Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture PDF

Author: Sarah Nelson Roth

Publisher:

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9781316004333

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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.

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture PDF

Author: Sarah N. Roth

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-07-21

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1139992805

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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

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780807846964

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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

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood PDF

Author: Corinne T. Field

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-09-02

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 146961815X

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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.

Interconnections

Interconnections PDF

Author: Carol Faulkner

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1580465072

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Explores gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history. This collection builds on decades of interdisciplinary work by historians of African American women as well as scholars of feminist and critical race theory, bridging the gap between well-developed theories of race, gender, and power and the practice of historical research. It examines how racial and gender identity is constructed from individuals' lived experiences in specific historical contexts, such as westward expansion, civil rights movements, or economic depression as well as by national and transnational debates over marriage, citizenship and sexual mores. All of these essays consider multiple aspects of identity, including sexuality, class, religion, and nationality, amongothers, but the volume emphasizes gender and race as principal bases of identity and locations of power and oppression in American history. Contributors: Deborah Gray White, Michele Mitchell, Vivian May, Carol MoseleyBraun, Rashauna Johnson, Hélène Quanquin, Kendra Taira Field, Michelle Kuhl, Meredith Clark-Wiltz. Carol Faulkner is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Syracuse University. Alison M. Parker is Professor and Chairof the History Department at SUNY College at Brockport.

Forging Freedom

Forging Freedom PDF

Author: Amrita Chakrabarti Myers

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0807835056

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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

Masterless Men

Masterless Men PDF

Author: Keri Leigh Merritt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-05-08

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 110718424X

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

Masters of Small Worlds

Masters of Small Worlds PDF

Author: Stephanie McCurry

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1995-05-11

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0199728127

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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.

Whitewashing America

Whitewashing America PDF

Author: Bridget T. Heneghan

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9781934110997

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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

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780801472886

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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.