Stemming from a conference in London sponsored by Brunel University and the Mellon Fund of the University of Cambridge, The Practice of U.S. Women's History has its inception in varying discursive voices. Positioning itself in relation to Peggy Pascoe's 1990 classic work Relations of Rescue, this new collection echoes and extends upon Pascoe's premise that history is “a kind of conversation between the past and the present in which we travel through time to examine the cultural assumptions – and possibilities – of our society as well as the societies before us” (Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, xxiii).

The Practice of U.S. Women's History comprises seventeen essays and an editorial introduction, incorporating the full chronological sweep of American history. Furthermore, this diversity – in its consideration of US women's historical practice – is not limited merely to chronological scope; it also explores various perspectives and individual voices from women's history. These positions and voices include Native American women, southern women of colour, women as reluctant migrants, African American women and migration, histories of US immigrant women, discursive work in the antebellum era, personal retrospectives on Western women's history, gender and US imperialism, Chinese American women in US history, racial constructions in Chicana/o historiography, the woman's suffrage movement, engendering social welfare policy, competing frameworks in the histories of sexualities, African American women and the modern black freedom struggle, and feminism and antifeminism in the United States. The introductory subtitle, “Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues,” is certainly apt. Such variety certainly, as the editors state, “questions whose voices count and who decides what matters” (1). In fact, they actively encourage the reader to “read the chapters out of ‘order.’ By disrupting standard periodization, this volume emphasizes the conversational nature of historiography, the nuances and disagreements that emerge when historians reflect on each other's work” (5). The individual contributors are also from varying cultural and social backgrounds, universities and transatlantic nationalities, speaking to this notion of disorder or dis-ordering in order to create new meanings and insights in US women's histories.

Overall, then, this collection offers a clear response to the central question posed by the editors and the many varied contributors: “Where have we been and where are we going as chroniclers of a gendered American story?” (1).