The Bancroft Library, one of the premier research institutions in the world, was founded in 1859 by Hubert H. Bancroft, a San Francisco bookseller, publisher, and collector. The documents and artifacts he amassed on the American West--from Alaska to Panama--were unsurpassed. In 1906 the University of California acquired the Bancroft collection and now celebrates the centennial of that acquisition. Over the past century, the library has expanded to include the Mark Twain Papers and Project, Tebtunis Papyri, rare books and manuscripts, collections in the History of Science and Technology, and other invaluable resources. In this celebratory volume, readers are introduced to the day-to-day life of an institution devoted to the collection, preservation, and study of original documents. From an in-depth look at the way material is acquired and conserved to chapters by individual curators summarizing the significance of choice archival objects, the substantive approach is particularly fitting; a handsomely illustrated design completes the tribute to a venerable institution.

As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta—the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south—in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers’ domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post–Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception—and at the heart—of the new south.