Join author Elizabeth Engelhardt (Kenan Eminent Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for a conversation and book signing for her work Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America.

From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners.

“Carefully researched, beautifully written, and thought provoking. The heretofore unknown stories that Engelhardt narrates will propel readers to learn more about the everyday lives of boardinghouse keepers and those to whom they opened their homes…” Boardinghouse Women draws on a vast archive to recover boardinghouse women’s stories, revealing what happened in the kitchens, bedrooms, hallways, back stairs, and front porches as well as behind closed doors—legacies still with us today.

Hear from Elizabeth Engelhardt about Boardinghouse Women and listen to a conversation guided by the Levine Museum of the New South about a fascinating and important facet of women’s history in the United States. A book signing will begin immediately following the conversation. 

Copies of Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America will be available to purchase onsite at the event, while supplies last.

Pre-Orders will be available to purchase until March 5th. 

Moderator: 

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras, Civil War Memory, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016). She co-authored with Keith S. Herbert a NPS Historic Resource Study on African American Schools in the South, 1865-1900 (Washington: DC: Department of the Interior, 2022) and co-edited volume The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (forthcoming Fordham University Press, 2024) with Andrew L. Slap. She is currently finalizing a second book manuscript exploring how everyday African Americans remembered and commemorated the Civil War from 1863 to the present. In addition, she is the Chief Reader for the AP US History Exam and the co-series editor with J. Brent Morris of the Reconstruction Reconsidered, a University of South Carolina Press book series.

Location:

Junior League of Charlotte – 1332 Maryland Avenue Charlotte, NC 28209

Admission:

$15.00

Parking: 

There is limited parking at the Junior League of Charlotte. Free public parking is available at the tennis courts directly beside the venue.

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