Nancy Gardner Prince

Nancy Gardner Prince (1799 - c. 1856) was an African-American born free in Newburyport, Massachusetts, who wrote about her travels in Russia and Jamaica. The date of her death is uncertain. Her published autobiography includes an account of how her marriage led her to the Russian Courts of Alexander I and Nicholas I.[1] "The author vivdly describes local Russian customs, as well as her experiences of the Saint Petersburg flood of 1824 and the Decembrist Revolt."

Little is known about Prince's family life. Her father, a seaman from Nantucket, died when she was an infant, leaving her in the care of her mother and six siblings. They sold berries to support the family and she eventually went on to work as a servant for white families. In 1824 she married Nero Prince, founder of the Prince Hall Freemasons in Boston. They traveled to Russia, where she opened a boarding home and made infant clothing while her husband was a footman to the czar in St. Petersburg. When they returned to Boston, she started her own seamstress business and gave lectures about her travels to Russia and Jamaica.

References

  1. ↑ Kaganoff, Penny. "A Black Woman’s Odyssey Through Russia and Jamaica: the Narrative of Nancy Prince". Publishers Weekly, June 28, 1990: 95. Gale Biography in Content.

Further reading

  • Bolden, Tonya. Biographies. Digital Schomburg, African American Women Writers of the 19th Century (accessed November 18, 2011),
  • "Nancy Gardner Prince", Notable Black American Women. Gale, 1992. Gale Biography in Context. Web. September 13, 2012.
  • Yee, Shirley. “Prince, Nancy Gardner 1799-c 1856", BlackPast.org (accessed 01/12/2012)
  • Kaganoff, Penny. "A Black Woman’s Odyssey Through Russia and Jamaica: the Narrative of Nancy Prince". Publishers Weekly, June 28, 1990: 95. Gale Biography in Content. Web. September 13, 2012
  • Prince, Nancy, A Narrative of the life and travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, accessed November 18, 2011)
  • Yee, Shirley J., Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992)
  • Loewenberg, Bert James, and Ruth Bogin, eds, Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life (Univ. Park: Penn State University Press, 1978).
  • Australia Tarver Henderson, "Nancy Gardner Prince" in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, vol. II (New York: Carlson, 1993): 946–47.
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