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Bonus Episode: Professor Travis Tells All

Hot Mess-Terpiece Theatre

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Black Women's History of Self-Help

The idea of reading for self-improvement was not as widely shared a cultural value in the black community. African Americans formed benevolent societies and churches that were focused on economic survival, political survival, and the creation of emotional networks to resist slavery and Jim Crow. Self-help is developing through the late 19th and early 20th century as a print genre targeted to a white middle class. The emerging black middle class has its own ways of being and doing and is not big enough to seem like an attractive market to white publishers.

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