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 PrizeLONGLISTED: Women s PrizeONE 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
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