Much of the material unearthed by this book is ugly, states historiographer Patricia Morton who exposes profoundly dehumanizing constructions of reality embedded in American scholarship as it has attempted to render the history of the Afro-American woman. Focusing on the scholarly literature of fact rather than on fictional or popular portrayals, Disfigured Images explores the telling--and frequent mis-telling--of the story of black women during a century of American historiography beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending to the present. Morton finds that during this period, a large body of scholarly literature was generated that presented little fact and much fiction about black women's history. The book's ten chapters take long and lingering looks at the black woman's prefabricated past. Contemporary revisionist studies with their goals of discovering and articulating the real nature of the slave woman's experience and role are thoroughly examined in the conclusion. Disfigured Images complements current work by recognizing in its findings a long-needed refutation of a caricatured, mythical version of black women's history.