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Sojourner Truth's America. By Margaret Washington. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xxii, 478 pp. $34.95, isbn 978-0-25203419-0.)
Margaret Washington delivers much more than a biography of Sojourner Truth, whom she calls "perhaps the most remarkable black woman in the nineteenth century" (p. 2). Washington embeds her wonderfully detailed and insightful account of Sojourner Truth's life in a history of Dutch colonial New York, African American enslavement and emancipation in northern and southern states, antebellum religious revivalism, rhe abolitionist movement, and the heated public debates over black women's and men's citizenship and suffrage rights in the post-Civil War United States. In the end, Washington's account of nineteenthcentury African American political and intellectual life is as nuanced and engaging as the life story of her main character.
The...