A comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War, Thavolia Glymph’s recent book, The Women’s Fight, shows how women--North and South, white and black, enslaved and free—were fully engaged in the wartime struggles on the home front, the military fight, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics.

In the provocative new biography Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution, Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s—the Age of the Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educator delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia.

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz.

Born in the Connecticut River Valley in 1787, Emma Hart Willard was part of the first generation of American girls to be educated outside of the home. As both a student and a young teacher in Connecticut, Vermont, and New York, she chafed at the limitations placed on female learning, but also the traditional methods of teaching. She went on to transform female education as founder of the Troy Female Seminary, and in the classroom experimented with new methods of teaching geography and history.

Benjamin Franklin’s “Way to Wealth” began its existence in Philadelphia as the untitled preface to Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1758. Despite not having a formal title—or author’s name—and despite being published on the periphery of the British Empire, it gradually spread around the world, eventually being published in twenty-six languages, in well over a thousand appearances. Franklin’s paean to hard work and frugality was issued for a variety of audiences, from elites to peasants and servants, and in formats ranging from newspapers to advice manuals to schoolbooks.