All That She Carried

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By Tiya Miles

Publisher Description

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 Award

ONE 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 Prize

ONE 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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256 Reviews

4.0

Kelsey Kloza

Created 11 days ago

“This was difficult to get through. While I appreciate what the author wanted to do (highlight a story of an enslaved Black woman and her daughters that would have otherwise been lost to history) it read to me like a college student's essay. It was like she was given this historical artifact and asked to write 300 pages about it, so the final result ends up with a lot of filler quotes, speculation, rhetorical questions, and projected or inflated meaning onto various aspects. I was hoping for a narrative non-fiction (along the lines of the books 'Master Slave, Husband Wife' or 'The Warmth of Other Suns') but instead found a very dry thesis without beginning/middle/climax/end and a central argument that comes down to "objects carry meaning too."”

Amanda Scruggs

Created 15 days ago

LitWithGenice

Created 27 days ago

“4/5 I read this book over a span of 10 days and I think this book was pretty good for what the contents entailed. This was thoroughly researched and well structured as each chapter provided a deeper dive into what was in the sack and how would it relate to the US south during that time. I do think if this book was more so about the sack and the family itself, it would have been a bit better for me to digest. A lot of extra information was provided from scholars, researchers, other enslaved/free peoples essays, etc that all gave context to the things that were in the sack. I could see how someone could get overwhelmed or not interested due to the amount of information that does not directly pertain to the women in the story. The context provided was important however and I learned a lot of things in this book about the US south, slavery etc”

Harsh Beautifully-written Well-researched Slow-paced Too long Abuse Child loss Murder Racism Sexual assault Violence

❄️✨️ Mel ✨️❄️

Created 28 days ago

“As a genealogist and historian who is currently feeling helpless against political systems and other things out of my control, this book was incredibly inspiring to me. This was an important read, and a great reminder of what it means to be a good ancestor and the value of love as a form of resistance and resilience.”

Abuse Bigotry Child abuse Child loss Death Grief Murder Racism Sexual assault Violence

Heidi Carothers

Created about 1 month ago

About Tiya Miles

Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Miles is the author of The Dawn of Detroit, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among other honors, as well as the acclaimed books Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series.