Born into slavery, Elizabeth Keckley, pictured here, went on to become a seamstress for Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, during the civil war era. ‘There was triumph in Keckley’s designs and in her ascent to being Lincoln’s primary dressmaker for seven years,’ writes Prempeh in her new book. She even ‘risked it all’ to ‘communicate her own story without filter’, publishing a memoir in 1868: Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.

Photograph: Courtesy the Indiana State Museum & Historic Sites, from the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection