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.
Looking at Reconstruction at the national level obscures the incredible amount of cultural work and conflict that went into reconstructing households at the most intimate of levels. Given the number of deaths, this household struggle ...
See also Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter; Soldiers Database; Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?” 10. 77. Timothy Stamps resignation quoted in Cavanaugh, The Otey, Ringgold and Davidson Virginia Artillery, 101; ...
... and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York, 2008). 18 United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876). Also see United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876). Ronald M. Labbé and Jonathan Lurie. The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, ...
Ethnicities are found in Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872–1901 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); “The Colored Members of the Legislature,” Raleigh Daily Era, December 4, 1872 (reprinted in ...
This collection of original essays and commentary considers not merely how history has shaped the continuing struggle for racial equality, but also how backlash and resistance to racial reforms continue to dictate the state of race in ...
“Gripping and essential.”—Jesse Wegman, New York Times An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins ...
See Woodward, Origins of the New South; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household; and Simon, Fabric of Defeat. 2. Cf. Fredrickson, Black Image, and Joel Williamson, Crucible of Race.
In Household Politics, Magda Fahrni examines postwar reconstruction from a variety of angles in order to fully convey its significance in the 1940s as differences of class, gender, language, religion, and region naturally produced differing ...
J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson . 349-94 . New York : Oxford University ... Trelease , Allen W. The North Carolina Railroad , 1849–1871 , and the Modernization of North Carolina . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina ...
Examines the impact of Reconstruction on the everyday lives of white Southerners, American Indians, Union soldiers, and former slaves.