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Complicated Lives: Free Blacks In Virginia, 1619-1865, Sherri L. Burr

Faculty Book Display Case

Would the United States have developed differently if Virginia had not passed a law in 1670 proclaiming all subsequently arriving Africans as servants for life, or slaves? What if the state had not stripped all Free Blacks and Indians of voting rights in 1723, or outlawed interracial sex for 337 years?

Complicated Lives upends the pervasive belief that all Africans landing on the shores of Virginia beginning in late August 1619, became slaves. In reality, many of these kidnap victims received the status of indentured servants. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of free African Americans in the South and North owned …

Gendered Law In American History (2016), Richard Chused, Wendy Williams

Books

Gendered Law in American History is a remarkable compendium of over thirty years of research and teaching in the field. It explores an array of social, cultural, and legal arenas from the turn of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, including concepts of citizenship at the founding of the republic, the development of married women’s property laws, divorce, child custody, temperance, suffrage, domestic and racial violence before and after the Civil War, protective labor legislation, and the use of legal history testimony in legal disputes. It is both an invaluable reference tool and an important new teaching …