In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity
Jeannine Marie DeLombard
456 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4422-9 | $59.95 | £39.00
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series
"DeLombard ingeniously shows from deep research how much the creation of an African American 'voice' stemmed from ancient assumptions about race, criminality, and guilt. Her reading of Frederick Douglass's arrest and jailing as a young slave rebel is alone worth the price of this book, but she demands that we see race, literature, and citizenship in the age of the Civil War as a national crucible played out in courts, on gallows, in jails, and ultimately on the printed page."–David W. Blight, author of American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era
In the Shadow of the Gallows reveals how a sense of racialized culpability shaped Americans' understandings of personhood prior to the Civil War. Jeanine DeLombard draws from legal, literary, and popular texts to address fundamental questions about race, responsibility, and American civic belonging. Read more . . .
Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England
Nan Goodman
224 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4427-4 | $59.95 | £39.00
Banished investigates Puritan practices of social exclusion through the lens of seventeenth-century New England common law. From religious dissident Anne Hutchinson to the Deer Island Indians, cases of banishment reveal the impact of legal rhetoric on our conceptualization, past and present, of community boundaries and belonging. Read more . . .
Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World
Michael A. LaCombe
240 pages | 6 x 9 | 18 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4418-2 | $39.95 | £26.00
A volume in the Early American Studies series
Political Gastronomy examines the many meanings of food as a symbol of power in the daily life and the political culture of early America. Struggling to establish status and precedence, English settlers and American Indians alike conveyed authority through shared meals and other significant exchanges of food.
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