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This short story—an important piece in early American feminist literature—sheds light on 19th century attitudes toward women with physical and mental illness. In this excerpt, the speaker details her bedroom, a place where her husband and doctors come to encourage her to health. Her ailment is vague; the emphasis is on what others—all men—think and say.

The Nuremberg Laws embedded many of the racially based ideological principles held by the Nazi party into written law. The German Reichstag passed this set of laws on September 15, 1935, initiating a period of legal discrimination against those the German government deemed racially inferior. The Reich Citizenship Law is one of the Nuremburg Laws.

Sean McCollum gives an account of writer Julia Alvarez's move to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a young girl. Although Alvarez struggled to fit in in this unfamiliar place, she finally found a comfortable niche in her writing.