Abstract
My foray into transnational biography began with a collection of family letters. Revolving around the ordinary life of an extraordinary woman, the letters were written between the 1850s and the 1880s and mailed from one New England town to another, between New England and the Deep South, and between the United States and the British Caribbean. From these 500 or so letters, I wrote The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century.1
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Notes
M. Hodes (2006), The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton).
See T. Bender (2000), The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession (Bloomington, Ind.: Organization of American Historians),
and T. Bender (2002), ‘Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives’, in T. Bender (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 1–21.
G. E. Marcus (1995), ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24, pp. 105, 106, 109.
J. Parini, ‘Biography Can Escape the Tyranny of Facts’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 February 2000, p. A72.
A. C. Varnum (1888), History of Pawtucket Church and Society (Lowell, Mass.: Morning Mail); telephone conversation with Joyce Frazee, Pawtucket Congregational Church, Lowell, Mass., 11 May 2000. Massachusetts Vital Records, Marriages, Dracut, 3 November 1869, vol. 218, p. 166, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston.
Eunice Connolly to Lois Davis, East End, Grand Cayman, 7 March 1870. K. Lystra (1989), Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 157–191.
D. King (1850), The State and Prospects of Jamaica (London: Johnstone & Hunter), pp. 59–60.
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© 2010 Martha Hodes
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Hodes, M. (2010). A Story with an Argument: Writing the Transnational Life of a Sea Captain’s Wife. In: Deacon, D., Russell, P., Woollacott, A. (eds) Transnational Lives. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277472_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277472_2
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