Miriam Thaggert is an associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo and the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance.
• Honorable Mention, Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women's and/or
Gender History, Organization of American Historians, 2023
• Honorable Mention, Letitia Woods Brown Book Award, Association of
Black Women Historians, 2023 "Using literary analysis and
comprehensive archival research, Thaggert resituates Pauli Murray's
legal theorization of 'Jane Crow' into the context of Black female
railroad travel, considering how Black women's experiences as
passengers and workers trouble depictions of the train as a
technological symbol of American progress." --Hypatia "Over the
long twentieth century, black women navigated the gendered,
sexualized, racialized hierarchies of American railroads, producing
something new in American cultural history, a counter-story of
Black female railroad history. With meticulous and creative
archival research, Thaggert tells the story of Black female
fugitive slaves, Black Pullman maids, Black female food vendors,
and elite Black women travelers, who challenged the violence and
humiliations of race and gendered train spaces and even, in some
instances, secured their constitutional right to freedom and
mobility."--Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist:
The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s "In
this well-researched and accessible volume, Miriam Thaggert
explores the little-known histories of railroads and Black women,
as passengers, food vendors and maids." --Ms. Magazine "This
extremely well written scholarly work addresses the fact that much
of the history of Black Americans has been tied to their inability
to freely move about the nation." --Library Journal, starred review
"Riding Jane Crow is a must-read for anyone interested in the life
of the train in American history, and especially the racial
underpinnings that are less frequently the topic of its story. But
the book also represents the undertaking of an astonishing scholar,
furnishing hundreds of primary sources by which the reader can and
should continue to educate themselves on the topic. While Thaggert
expertly toes the line between her voice and those that are not her
own, she takes care to present those voices with grace, genuine
curiosity, and above all, historical import." --Pilgrim House "This
book expands and extends the history of passenger rail travel --
and history work on railroads -- in interesting and engaging ways.
. . . Riding Jane Crow deftly mixes literary analysis with case
studies of a variety of aspects of Black women's railroad
experiences." --H-Net Reviews “This well-argued, expansively
researched book completely and powerfully reframes our
understanding of the American railroad through the eyes of
previously overlooked Black women travelers and workers on the
rails. The racialized politics of rail travel that this book so
deftly illumines has given me new appreciation for the harrowing
journeys of the Black women reformers and laborers who showed us
that it was not the building of trains or the laying of thousands
miles of track, but rather the choice to treat or not treat the
Black women riding those trains with dignity, that mark the limits
and possibilities of American progress.” –Brittney Cooper, author
of New York Times bestseller Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist
Discovers Her Superpower and award-winning author of Beyond
Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women "Riding Jane
Crow brilliantly explores the experiences of Black women as
passengers and workers on trains in post-Reconstruction America.
This meticulously researched and well-written book takes the reader
on a powerful journey that unveils the intricacies of race, gender,
and class in travel history."--Keisha N. Blain, co-editor of the
No. 1 New York Times bestseller 400 Souls and award-winning author
of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global
Struggle for Freedom
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