The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts PDF Download

Author: Amber D. Moulton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674286251
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Though Massachusetts banned slavery in 1780, prior to the Civil War a law prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks reinforced the state’s racial caste system. Amber Moulton recreates an unlikely collaboration of reformers who sought to rectify what they saw as an indefensible injustice, leading to the legalization of interracial marriage.

Author: Karen Woods Weierman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781558498013
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Examines the roots of a pernicious and persistent American taboo

Author: Sheryll Cashin
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807058270
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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The landmark story of how interracial love and marriage changed American history—and continues to alter the landscape of American politics When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case—the first to use the words “white supremacy” to describe such racism. Drawing from the earliest chapters in US history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America’s original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of nonwhite blood merited exclusion from full citizenship. In vivid detail, she illustrates how the idea of whiteness was created by the planter class of yesterday and is reinforced by today’s power-hungry dog-whistlers to divide struggling whites and people of color, ensuring plutocracy and undermining the common good. Not just a hopeful treatise on the future of race relations in America, Loving challenges the notion that trickle-down progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible and sharp, Cashin reanimates the possibility of a future where interracial understanding serves as a catalyst of a social revolution ending not in artificial color blindness but in a culture where acceptance and difference are celebrated.

Author: Michael P. Winship
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Puritans did not find a life free from tyranny in the new world—they created it there. Massachusetts emerged a republic as they hammered out a vision of popular participation and limited government in church and state, spurred by Plymouth pilgrims. Godly Republicanism underscores how pathbreaking yet rooted in puritanism’s history the project was.

Author: Katherine Grandjean
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674289919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Katherine Grandjean shows that the English conquest of New England was not just a matter of consuming territory, of transforming woods into farms. It entailed a struggle to control the flow of information—who could travel where, what news could be sent, over which routes winding through the woods along the early American communications frontier.

Author: Andrew J. Torget
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469624257
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing wealth and waves of Americans to the Gulf Coast while also devastating the lives and villages of Mexicans in Texas. In response, Mexico threw open its northern territories to American farmers in hopes that cotton could bring prosperity to the region. Thousands of Anglo-Americans poured into Texas, but their insistence that slavery accompany them sparked pitched battles across Mexico. An extraordinary alliance of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas came together to defend slavery against abolitionists in the Mexican government, beginning a series of fights that culminated in the Texas Revolution. In the aftermath, Anglo-Americans rebuilt the Texas borderlands into the most unlikely creation: the first fully committed slaveholders' republic in North America. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States, and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s.

Author: Albert J. Von Frank
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674039544
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston--and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect, it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation. In a searching cultural analysis, Albert J. von Frank draws us into the drama and the consequences of the case. He introduces the individuals who contended over the fate of the barely literate twenty-year-old runaway slave--figures as famous as Richard Henry Dana Jr., the defense attorney, as colorful as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Bronson Alcott, who led a mob against the courthouse where Burns was held, and as intriguing as Moncure Conway, the Virginia-born abolitionist who spied on Burns's master. The story is one of desperate acts, even murder--a special deputy slain at the courthouse door--but it is also steeped in ideas. Von Frank links the deeds and rhetoric surrounding the Burns case to New England Transcendentalism, principally that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His book is thus also a study of how ideas relate to social change, exemplified in the art and expression of Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, and others. Situated at a politically critical moment--with the Whig party collapsing and the Republican arising, with provocations and ever hotter rhetoric intensifying regional tensions--the case of Anthony Burns appears here as the most important fugitive slave case in American history. A stirring work of intellectual and cultural history, this book shows how the Burns affair brought slavery home to the people of Boston and brought the nation that much closer to the Civil War.

Author: Eric Hinderaker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674048334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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George Washington Prize Finalist Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati Prize “Fascinating... Hinderaker’s meticulous research shows that the Boston Massacre was contested from the beginning... [Its] meanings have plenty to tell us about America’s identity, past and present.” —Wall Street Journal On the night of March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered in front of Boston’s Custom House, killing five people. Denounced as an act of unprovoked violence and villainy, the event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre is one of the most famous and least understood incidents in American history. Eric Hinderaker revisits this dramatic confrontation, examining in forensic detail the facts of that fateful night, the competing narratives that molded public perceptions at the time, and the long campaign to transform the tragedy into a touchstone of American identity. “Hinderaker brilliantly unpacks the creation of competing narratives around a traumatic and confusing episode of violence. With deft insight, careful research, and lucid writing, he shows how the bloodshed in one Boston street became pivotal to making and remembering a revolution that created a nation.” —Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions “Seldom does a book appear that compels its readers to rethink a signal event in American history. It’s even rarer...to accomplish so formidable a feat in prose of sparkling clarity and grace. Boston’s Massacre is a gem.” —Fred Anderson, author of Crucible of War

Author: Renee C. Romano
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674010338
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Marriage between blacks and whites is a longstanding and deeply ingrained taboo in American culture. On the eve of World War II, mixed-race marriage was illegal in most states. Yet, sixty years later, black-white marriage is no longer illegal or a divisive political issue, and the number of such couples and their mixed-race children has risen dramatically. Renee Romano explains how and why such marriages have gained acceptance, and what this tells us about race relations in contemporary America. The history of interracial marriage helps us understand the extent to which America has overcome its racist past, and how much further we must go to achieve meaningful racial equality.

Author: Peggy Pascoe
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0195094638
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
" ... Examines two of the most insidious ideas in American history. The first is the belief that interracial marriage is unnatural. The second is the belief in white supremacy. When these two ideas converged, with the invention of the term 'miscegenation' in the 1860s, the stage was set for the rise of a social, political, and legal system of white supremacy that reigned through the 1960s and, many would say, beyond" -- Introduction, page 1.