Author: Corinne T. Field
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146961815X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
In the fight for equality, early feminists often cited the infantilization of women and men of color as a method used to keep them out of power. Corinne T. Field argues that attaining adulthood--and the associated political rights, economic opportunities, and sexual power that come with it--became a common goal for both white and African American feminists between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The idea that black men and all women were more like children than adult white men proved difficult to overcome, however, and continued to serve as a foundation for racial and sexual inequality for generations. In detailing the connections between the struggle for equality and concepts of adulthood, Field provides an essential historical context for understanding the dilemmas black and white women still face in America today, from "glass ceilings" and debates over welfare dependency to a culture obsessed with youth and beauty. Drawn from a fascinating past, this book tells the history of how maturity, gender, and race collided, and how those affected came together to fight against injustice.
Author: David Stefan Doddington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009463659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
This book explores how age shaped slavery as an institution and how the aging process affected the enslaved and enslaver alike. It challenges static models of enslaved resistance and enslaver dominance by emphasizing intergenerational conflict in the American South. Key reading for students and scholars of slavery in the US.
Author: John Frederick Bell
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807177849
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Winner of the New Scholar’s Book Award from the American Educational Research Association The abolitionist movement not only helped bring an end to slavery in the United States but also inspired the large-scale admission of African Americans to the country’s colleges and universities. Oberlin College changed the face of American higher education in 1835 when it began enrolling students irrespective of race and sex. Camaraderie among races flourished at the Ohio institution and at two other leading abolitionist colleges, Berea in Kentucky and New York Central, where Black and white students allied in the fight for emancipation and civil rights. After Reconstruction, however, color lines emerged on even the most progressive campuses. For new generations of white students and faculty, ideas of fairness toward African Americans rarely extended beyond tolerating their presence in the classroom, and overt acts of racial discrimination grew increasingly common by the 1880s. John Frederick Bell’s Degrees of Equality analyzes the trajectory of interracial reform at Oberlin, New York Central, and Berea, noting its implications for the progress of racial justice in both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on student and alumni writings, institutional records, and promotional materials, Bell interrogates how abolitionists and their successors put their principles into practice. The ultimate failure of these social experiments illustrates a tragic irony of abolitionism, as the achievement of African American freedom and citizenship led whites to divest from the project of racial pluralism.
Author: Leslie Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197685838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
"Consistent Democracy offers an intellectual history of the arguments, advocacy, and commentary about the so-called woman question and American popular government from the 1830s through the 1890s. What did it mean, a range of observers asked, that the world's first mass democracy only enfranchised white men? The inconsistency of women's "political non-existence" provoked a movement for change, led by familiar figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Movement voices were one part of a noisy and often discordant chorus. Only by attending to this broad range of competing voices can we understand popular political thought in nineteenth-century America"--
Author: Rebecca L. Davis
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479878073
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
The history of heterosexuality in North America across four centuries Heterosexuality is usually regarded as something inherently “natural”—but what is heterosexuality, and how has it taken shape across the centuries? By challenging ahistorical approaches to the heterosexual subject, Heterosexual Histories constructs a new framework for the history of heterosexuality, examining unexplored assumptions and insisting that not only sex but race, class, gender, age, and geography matter to its past. Each of the fourteen essays in this volume examines the history of heterosexuality from a different angle, seeking to study this topic in a way that recognizes plurality, divergence, and inequity. Editors Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell have formed a collection that spans four centuries, addressing the many different racial groups, geographies, and subcultures of heterosexuality in North America. The essays range across disciplines with experts from various fields examining heterosexuality from unique perspectives: a historian shows how defining heterosexuality, sex, and desire were integral to the formation of British America and the process of colonization; a legal scholar examines the connections between race, sexual citizenship, and nonmarital motherhood; a gender studies expert analyzes the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and explores the intersections of heterosexuality with shame and second-wave feminism. Together, these essays explain how differently earlier Americans understood the varieties of gender and different-sex sexuality, how heterosexuality emerged as a dominant way of describing gender, and how openly many people acknowledged and addressed heterosexuality’s fragility. By contesting presumptions of heterosexuality’s stability or consistency, Heterosexual Histories opens the historical record to interrogations of the raced, classed, and gendered varieties of heterosexuality and considers the implications of heterosexuality’s multiplicities and changes. Providing both a sweeping historical survey and concentrated case studies, Heterosexual Histories is a crucial addition to the field of sexuality studies.
Author: Susan J. Pearson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469665700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
For many Americans, the birth certificate is a mundane piece of paper, unearthed from deep storage when applying for a driver's license, verifying information for new employers, or claiming state and federal benefits. Yet as Donald Trump and his fellow "birthers" reminded us when they claimed that Barack Obama wasn't an American citizen, it plays a central role in determining identity and citizenship. In The Birth Certificate: An American History, award-winning historian Susan J. Pearson traces the document's two-hundred-year history to explain when, how, and why birth certificates came to matter so much in the United States. Deftly weaving together social, political, and legal history, The Birth Certificate is a fascinating biography of a piece of paper that grounds our understanding of how those who live in the United States are considered Americans.
Author: Kirsten E. Wood
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469675552
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
People have gathered in public drinking places to drink, relax, socialize, and do business for hundreds of years. For just as long, critics have described taverns and similar drinking establishments as sources of individual ruin and public disorder. Examining these dynamics as Americans surged westward in the early nineteenth century, Kirsten E. Wood argues that entrepreneurial, improvement-minded men integrated many village and town taverns into the nation's rapidly developing transportation network and used tavern spaces and networks to raise capital, promote innovative businesses, practice genteel sociability, and rally support for favored causes—often while drinking the staggering amounts of alcohol for which the period is justly famous. White men's unrivaled freedom to use taverns for their own pursuits of happiness gave everyday significance to citizenship in the early republic. Yet white men did not have taverns to themselves. Sharing tavern spaces with other Americans intensified white men's struggles to define what, and for whom, taverns should be. At the same time, temperance and other reform movements increasingly divided white men along lines of party, conscience, and class. In both conflicts, some improvement-minded white men found common cause with middle-class white women and Black activists, who had their own stake in rethinking taverns and citizenship.
Author: Jesica Siham Fernández
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479801216
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
Introduction: Latinx youth growing up in the United States -- Legality as having papeles -- Socializing future citizens -- Rights as a privilege -- Citizenship as a sociopolitical process -- Claiming rights beyond state relations -- Conclusion: Reimagining citizenship, legality, and rights.
Author: Michaël Roy
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479830097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
"How children helped abolish slavery"--
Author: Sari Edelstein
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198831889
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
This volume explores the idea of age in American literature over the course of the nineteenth century and examines how writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James used literature as a space to imagine alternative ideas about aging and to challenge conventional definitions of adulthood.
