the profession during these years in their roles as writers, preservationists, educators, archivists, government workers, and social activists. Des Jardins explores the work of a wide variety of women historians, both professional and amateur, popular and scholarly, conservative and radical, white and nonwhite. Although their ability to earn professional credentials and gain research access to official documents was limited by their gender (and often by their race), these historians addressed important new questions and represented social groups traditionally omitted from the historical record, such as workers, African Americans, Native Americans, and religious minorities. Assessing the historical contributions of Mary Beard, Zora Neale Hurston, Angie Debo, Mari Sandoz, Lucy Salmon, Mary McLeod Bethune, Dorothy Porter, Nellie Neilson, and many others, Des Jardins argues that women working within the broadest confines of the historical enterprise collectively brought the new perspectives of social and cultural history to the study of a multifaceted American past. In the process, they not only developed the field of women's history but also influenced the creation of our national memory in the twentieth century. |Des Jardins explores American women's participation in the practice of history from the late 19th century through the end of World War II, a period in which history became professionalized as an increasingly masculine field of scientific inquiry. Des Jardins reveals how women nevertheless transformed the profession during these years in their roles as writers, preservationists, educators, government workers, archivists, and social activists.

Lillian Gilbreth is a stunning example of female ingenuity in the early twentieth century. At a time when women were standard fixtures in the home and barely accepted in many professions, Gilbreth excelled in both spheres, concurrently winning honors as Engineer of the Year" and Mother of the Year." This accessible, engaging introduction to the life of Lillian Gilbreth examines her pivotal role in establishing the discipline of industrial psychology, her work as an engineer of domestic management and home economics, and her role as mother of twelve children- made famous by the book, and later movie, Cheaper by the Dozen . This book examines the life of an exceptional woman who was able to negotiate the divide between the public and domestic spheres and define it on her terms. About the Lives of American Women series: Selected and edited by renowned women's historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a women's life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a good read," featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject's perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.

Marie "Missy" Mattingly Meloney was born in 1878, in an America where women couldn't vote and had extremely limited political power. By the time she died in 1943, women had been voting for over two decades and were a recognised political block. This seems like an inevitability but in many ways it was Missy who created the idea of the female demographic. As a journalist, editor and political adviser, Missy is responsible for bringing women into American political culture as recognised consumers of political content, as a voting demographic to be targeted and reckoned with and as political operatives in their own right. Even before the passage of the 19th Amendment, Missy was carving out space for women in politics. As Editor-in-Chief of three major women's periodicals (at a time when few women held positions of such power), Missy forced publishers to recognise women writers and readers as cohorts worth taking seriously. She was aware of the purchasing power of women but also of the hole in the market for publications that spoke directly to them in a serious way. As a woman's editor, she made it increasingly acceptable for women to engage with politics as consumers, authors and journalists. In the process, she brought women writers to the mainstream and helped get women in the door of political and war reporting. Thanks to her instincts about how to appeal to women as a political cohort, she became the first campaign adviser to target them as a demographic. Hoover called her in to help him figure out how to appeal to women voters and gave her an official post in his administration. Informally, she was the first female political adviser to Coolidge, Bill Donovan and even FDR, despite being a political operative for the Republican Party. At the same time, Missy was a major player herself in early 20th century history. She was friend and confidante to artists, authors, diplomats and dictators-it was to her that Mussolini first confided his plans to invade Ethiopia. She was Marie Curie's publicist and she secured the funding for Mount Rushmore. Missy did all this and so much more, without ruffling any feathers. No firebrand or militant suffragette, Missy worked behind the scenes, making connections and gently influencing those in power. And so history has forgotten her. In this first biography of Missy Meloney, historian Julie Des Jardins restores Missy to her rightful place in history-as a trailblazer who transformed America.