Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture PDF Author: Sarah N. Roth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139992805
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises. In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture PDF Author: Sarah N. Roth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139992805
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book

Book Description
In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises. In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture PDF Author: Sarah Nelson Roth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316004333
Category : African American men
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period.

We Mean to be Counted

We Mean to be Counted PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Varon
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807846964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Over the past two decades, historians have successfully disputed the notion that American women remained wholly outside the realm of politics until the early twentieth century. Still, a consensus has prevailed that, unlike their Northern counterparts, wom

Forging Freedom

Forging Freedom PDF Author: Amrita Chakrabarti Myers
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807835056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
For black women in antebellum Charleston, freedom was not a static legal category but a fragile and contingent experience. In this deeply researched social history, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers analyzes the ways in which black women in Charleston acquired, de

Interconnections

Interconnections PDF Author: Carol Faulkner
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580465072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Explores gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history.

Masterless Men

Masterless Men PDF Author: Keri Leigh Merritt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110718424X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
This book examines the lives of the Antebellum South's underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America.

Whitewashing America

Whitewashing America PDF Author: Bridget T. Heneghan
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781934110997
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
A study of how material goods and antebellum consumption defined whiteness

Reforming Men and Women

Reforming Men and Women PDF Author: Bruce Dorsey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801472886
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Before the Civil War, the public lives of American men and women intersected most frequently in the arena of religious activism. Bruce Dorsey broadens the field of gender studies, incorporating an analysis of masculinity into the history of early American religion and reform. His is a holistic account that reveals the contested meanings of manhood and womanhood among antebellum Americans, both black and white, middle class and working class.Urban poverty, drink, slavery, and Irish Catholic immigration--for each of these social problems that engrossed Northern reformers, Dorsey examines the often competing views held by male and female activists and shows how their perspectives were further complicated by differences in class, race, and generation. His primary focus is Philadelphia, birthplace of nearly every kind of benevolent and reform society and emblematic of changes occurring throughout the North. With an especially rich history of African-American activism, the city is ideal for Dorsey's exploration of race and reform.Combining stories of both ordinary individuals and major reformers with an insightful analysis of contemporary songs, plays, fiction, and polemics, Dorsey exposes the ways race, class, and ethnicity influenced the meanings of manhood and womanhood in nineteenth-century America. By linking his gendered history of religious activism with the transformations characterizing antebellum society, he contributes to a larger quest: to engender all of American history.

Masters of Small Worlds

Masters of Small Worlds PDF Author: Stephanie McCurry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199728127
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In this innovative study of the South Carolina Low Country, author Stephanie McCurry explores the place of the yeomanry in plantation society--the complex web of domestic and public relations within which they were enmeshed, and the contradictory politics of slave society by which that class of small farmers extracted the privileges of masterhood from the region's powerful planters. Insisting on the centrality of women as historical actors and gender as a category of analysis, this work shows how the fateful political choices made by the low-country yeomanry were rooted in the politics of the household, particularly in the customary relations of power male heads of independent households assumed over their dependents, whether slaves or free women and children. Such masterly prerogatives, practiced in the domestic sphere and redeemed in the public, explain the yeomanry's deep commitment to slavery and, ultimately, their ardent embrace of secession. By placing the yeomanry in the center of the drama, McCurry offers a significant reinterpretation of this volatile society on the road to Civil War. Through careful and creative use of a wide variety of archival sources, she brings vividly to life the small worlds of yeoman households, and the larger world of the South Carolina Low Country, the plantation South, and nineteenth-century America.

Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South

Women, Work and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South PDF Author: Wilma A. Dunaway
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521886198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The nature of female labor in the antebellum Appalachian South was shaped by race, ethnicity, and/or class positions.