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Hannah Rosen

Selected Works

2019

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Terror In The Heart Of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, And The Meaning Of Race In The Postemancipation South, Hannah Rosen Sep 2019

Terror In The Heart Of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, And The Meaning Of Race In The Postemancipation South, Hannah Rosen

Hannah Rosen

The meaning of race in the antebellum southern United States was anchored in the racial exclusivity of slavery (coded as black) and full citizenship (coded as white as well as male). These traditional definitions of race were radically disrupted after emancipation, when citizenship was granted to all persons born in the United States and suffrage was extended to all men. Hannah Rosen persuasively argues that in this critical moment of Reconstruction, contests over the future meaning of race were often fought on the terrain of gender.

Sexual violence--specifically, white-on-black rape--emerged as a critical arena in postemancipation struggles over African American …


In The Moment Of Violence: Writing The History Of Postemancipation Terror, Hannah Rosen Sep 2019

In The Moment Of Violence: Writing The History Of Postemancipation Terror, Hannah Rosen

Hannah Rosen

This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postemancipation life as a new form of freedom, these essays develop the work of scholars who are looking at how belonging to an empowered government …