A perceptive and inspiring biography of an extraordinary woman born into slavery who, through grit and determination, became a historic social and educational leader. The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a remarkable story of a Black woman’s journey from slavery to emancipation, from antebellum New Jersey to the Hawai‘ian Islands, and from her own self-education to a lifetime of teaching others—all told against the backdrop of the early United States’ pervasive racism. It’s a compelling chronicle of a critical time in American history and a testament to the courage and commitment of a woman whose persistence grew into a potent form of resistance. When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was “given, as a slave” to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green’s library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai‘i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility. Betsey Stockton became a revered figure in Princeton’s sizeable Black population, a founder of religious and educational institutions, and a leader engaged in the day-to-day business of building communities. In this first book-length telling of Betsey Stockton’s story, Gregory Nobles illuminates both a woman and her world, following her around the globe, and showing how a determined individual could challenge her society’s racial obstacles from the ground up. It’s at once a revealing lesson on the struggles of Stockton’s times and a fresh inspiration for our own.

Merging scholarly research and biographical narrative, She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton reveals the true life of a freed and highly educated slave in the Antebellum North. Betsey Stockton’s odyssey began in 1798 in Princeton, New Jersey, as “Bet,” the child of a slave mother, who captured the heart of her owner and surrogate father Ashbel Green, President of Princeton University. Advanced lessons at Princeton Theological Seminary matched her with lifelong friends Rev. Charles S. Stewart and his pregnant bride Harriet, as the three endured an 158-day voyage as Presbyterian missionaries to the Sandwich Islands in1823. Armchair sailors will savor Stockton’s own pre-Moby Dick whaleship journal of her time at sea, a shipboard birth, and life at Lahaina, Maui, where Stockton is celebrated as founding the first school for non-royal Hawaiians. Back on US soil, Stockton became surrogate mother to the Stewarts’ three children, sailed with missionaries on the Barge Canal to the Ojibwa Mission School, and later returned to her hometown, establishing a church and four schools which are the centers of a still-vibrant African American Historic District of Witherspoon-Jackson.

10 Women Who Changed the World is seminary president Daniel L. Akin’s powerful tribute to the transformational work done by some truly inspiring female Christian missionaries. With each profile, he journeys into the heart of that gospel servant’s mission-minded story and makes a compelling connection to a similar account from the Bible. By reading each missionary story, and how each woman embodies a certain passage of Scripture, prepare to be challenged and inspired to follow in their footsteps—because intentionally living on mission isn’t something reserved for heroes of the past. It’s something each one of us can pursue in everyday life! Women featured in this book: Sarah Hall Boardman Judson (and how she embodies Psalm 138) Eleanor Chesnut (and how she embodies John 13:34–35) Ann Hasseltine Judson (and how she embodies Psalm 142) Harriet Newell (and how she embodies Psalm 116) Darlene Deibler Rose (and how she embodies Psalm 27) Betsey Stockton (and how she embodies 1 Corinthians 7:17–24) Bertha Smith (and how she embodies Galatians 2:20) Charlotte Atlee White Rowe (and how she embodies 1 Corinthians 9:19, 22-23) Yvette Aarons (how she embodies Proverbs 3:5-8) Lilias Trotter (and how she embodies 2 Corinthians 12:7-10)

This unique book explores the lives and work of nearly 300 New Jersey women from the Colonial period to the present century. Included are biographies of notable, often nationally known individuals, as well as less celebrated people, whose vibrant personal stories illustrate the richness of women's experiences in New Jersey—and, really, in America—from 1600 to the present. Researched, written and illustrated by The Women's Project of New Jersey, this volume both recovers and re-tells the life stories of women who have helped shape our world. Past and Promise is a long-overdue celebration of the accomplishments of these individuals who succeeded, often against overwhelming odds. Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women incorporates an inclusive view of history that understands the past as the history of all of the people, not merely those who held a monopoly of power. As such this work contains biographies of artists, activists, entertainers, scientists, scholars, teachers, factory and agricultural workers, businesswomen, social engineers, and community builders. This easy-to-use and beautifully presented volume is indexed, and full of illustrations. The biographies are arranged alphabetically within four sections covering the following time periods: 1600-1807, 1808-1865, 1866-1920, and 1921 to the present. Each section is introduced by a historical overview, and each biographical entry includes a brief bibliography for further reading and research. This unique and very readable collection of biographies belongs in every public and personal library and deserves a wide audience of general readers from high school age through college and beyond.

Taking up a little-known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavor, Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner focus on the experiences of very young ’native’ children in three British colonies. In missionary settlements across the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, Upper Canada, and British-controlled India, experimental British ventures for placing young children of the poor in infant schools were simultaneously transported to and adopted for all three colonies. From the 1820s to the 1850s, this transplantation of Britain’s infant schools to its distant colonies was deemed a radical and enlightened tool that was meant to hasten the conversion of 'heathen' peoples by missionaries to Christianity and to European modes of civilization. The intertwined legacies of European exploration, enlightenment ideals, education, and empire building, the authors argue, provided a springboard for British colonial and missionary activity across the globe during the nineteenth century. Informed by archival research and focused on the shared as well as unique aspects of the infant schools’ colonial experience, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods illuminates both the pervasiveness of missionary education and the diverse contexts in which its attendant ideals were applied.

African American Lives offers up-to-date, authoritative biographies of some 600 noteworthy African Americans. These 1,000-3,000 word biographies, selected from over five thousand entries in the forthcoming eight-volume African American National Biography, illuminate African-American history through the immediacy of individual experience. From Esteban, the earliest known African to set foot in North America in 1528, right up to the continuing careers of Venus and Serena Williams, these stories of the renowned and the near forgotten give us a new view of American history. Our past is revealed from personal perspectives that in turn inspire, move, entertain, and even infuriate the reader. Subjects include slaves and abolitionists, writers, politicians, and business people, musicians and dancers, artists and athletes, victims of injustice and the lawyers, journalists, and civil rights leaders who gave them a voice. Their experiences and accomplishments combine to expose the complexity of race as an overriding issue in America's past and present. African American Lives features frequent cross-references among related entries, over 300 illustrations, and a general index, supplemented by indexes organized by chronology, occupation or area of renown, and winners of particular honors such as the Spingarn Medal, Nobel Prize, and Pulitzer Prize.

Everything you've ever wanted to know about the Garden State can now be found in one place. This encyclopaedia contains a wealth of information from New Jersey's prehistory to the present covering architecture, arts, biographies, commerce, arts, municipalities and much more.