Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture PDF Author: Sarah N. Roth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107043689
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: 1107043689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

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: 9781316008836
Category : African American men
Languages : en
Pages :

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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"--

We Mean to Be Counted

We Mean to Be Counted PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Varon
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807866083
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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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, women of the antebellum South were largely excluded from public life. With this book, Elizabeth Varon effectively challenges such historical assumptions. Using a wide array of sources, she demonstrates that throughout the antebellum period, white Southern women of the slaveholding class were important actors in the public drama of politics. Through their voluntary associations, legislative petitions, presence at political meetings and rallies, and published appeals, Virginia's elite white women lent their support to such controversial reform enterprises as the temperance movement and the American Colonization Society, to the electoral campaigns of the Whig and Democratic Parties, to the literary defense of slavery, and to the causes of Unionism and secession. Against the backdrop of increasing sectional tension, Varon argues, these women struggled to fulfill a paradoxical mandate: to act both as partisans who boldly expressed their political views and as mediators who infused public life with the "feminine" virtues of compassion and harmony.

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

The Mark of Slavery

The Mark of Slavery PDF Author: Jenifer L. Barclay
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052617
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Exploring the disability history of slavery Time and again, antebellum Americans justified slavery and white supremacy by linking blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency. Jenifer L. Barclay examines the ubiquitous narratives that depicted black people with disabilities as pitiable, monstrous, or comical, narratives used not only to defend slavery but argue against it. As she shows, this relationship between ableism and racism impacted racial identities during the antebellum period and played an overlooked role in shaping American history afterward. Barclay also illuminates the everyday lives of the ten percent of enslaved people who lived with disabilities. Devalued by slaveholders as unsound and therefore worthless, these individuals nonetheless carved out an unusual autonomy. Their roles as caregivers, healers, and keepers of memory made them esteemed within their own communities and celebrated figures in song and folklore. Prescient in its analysis and rich in detail, The Mark of Slavery is a powerful addition to the intertwined histories of disability, slavery, and race.

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.

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.

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.

Culture of Eloquence

Culture of Eloquence PDF Author: James Perrin Warren
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271039132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description


Gender, Health, and Popular Culture

Gender, Health, and Popular Culture PDF Author: Cheryl Krasnick Warsh
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554582539
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
Health is a gendered concept in Western cultures. Customarily it is associated with strength in men and beauty in women. This gendered concept was transmitted through visual representations of the ideal female and male bodies, and ubiquitous media images resulted in the absorption of universal standards of beauty and health and generalized desires to achieve them. Today, genuine or self-styled experts—from physicians to newspaper columnists to advertisers—offer advice on achieving optimal health. Topics in this collection are wide ranging and include childbirth advice in Victorian Australia and Cold War America, menstruation films, Canadian abortion tourism, the Pap smear, the Body Worlds exhibition, and fat liberation. Masculinity is explored among drunkards in antebellum Philadelphia and family memoirs during the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Seemingly objective public health advisories are shown to be as influenced by commercial interests, class, gender, and other social differentiations as marketing approaches are, and the message presented is mediated to varying degrees by those receiving it. This book will be of interest to scholars in women’s studies, health studies, marketing, media studies, social history and anthropology, and popular culture.