book coverCover of the book Ties That Bind

Wild Girls

This Week’s Show

Listen to an interview with Tiya on Living on Earth’s This Week’s Show. To kick off Women’s History Month, we take a look at the history of women outdoors in America. From abolitionist Harriet Tubman to novelist Louisa May Alcott, some of the country’s most important women trailblazers shared a connection with the natural world in their girlhood. According to author Tiya Miles in her book Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, this time spent in the outdoors prepared these women to become pioneers in their fields. She joins Host Paloma Beltran for more (interview begins at 16:02). Read the transcript of Tiya’s interview.


7 Inspiring Books About Women in Sports Who Defied Expectations

Aime Alley Card, author of “The Tigerbelles,” recommends stories that will make you laugh, cry, and make you believe that overcoming the odds is possible; including Tiya’s book, Wild Girls. Read Aime’s recommendations.


Tiya Miles Uncovers the Hidden History of Women in the Outdoors

Tiya shows how wild places shaped the lives of female trailblazers in her book, Wild Girls, and shares her favorite memories in nature along with some ideas on how we can make it easier for all people to enjoy the outdoors. Read the article in Outside Magazine.


3 Must-Read Books to Kick Off the New Year

In her captivating new book Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged the Nation, Harvard professor and environmental educator Tiya Miles approaches such ideas via the biographies of female American leaders—enslaved heroines, pathbreaking writers, and Indigenous athletes—who had formative experiences in the wild. “Girl outsiders became trailblazers in their communities and American culture writ large,” Miles argues. “The stories pressed into this book like wildflower petals will show how time spent outside shaped the character of girls who later changed the country.”

Read the full recommendation in Sierra, the magazine of Sierra Club.


9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Tiya’s book, Wild Girls, is a suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

This brisk, intimate history, by a National Book Award-winning Harvard historian, is stocked with revelatory detail about the role of nature in the lives of a diverse array of American women, among them Harriet Tubman, Louisa May Alcott and Octavia Butler.

Read the full list at The New York Times.


Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2023

Tiya’s book Wild Girls lands on Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2023 in the Nonfiction category.

In this intellectual stroll through American history, Miles pieces together a surprising thesis regarding such radical women as Harriet Tubman and Louisa May Alcott and the strong relationships with the outdoors they developed in their youth. In graceful and erudite prose, Miles demonstrates how these pathbreakers were both drawn to the freedom of nature and in turn molded by it.

Read the full review at Publishers Weekly.

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How America’s Natural Beauty Called Generations of Women to Action

“Memory, for this young daughter of enslaved grandparents, is yoked to outdoor spaces with complex intergenerational meanings.” Read a published excerpt from Tiya’s book, Wild Girls, on Literary Hub.


Wild Girls (Starred Review)

If you, like Tiya Miles, were once a girl who found an expansive sense of wonder in wild spaces, you will love her book about the history of women in the outdoors.

Tiya Miles’ beautiful new book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, opens with a provocative suggestion: Being outdoors—experiencing unfettered, wide, risky and exciting natural environs—can open one up in unique ways that defy gendered expectations.

Read this review as it appears on BookPage.


Girls gone wild — Harriet Tubman, Louisa May Alcott, and the freedoms they found outdoors

Craig Feldman from the Boston Globe talks with Tiya about her book Wild Girls. They discuss Tiya’s research for the book, some of the ways the natural environment shaped the women she writes about and how these women, in particular, challenge the narratives that many Americans grew up with. Read interview in the Boston Globe.


For America’s ‘Wild Girls,’ the Natural World Meant Freedom

From The New York Times book review:

Tiya Miles’s “Wild Girls” is a thoroughly absorbing exploration of the formative role that nature has played in American women’s lives. A beautiful synthesis of diverse women’s experiences, combining history with memoir and a call to action, this brisk, elegant study — the first in a new series of “short” nonfiction books from Norton — demonstrates how the natural world functioned as a girlhood training ground for adult resistance to the country’s confining gender roles.

Read the full review in The New York Times.


Off the Shelf

“Wild Girls… is an utterly different encounter with nature—an invitation to seek out the untold ways humans and Earth interact. As a girl growing up in Cincinnati, Miles walked on the frozen Ohio River with her father in 1977. As a historian, she recalls the slaves who used it as an “ice bridge” to freedom in the early 1850s, right after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—a bracing frame for her original take on girls’ encounters with the wild.” Read the article.


Tiya Miles Rides with the Trailblazers in a New Book

Publishers Weekly‘s Sophia Stewart explores how Tiya’s lifelong inspiration in the natural world planted the seeds for her upcoming book, Wild Girls, and nurtured the idea that several notable women in US history were shaped and inspired by their own experiences in the great outdoors. Read the article.


The Cherokee Rose

Beyond The Ghosts of the South w/ Professor Tiya Miles

In this podcast episode of Crawlspace – True Crime & Mysteries, Tim Pilleri & Lance Reenstierna travel to the Haunted South with Tiya to explore the impact dark tourism in the South had on Tiya and how it led her to shine a light on the realities of these tales. Listen to the podcast now.


Reinspired by true events

In a recent interview with The Harvard Gazette, Tiya discusses what inspired her first novel The Cherokee Rose and why a recent tribal reckoning led her to revisit it. Read her full interview.


Six must-read new fiction books – reviewed by our experts

Reviewed by Emily West, Professor of American History, University of Reading, “This inspiring, moving and deeply spiritual “dual time” novel is loosely based upon research by the historian Tiya Miles, who introduces readers to the often-overlooked ownership of enslaved people by Native Americans.” Read the full review.


Q&A: How to Write Rural Historical Fiction, With Tiya Miles

In her interview with The Daily Yonder, Tiya discusses her process to writing historical fiction that accurately reflects the time and people featured in her work. Read her interview.

tiya wearing overalls smiling in front of a lush green field

Tiya’s Interview on Art Works

On the podcast Art Works, produced by the National Endowment for the Arts, Tiya discusses the challenges of writing a novel as an historian, the freedom in fiction to explore new themes and ideas, and how her experiences writing her debut novel helped shaped her writing in All That She Carried. Listen to Tiya’s interview on Art Works.


All That She Carried

Electric, poignant, exquisitely written: inside the inaugural Women’s prize for nonfiction shortlist

The award’s chair of judges explain why they chose Tiya’s book, All That She Carried, as one of the final six contenders for the inaugural Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Carefully judged, deeply researched, and exquisitely written, All That She Carried is a masterclass in how to contend with the absences of enslaved people in the archives. It brims with intelligence and love.

Read the full announcement.


In conversation with Tiya Miles

The Women’s Prize Trust spoke to Tiya about her writing, research and current reads. Read Tiya’s interview.


9 Fascinating Books for Black History Month

Recent reads that explore the lives of extraordinary African Americans and their legacies including Tiya’s book All That She Carried.

Heirlooms embody powerful familial stories, and Miles meticulously takes us through one such story of an inheritance that reveals as much about a maternal ancestry as it does about the history of the United States.

Read the AARP’s full recommendation.


10 Recent Works of Black History That Everyone Should Read

It’s a treasure trove of insight into Black family life in America.

Tiya’s book, All That She Carried, is one of “10 standout titles” that PW encourages you to add to your bookshelf. View the list.

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Five Local Libraries Will Be Hosts For 2024 Statewide Reading Program

Indiana Humanities and the Indiana Center for the Book recently announced the awardees for the 2023-2025 “One State/One Story” statewide reading program featuring All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Read more.


Five Best: Books on Unsung Women

All That She Carried was selected by Leah Redmond Chang, the author of Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power as one of the five best books about unsung women.

Tiya Miles rethinks the nature of black women’s legacies: cultivated over decades, they are built through stories told by mothers to daughters, memories inscribed onto the objects that they carry and pass onward.

Read more.


Titles Announced For 2023-2025 Indiana Statewide Read

Indiana Humanities and Indiana Center for the Book announced their selections for the 2023-2025 One State/One Story statewide reading program. “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake” by Tiya Miles is the high school/adult selection, and “Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life” by Ashley Bryan is the children’s selection. This will be the first cycle to feature two titles. Read the full article.


Read All About It

Brooke Gladstone’s interview with Tiya on her award-winning book All That She Carried is revisited in this episode of On The Media. ‘We could just throw our hands up and say, “We can’t find what we need, so we can’t tell these stories,” but that would be an additional injustice on top of the historical injustices.’ Listen Now. (Tiya’s segment begins at the 32:46 minute mark.)


All That She Carried — the extraordinary history of a mother’s gift

Tiya’s book, All That She Carried, is “a powerful dissenting narrative and “[as] this extraordinary study goes on to show, it’s also a means by which to illuminate the experiences of millions of enslaved people whose voices have been silenced.” Read more in the Financial Times.


All That She Carried by Tiya Miles review – social fabric

“The Harvard historian Tiya Miles has taken a bold and innovative approach to this problem in All That She Carried, a bestseller when it came out in the US last year, now published for the first time in Britain.”

All That She Carried finds a way to give voice to the wordless by using a mundane, domestic object – a cloth sack and its contents – to thread an extraordinary tale through the generations.” Read the review in The Guardian.


Profile Books scoops Miles’ National Book award-winning All That She Carried

Profile Books has scooped Tiya’s award-winning book, and “deeply moving history,” All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Read the announcement.


A Historian Reckons With Gaps in the Archives

Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC Studios On the Media, asks Tiya about her meditative approach to history and her career as a historical fiction writer. Miles explains what she learned about the three women connected to Ashley’s sack through her research and imagination to consider what their lives looked like. Listen now.


Eight Books for the Preservationist in Your Life

Looking for a book to read over the holidays? The National Trust for Historic Preservation has a list of recommendations, including Tiya’s book All That She Carried, that will “further invigorate, inspire, and maybe expand the perspective of the preservationist in your life.” View the full list.

all that she carried paperback cover

The 19 Best Memoirs to Curl Up with on the Couch (or the Beach Blanket)

Find out where Tiya’s All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake landed on Oprah Daily’s curated list of recently released and well-known memoirs.


All That She Carried wins Darlene Clark Hine Award for the best book in African American women’s and gender history

The Organization of American Historians announced All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake as the winner of the Darlene Clark Hine Award.

“More than a recovery narrative, this work is a testament to the power of intergenerational love and survival in slavery and freedom. Her use of a variety of sources and her ability to tell an environmental as well as a geographic history sets her book apart. She has advanced the field of African American women’s and gender history by giving us a model rooted in creativity for how to bear witness to the experiences of people left out of archives.” Read the program announcement (p.14) from the Organization of American Historians.

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All That She Carried wins the Lawrence W. Levine Award for the best book in American cultural history

The Organization of American Historians announced All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake as the winner of the the Lawrence W. Levine Award.

All That She Carried is a tour de force, setting a new bar for the craft of writing cultural history… This book honors Lawrence Levine’s legacy by revealing the importance of cultural objects, quite literally, from the ground up: the cotton that fueled plantation slavery is transformed through the skill and creativity of specific Black women into fabric that becomes, first, a family heirloom and, in recent years, an object of public history, preserved and displayed in museums. Miles’s skill and creativity as a historian are boundless; she will bring new audiences to the field of cultural history through her accessible, generous, and utterly compelling prose.” Read the program announcement (p.13) from the Organization of American Historians.


Behind the Mic: Janina Edwards on All That She Carried

Narrator Janina Edwards shares her experience narrating Tiya Miles’s National Book Award-winning All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.


Interview with South Writ Large

In her interview with South Writ Large, Tiya shares her inspiration, challenges, and intent behind her highly acclaimed book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Read her interview.


BILL’S BOOKS

Bill Goldstein included Tiya’s book, All That She Carried, as one of his favorite books of the year during his “Bill’s Books” segment on NBC Weekend Today in New York. Watch the clip of Bill’s Books.


Tiya Miles writes history but she reads everything

What’s on Tiya’s reading list? Find out in her interview published in The Boston Globe. Read “Tiya Miles writes history but she reads everything.”


How A Cotton Sack, Passed Down Over Generations, Tells A Larger Story About Slavery – NPR

In this interview Tiya talks with NPR’s Arun Venugopal about her book All That She Carried — highlighting the story of a single cotton sack passed down over generations; from Rose, an enslaved woman, who gives the sack to her young daughter Ashley before she is sold to eventually finding its way to her great-granddaughter Ruth who embroiders the sack Venugopal summarizes, “In the words of author Tiya Miles, this book is about the burdens of being human in an inhumane world, and about how Black women in particular have responded to systemic erasure with art, compassion and love.” Listen to Tiya’s interview (transcript available).


The Extreme History Project: The Dirt on the Past

Tiya talks with the hosts of the podcast The Dirt on the Past about her book All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake — why she felt compelled to write about this significant object, her process, and why this story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women is important today as we struggle with how to understand our hard histories and reconcile our past in a way that can help us move forward together.

Listen to the interview on Apple Podcasts.

Listen online.


Understanding the Horror of Slavery Is Impossible. But a Simple Cotton Sack Can Bring Us Closer.

From pecans to maternal empathy; in a moving and thoughtful interview with Slate, Tiya shares some of what she felt and experienced researching and writing All That She Carried. Read the full interview.


The Echoes of Artifacts in “All That She Carried”

All That She Carried locates the spiritual and tangible archive in objects, places, and literature. This is not traditional history; here emotions are held with the same care and consideration as traditional sources. The goal is not simply to uncover the story of Ashley’s sack, but to unpack the meaning of material things in Black women’s lives from enslavement through Jim Crow segregation.” Read this review as it appears on Chicago Review of Books.


How the Survivors of Slavery Used Material Objects to Preserve Intergenerational Wisdom

‘Having been treated as possessions and deprived of ownership of themselves, their families, crops they nurtured, and objects they made and maintained, African American survivors of slavery recognized the world of things. They lived each day in haunted awareness of the thin boundary line between human and non-human, a thinness daily exposed and abused by slave societies. Despite the prominence of a Cartesian duality in Western philosophy that proposed a clear split between spirit and matter, enslaved Blacks knew that people could be treated like things and things prized over people.’ This piece is excerpted from Tiya’s book All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake and can be read online at Literary Hub.


To Find the History of African American Women, Look to Their Handiwork

‘A granddaughter, mother, sewer, and storyteller imbued a piece of old cloth with all the drama and pathos of ancient tapestries depicting the deeds of queens and goddesses. She preserved the memory of her foremothers and also venerated these women, shaping their image for the next generations. Without Ruth, there would be no record. Without her record, there would be no history.’ This piece is excerpted from Tiya’s book All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake and can be read online in The Atlantic.


The radical hope of Black motherhood

One family’s heirloom reveals a broader legacy: brilliant practicality in the face of terror. Read the full article in The Boston Globe.


An Ordinary Treasure: PW Talks with Tiya Miles

Tiya was interviewed by Publishers Weekly on the material and symbolic significance of a cotton sack packed by an enslaved mother for her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, the subject in her upcoming book All That She Carried (Random House, June 2021). Read the interview.

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You can sometimes find Tiya on social media!

Photo by Stephanie Mitchell.

Follow Tiya on Twitter:
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Featured Editorials & Essays

How Octavia Butler Told the Future

Somehow she knew this time would come. The smoke-choked air from fire gone wild, the cresting rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the melting away of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence—Octavia Butler foresaw them all.

Tiya writes why we need Octavia Butler’s conception of “histofuturism” now more than ever. Read Tiya’s latest essay in The Atlantic.


‘Come Out and See the Stars’

How Americans like Harriet Tubman found hope in nature

Surely these memories pressed inside the souls of Black folk like bright leaves pressed into autumn soils, creating moist, fertile ground for self-knowledge, resistance, and resilience. Enslaved people had a critical awareness of their ecological contexts that we tend to overlook. In the stirrings of the natural world, they identified an essential, rare earth element: hope.

Read the essay adapted from Tiya Miles’s new book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation.


Juneteenth Is Different Out West

Tiya considers the impact of recognizing Juneteenth, a historically community-based holiday, as a national holiday. She writes, “Juneteenth festivities have long represented tucked-away spaces, deeply local, somewhat surprising and fitted to the variances of Black life in America”; and reminds us of the risk of “commercialization that threatens to eclipse these local celebrations, in all their wondrous specificity.” Read her essay in The New York Times.


The Great American Poet Who Was Named After a Slave Ship

In her review of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley by David Waldstreicher, Tiya writes, “…Waldstreicher points out that the remarkable and unlikely story of this Revolutionary-era Black celebrity, who was both highlighted and castigated for her race, turns on such reversals and contradictions. Wheatley emerges in these pages as a literary marvel. Waldstreicher’s comprehensive account is a monument to her prowess.” Read the full review in The Atlantic.


A National Tantrum at a National Park

Photo: M. Scott Brauer

“You’re in such a gorgeous place. Why are you complaining about stupid stuff?” Tiya explores the spread of ugly behavior that has grown alongside Covid and found its way into some of our most beautiful places. Read “A National Tantrum at a National Park” in The Atlantic.



Featured Interviews & Video

This Week’s Show

To kick off Women’s History Month, we take a look at the history of women outdoors in America. From abolitionist Harriet Tubman to novelist Louisa May Alcott, some of the country’s most important women trailblazers shared a connection with the natural world in their girlhood. According to author Tiya Miles in her book Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, this time spent in the outdoors prepared these women to become pioneers in their fields. She joins Host Paloma Beltran for more (interview begins at 16:02).

Listen to an interview with Tiya on Living on Earth’s This Week’s Show.


 

For Tiya Miles, Girlhood Reading Was ‘My Escape and Joy’

Tiya was featured in By the Book, a space in The New York Times for authors and other notable people to share a peak into their lives as readers.

“My favorite author was Madeleine L’Engle,” says the National Book Award-winning historian, whose new book is “Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation.” “In middle school I would ride the city bus to the public library and check out L’Engle’s novels for teens.”

Read the full interview in The New York TImes.


 

Black Native History with Dr. Tiya Miles

On the first episode in the series Black Native History on All My Relations Podcast, Tiya talks with the hosts about the historical foundations and intersection of relationships between Black and Native populations starting with the circumstances of their introduction during the time of the white settler invasion of the Americas.

Listen to Black Native History with Dr. Tiya Miles.


Crowdsourcing the Story of a People

Tiya describes how public history can reshape our views of the past and present in an interview with The Harvard Gazette.

Tiya Miles believes a better understanding of the past is as likely to be found in a National Park or a conversation with an elderly relative as it is in a formal archive or classroom.

Read the full interview.


 

Teaching America’s Interwoven Histories

Tiya Miles standing outside in from blurred green shrubs in the background

Tiya talked to Teaching Tolerance about why we can’t understand American history without first understanding the shared history of African Americans and Indigenous Americans.

The U.S. exists only because of foundational expropriation of North American indigenous lands.

Read the full interview.