A Story with an Argument: Writing the Transnational Life of a Sea Captain’s Wife

Abstract

My foray into transnational biography began with a collection of family letters. Revolving around the ordinary life of an extraordinary woman, the letters were written between the 1850s and the 1880s and mailed from one New England town to another, between New England and the Deep South, and between the United States and the British Caribbean. From these 500 or so letters, I wrote The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century.1