South Guilford News

Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, author of Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America, will discuss her book at 6 pm, Thursday, March 14 at the Greensboro History Museum, 130 Summit Ave. Engelhardt is the UNC Chapel Hill Kenan Eminent Professor of Southern Studies and will speak at the Museum’s By the Book series.

Boardinghouse Women is a fascinating look at how southern boardinghouse keepers changed modern American food and much more. Engelhardt asserts that modern business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to these entrepreneurial women of the South. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners. Within their walls, boardinghouse residents and owners developed the region's earliest printed cookbooks, created space for making music and writing literary works, formed ad hoc communities of support, tested boundaries of race and sexuality, and more.

Engelhardt is the author of well-known studies of Southern foodways, A Mess of Greens and Republic of Barbecue and is a contributor to Greensboro Public Library’s One City, One Book community read, Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food. This is a free event with a book signing to follow. Greensboro History Museum’s By the Book series features authors exploring history connections across North Carolina and the Southeast. Copies of Boardinghouse Women will be available for purchase from Scuppernong Books at the event.

Original source can be found here.