My BOOKS
More Than Words Can Ever Tell
What is the secret to life-long love? Why do some marriages stand the test of time while others fail? In 2014 in the wake of her dad’s death, historian Jennifer Lansbury discovered a cache of letters written by her parents over half a century earlier when her father, compliments of the U.S. Marine Corps, was separated time and again from his “dearest, darling wife” and young children. In reading through them, she discovered that the foundation of her parents’ beautiful 58-year marriage was in this pile of letters, and came to see her mother and father in a totally new way, as a young couple separate from who they were as her parents. Enter their world as she uses their letters, coupled with memory of her growing up, to tell the story of her parents and their love, her family, and the separations they endured against the backdrop of the times in which they lived. Journey with them—from their North Carolina beginnings during the Great Depression and World War II; through her father’s brutal experience of the Korean War; to the island of Okinawa, rocky clime of Argentia, Newfoundland, and Marine bases of the South during the burgeoning 1950s and turbulent 1960s—as Becky and George use sixteen years of love letters to hold together a relationship and family torn apart by war and devotion to military service.
A Spectacular Leap
Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America
When high jumper Alice Coachman won the high jump title of the 1941 national championships with "a spectacular leap," Black women had been participating in competitive sport for close to 25 years. Yet it would be another 20 before they would experience something akin to the national fame and recognition that Black men had known since the 1930s, the days of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. From the 1920s, when they were confined to competing within the Black community, into the heady days of the late twentieth century when they ruled the world of women's track and field, these revolutionary competitors found sport opened the door to a better life. However, they also discovered that success meant challenging perceptions that many Americans—both Black and White—held of them.
Through the stories of six athletes—Coachman, Ora Washington, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, Wyomia Tyus, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee—Jennifer Lansbury deftly follows the emergence of Black women athletes from the Black community; their confrontations with contemporary attitudes of race, class, and gender; and their encounters with the civil rights movement. Uncovering the various strategies the athletes use to beat back stereotypes, Lansbury explores the fullness of Black women's relationship with sport in the twentieth century.
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