Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and
Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while
Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly
different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and
Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works
and organizing efforts brought the nation's attention to issues of
region, race, and labor.
In Sisters and Rebels, National Humanities Award-winning historian
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters,
who were "estranged and yet forever entangled" by their mutual obsession
with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past
through to the contemporary moment, Hall revives a buried tradition of
Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost,
revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the
fraught ties of sisterhood.
Grounded in decades of research, the family's private papers, and
interviews with Katharine and Grace, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an
epic narrative of American history through the lives and works of three
Southern women.