Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South

Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South PDF Author: Diane Miller Sommerville
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Challenging notions of race and sexuality presumed to have originated and flourished in the slave South, Diane Miller Sommerville traces the evolution of white southerners' fears of black rape by examining actual cases of black-on-white rape throughout the nineteenth century. Sommerville demonstrates that despite draconian statutes, accused black rapists frequently avoided execution or castration, largely due to intervention by members of the white community. This leniency belies claims that antebellum white southerners were overcome with anxiety about black rape. In fact, Sommerville argues, there was great fluidity across racial and sexual lines as well as a greater tolerance among whites for intimacy between black males and white females. According to Sommerville, pervasive misogyny fused with class prejudices to shape white responses to accusations of black rape even during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, a testament to the staying power of ideas about poor women's innate depravity. Based predominantly on court records and supporting legal documentation, Sommerville's examination forces a reassessment of long-held assumptions about the South and race relations as she remaps the social and racial terrain on which southerners--black and white, rich and poor--related to one another over the long nineteenth century.

Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South

Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South PDF Author: Diane Miller Sommerville
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Challenging notions of race and sexuality presumed to have originated and flourished in the slave South, Diane Miller Sommerville traces the evolution of white southerners' fears of black rape by examining actual cases of black-on-white rape throughout the nineteenth century. Sommerville demonstrates that despite draconian statutes, accused black rapists frequently avoided execution or castration, largely due to intervention by members of the white community. This leniency belies claims that antebellum white southerners were overcome with anxiety about black rape. In fact, Sommerville argues, there was great fluidity across racial and sexual lines as well as a greater tolerance among whites for intimacy between black males and white females. According to Sommerville, pervasive misogyny fused with class prejudices to shape white responses to accusations of black rape even during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, a testament to the staying power of ideas about poor women's innate depravity. Based predominantly on court records and supporting legal documentation, Sommerville's examination forces a reassessment of long-held assumptions about the South and race relations as she remaps the social and racial terrain on which southerners--black and white, rich and poor--related to one another over the long nineteenth century.

Reconstructing the Household

Reconstructing the Household PDF Author: Peter W. Bardaglio
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio's analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.

Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century South Africa

Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century South Africa PDF Author: R. L. Watson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107022002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Examines the significance of the abolition of slavery in South Africa's Cape Colony in 1834 and the subsequent development of race relations.

Rape and Sexual Power in Early America

Rape and Sexual Power in Early America PDF Author: Sharon Block
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
In a comprehensive examination of rape and its prosecution in British America between 1700 and 1820, Sharon Block exposes the dynamics of sexual power on which colonial and early republican Anglo-American society was based. Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classified as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charged only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-labor system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.

Black and White Masculinity in the American South, 1800-2000

Black and White Masculinity in the American South, 1800-2000 PDF Author: Sergio Lussana
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443815330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book consists of a range of essays written by historians and literary critics which examine the historical construction of Southern masculinities, rich and poor, white and black, in a variety of contexts, from slavery in the antebellum period, through the struggle for Civil Rights, right up to the recent South. Building on the rich historiography of gender and culture in the South undertaken in recent years, this volume aims to highlight the important role Southern conceptions of masculinity have played in the lives of Southern men, and to reflect on how masculinity has intersected with class, race and power to structure the social relationships between blacks and whites throughout the history of the South. The volume highlights the multifaceted nature of Southern masculinities, demonstrating the changing ways black and white masculinities have been both imagined and practised over the years, while also emphasizing that conceptions of black and white masculinity in the American South rarely seem to be divorced from wider questions of class, race and power.

Reconstructions

Reconstructions PDF Author: Thomas J. Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199723974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The pivotal era of Reconstruction has inspired an outstanding historical literature. In the half-century after W.E.B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a host of thoughtful and energetic authors helped to dismantle racist stereotypes about the aftermath of emancipation and Union victory in the Civil War. The resolution of long-running interpretive debates shifted the issues at stake in Reconstruction scholarship, but the topic has remained a vital venue for original exploration of the American past. In Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, eight rising historians survey the latest generation of work and point to promising directions for future research. They show that the field is opening out to address a wider range of adjustments to the experiences and effects of Civil War. Increased interest in cultural history now enriches understandings traditionally centered on social and political history. Attention to gender has joined a focus on labor as a powerful strategy for analyzing negotiations over private and public authority. The contributors suggest that Reconstruction historiography might further thrive by strengthening connections to such subjects as western history, legal history, and diplomatic history, and by redefining the chronological boundaries of the postwar period. The essays provide more than a variety of attractive vantage points for fresh examination of a major phase of American history. By identifying the most exciting recent approaches to a theme previously studied so ably, the collection illuminates the creative process in scholarly historical literature.

The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope Vol 1

The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope Vol 1 PDF Author: Brenda Ayres
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040244432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Frances Milton Trollope (1779-1863) was a prolific, provocative and hugely successful novelist. She greatly influenced the generation of Victorian novelists who came after her such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. This book features Trollope's social problem novels.

Liberty's Prisoners

Liberty's Prisoners PDF Author: Jen Manion
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812292421
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Liberty's Prisoners examines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States. The first penitentiary was founded in Philadelphia in 1790, a period of great optimism and turmoil in the Revolution's wake. Those who were previously dependents with no legal standing—women, enslaved people, and indentured servants—increasingly claimed their own right to life, liberty, and happiness. A diverse cast of women and men, including immigrants, African Americans, and the Irish and Anglo-American poor, struggled to make a living. Vagrancy laws were used to crack down on those who visibly challenged longstanding social hierarchies while criminal convictions carried severe sentences for even the most trivial property crimes. The penitentiary was designed to reestablish order, both behind its walls and in society at large, but the promise of reformative incarceration failed from its earliest years. Within this system, women served a vital function, and Liberty's Prisoners is the first book to bring to life the e xperience of African American, immigrant, and poor white women imprisoned in early America. Always a minority of prisoners, women provided domestic labor within the institution and served as model inmates, more likely to submit to the authority of guards, inspectors, and reformers. White men, the primary targets of reformative incarceration, challenged authorities at every turn while African American men were increasingly segregated and denied access to reform. Liberty's Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a repository for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.

Sexuality and Slavery

Sexuality and Slavery PDF Author: Daina Ramey Berry
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354023
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking collection, editors Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris place sexuality at the center of slavery studies in the Americas (the United States, the Caribbean, and South America). While scholars have marginalized or simply overlooked the importance of sexual practices in most mainstream studies of slavery, Berry and Harris argue here that sexual intimacy constituted a core terrain of struggle between slaveholders and the enslaved. These essays explore consensual sexual intimacy and expression within slave communities, as well as sexual relationships across lines of race, status, and power. Contributors explore sexuality as a tool of control, exploitation, and repression and as an expression of autonomy, resistance, and defiance.

Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South PDF Author: William A. Link
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813063590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
“This is a remarkable collection of essays. Citizenship clearly forms the backbone for these investigations but the range of the contributors’ backgrounds (in terms of disciplinary training) and the approaches they take to the question makes this collection both broad and deep. As it turns out, there is no other way to tackle a concept as central but also as slippery as citizenship. A shorter or more focused collection would miss the nuances and insights that this one offers.”—Aaron Sheehan-Dean, author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia “President Obama’s citizenship continues to be questioned by the ‘birthers,’ the Cherokee Nation has revoked tribal rights from descendants of Cherokee slaves, and Parliament in the U.K. is debating ‘citizenship education.’ It is in both this broader context and in the narrower academic one that Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South stands as a smart, exciting, and most welcome contribution to southern history and southern studies.”—Michele Gillespie, author of Katharine and R.J. Reynolds: Partners of Fortune and the Making of the New South “Combining historical and cultural studies perspectives, eleven well-crafted essays and a provocative epilogue engage the economic, political, and cultural dynamics of race and belonging from the era of enslavement through emancipation, reconstruction, and the New South.”—Nancy A. Hewitt, author of Southern Discomfort More than merely legal status, citizenship is also a form of belonging, shaping individual and group rights, duties, and identities. The pioneering essays in this volume are the first to address the evolution and significance of citizenship in the American South during the long nineteenth century. They explore the politics and contested meanings of citizenry from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in a tumultuous period when slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and segregation redefined relationships between different groups of southern men and women, both black and white.