The poetry and journalistic essays of Katherine Tillman often appeared in publications sponsored by the American Methodist church. Collected together for the first time, her works speak to the struggles and triumphs of African-American women.

The basis for much of medical public health practice comes from epidemiological research. This text describes current statistical tools that are used to analyze the association between possible risk factors and the actual risk of disease. Beginning with a broad conceptual framework on the disease process, it describes commonly used techniques for analyzing proportions and disease rates. These are then extended to model fitting, and the common threads of logic that bind the two analytic strategies together are revealed. Each chapter provides a descriptive rationale for the method, a worked...

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), the first black American to publish a book, was internationally famous during her short life. This edition, with an essay by the editor, restores her to her proper place in America's literary heritage.

Hallie Q. Brown and twenty-eight contributors recreate the lives of sixty remarkable Afro-American women, all born in the United States or Canada between the 1740s and the end of the nineteenth century. Slaves and social workers, artists and activists, cake makers and home makers, their stories offer unusual insight into female networks, patterns of voluntary association, work, religion, family life, and black women's culture.

Not only one of the last of over one hundred slave narratives published separately before the Civil War, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is also one of the few existing narratives written by a woman. It offers a unique perspective on the complex plight of the black woman as slave and as writer. In a story that merges the conventions of the slave narrative with the techniques of the sentimental novel, Harriet Jacobs describes her efforts to fight off the advances of her master, her eventual liaison with another white man (the father of two of her children), and her...

A far cry from the nineteenth-century slave narrative tradition, this book, written in 1857, is a special kind of success story. With delightful urbanity and wit, Mary Seacole, a free-born Jamaican Creole, recounts her childhood as a daughter of a Scottish army officer and a free black boarding-house keeper, her years as a storekeeper in a Central American frontier town, and her role as a battlefield 'doctress' to British troops in the Crimean War. She emerges as an independent and respected maternal figure, the acme of female achievement in Victorian culture, and a symbol of 'home' to...

What shines through each of these stories is the black woman's ability to recover in past oppression the hope for a better day.

These narratives by four famous black woman preachers and evangelists, published between 1835 and 1907, all share a theme that continues to dominate Afro-American literature even today: the power of Christianity to give strength and comfort in the struggle for liberation from caste and gender restrictions.

Highly spiritual, the work in this collection represents both previously published and unpublished material by Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, a notable and neglected black woman writer. Including short fiction, poetry, and drama, her work fills a lacuna in the understanding of the literature of the nineteenth century.

Published in 1900, this is Hopkins's best-known novel, and her only fiction to be published in book form in her lifetime. Like her magazine fiction, it allies the conventions of the sentimental novel with the goal of effecting social change. A uniquely detailed examination of black life, and a richly textured piece of fiction, it is one of the most important works produced by an Afro-American before the First World War.