All That She Carried

Books | History / African American & Black

3.9

(4.0K)

Tiya Miles

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives. WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, Lawrence W. Levine Award, Darlene Clark Hine Award, Cundill History Prize, Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, Massachusetts Book AwardONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Vulture, Publishers Weekly“A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today. FINALIST: MAAH Stone Book Award, Kirkus Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, Chatauqua Prize, Women’s PrizeONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, Book Riot, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist

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Author

Tiya Miles

Pages

416

Publisher

Random House Publishing Group

Published Date

2021-06-08

ISBN

1984854992 9781984854995

Community ReviewsSee all

"This nonfiction book was filled with details of the research to find the three people who handed Ashley's bag down from generation to generation in times of Slavery during the Civil War. Reading the technical side of the research was tedious, but the history, itself, was fascinating. I would have given the book a much higher rating if more of the book was about the history of the bag and fewer details about the painstaking research process."

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Pamela Inskeep

"This book uses a single object - a bag given to a daughter by her mother - to illustrate the history of the region, the cruelties of slavery and the resilience of Black women. The writing places the bag and its contents in a historical context and then extrapolates on the history of the women associated through the scant archival record and similar narratives by others. I learned a lot from this."

awesome_user_984860

"Not what I was hoping it was gonna be. I was looking for a story of three women and a story of their history and enslavement. Reads like a history book with a lot of assumptions, and very hard to read. Just didn’t hold my interest, and I usually love books that include history."

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Sheri Tegeler Crandall