Download or read book The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America written by Greta LaFleur and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How natural history made sex scientific in the eighteenth century. If sexology—the science of sex—came into being sometime in the nineteenth century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, Greta LaFleur demonstrates that eighteenth-century natural history—the study of organic life in its environment—actually provided the intellectual foundations for the later development of the scientific study of sex. Natural historians understood the human body to be a "porous envelope," eminently vulnerable to its environment. Yet historians of sexuality have tended to rely on archival evidence of genital-based or otherwise bodily sex acts for source material. Through careful readings of both elite natural history texts and popular print forms that circulated widely in the British North American colonies—among them Barbary captivity, execution, cross-dressing, and anti-vice narratives—LaFleur traces the development of a broad knowledge of sexuality defined in terms of the dynamic relationship between the human and the natural, social, physical, and climatic milieu. At the heart of this book is the question of how to produce a history of sexuality for an era in which modern vocabularies for sex and desire were unavailable. LaFleur demonstrates how environmental logic was used to explain sexual behavior on a broad scale, not just among the educated elite who wrote and read natural historical texts. LaFleur reunites the history of sexuality with the history of race, demonstrating how they were bound to one another by the emergence of the human sciences. Ultimately, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America not only rewrites all dominant scholarly narratives of eighteenth-century sexual behavior but also poses a major intervention into queer theoretical understandings of the relationship between sex and the subject.
Download or read book Sex and Sexuality in Early America written by Merril D. Smith and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1998-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role did sexual assault play in the conquest of America? How did American attitudes toward female sexuality evolve, and how was sexuality regulated in the early Republic? Sex and sexuality have always been the subject of much attention, both scholarly and popular. Yet, accounts of the early years of the United States tend to overlook the importance of their influence on the shaping of American culture. Sex and Sexuality in Early America addresses this neglected topic with original research covering a wide spectrum, from sexual behavior to sexual perceptions and imagery. Focusing on the period between the initial contact of Europeans and Native Americans up to 1800, the essays encompass all of colonial North America, including the Caribbean and Spanish territories. Challenging previous assumptions, these essays address such topics as rape as a tool of conquest; perceptions and responses to Native American sexuality; fornication, bastardy, celibacy, and religion in colonial New England; gendered speech in captivity narratives; representations of masculinity in eighteenth- century seduction tales, the sexual cosmos of a southern planter, and sexual transgression and madness in early American fiction. The contributors include Stephanie Wood, Gordon Sayre, Steven Neuwirth, Else L. Hambleton, Erik R. Seeman, Richard Godbeer, Trevor Burnard, Natalie A. Zacek, Wayne Bodle, Heather Smyth, Rodney Hessinger, and Karen A. Weyler.
Download or read book Sexual Revolution in Early America written by Richard Godbeer and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2004-02-18 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Alternate Selection of the History Book Club In 1695, John Miller, a clergyman traveling through New York, found it appalling that so many couples lived together without ever being married and that no one viewed "ante-nuptial fornication" as anything scandalous or sinful. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister in South Carolina in 1766, described the region as a "stage of debauchery" in which polygamy was "very common," "concubinage general," and "bastardy no disrepute." These depictions of colonial North America's sexual culture sharply contradict the stereotype of Puritanical abstinence that persists in the popular imagination. In Sexual Revolution in Early America, Richard Godbeer boldly overturns conventional wisdom about the sexual values and customs of colonial Americans. His eye-opening historical account spans two centuries and most of British North America, from New England to the Caribbean, exploring the social, political, and legal dynamics that shaped a diverse sexual culture. Drawing on exhaustive research into diaries, letters, and other private papers, as well as legal records and official documents, Godbeer's absorbing narrative uncovers a persistent struggle between the moral authorities and the widespread expression of popular customs and individual urges. Godbeer begins with a discussion of the complex attitude that the Puritans had toward sexuality. For example, although believing that sex could be morally corrupting, they also considered it to be such an essential element of a healthy marriage that they excommunicated those who denied "conjugal fellowship" to their spouses. He next examines the ways in which race and class affected the debate about sexual mores, from anxieties about Anglo-Indian sexual relations to the sense of sexual entitlement that planters held over their African slaves. He concludes by detailing the fundamental shift in sexual culture during the eighteenth century towards the acceptance of a more individualistic concept of sexual desire and fulfillment. Today's moral critics, in their attempts to convince Americans of the social and spiritual consequences of unregulated sexual behavior, often harken back to a more innocent age; as this groundbreaking work makes clear, America's sexual culture has always been rich, vibrant, and contentious.
Download or read book Rape and Sexual Power in Early America written by Sharon Block and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a comprehensive examination of rape and its prosecution in British America between 1700 and 1820, Sharon Block exposes the dynamics of sexual power on which colonial and early republican Anglo-American society was based. Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classified as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charged only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-labor system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.
Download or read book Long Before Stonewall written by Thomas A. Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2007-07 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Against Sex written by Kara M. French and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How much sex should a person have? With whom? What do we make of people who choose not to have sex at all? As present as these questions are today, they were subjects of intense debate in the early American republic. In this richly textured history, Kara French investigates ideas about, and practices of, sexual restraint to better understand the sexual dimensions of American identity in the antebellum United States. French considers three groups of Americans—Shakers, Catholic priests and nuns, and followers of sexual reformer Sylvester Graham—whose sexual abstinence provoked almost as much social, moral, and political concern as the idea of sexual excess. Examining private diaries and letters, visual culture and material artifacts, and a range of published works, French reveals how people practicing sexual restraint became objects of fascination, ridicule, and even violence in nineteenth-century American culture. Against Sex makes clear that in assessing the history of sexuality, an expansive view of sexual practice that includes abstinence and restraint can shed important new light on histories of society, culture, and politics.
Download or read book Intimate Matters written by John D'Emilio and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 1989 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces changing American attitudes towards human sexuality, discusses social issues involving race, gender, class, and sexual preference, and looks at crusaders for sexual change
Download or read book A Desired Past written by Leila J. Rupp and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author combines a vast array of scholarship on supposedly discrete episodes in American history into a story of same-sex desire across the country and the centuries.
Download or read book Documenting Intimate Matters written by Thomas A. Foster and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-12-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Thorough, and timely . . . sure to be a popular and valued companion to courses on the history of sexuality and gender in the United States.” —Regina Kunzel, University of Minnesota Over time, sexuality in America has changed dramatically. Frequently redefined and often subject to different systems of regulation, it has been used as a means of control; it has been a way to understand ourselves and others; and it has been at the center of fierce political storms, including some of the most crucial changes in civil rights in recent years. Edited by Thomas A. Foster, Documenting Intimate Matters features seventy-two documents that collectively highlight the broad diversity inherent in the history of American sexuality. Complementing the third edition of Intimate Matters, by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman—often hailed as the definitive survey of sexual history in America—the multiple narratives presented by these documents reveal the complexity of this subject in US history. The historical moments captured in this volume show that, contrary to popular misconception, the history of sexuality is not a simple story of increased freedoms and sexual liberation, but an ongoing struggle between change and continuity.
Download or read book Race Sex and Social Order in Early New Orleans written by Jennifer M. Spear and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2009 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association A microcosm of exaggerated societal extremes—poverty and wealth, vice and virtue, elitism and equality—New Orleans is a tangled web of race, cultural mores, and sexual identities. Jennifer M. Spear's examination of the dialectical relationship between politics and social practice unravels the city’s construction of race during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spear brings together archival evidence from three different languages and the most recent and respected scholarship on racial formation and interracial sex to explain why free people of color became a significant population in the early days of New Orleans and to show how authorities attempted to use concepts of race and social hierarchy to impose order on a decidedly disorderly society. She recounts and analyzes the major conflicts that influenced New Orleanian culture: legal attempts to impose racial barriers and social order, political battles over propriety and freedom, and cultural clashes over place and progress. At each turn, Spear’s narrative challenges the prevailing academic assumptions and supports her efforts to move exploration of racial formation away from cultural and political discourses and toward social histories. Strikingly argued, richly researched, and methodologically sound, this wide-ranging look at how choices about sex triumphed over established class systems and artificial racial boundaries supplies a refreshing contribution to the history of early Louisiana.
Download or read book Suspect Relations written by Kirsten Fischer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the eighteenth century, race came to seem as corporeal as sex. Kirsten Fischer has mined unpublished court records and travel literature from colonial North Carolina to reveal how early notions of racial difference were shaped by illicit sexual relationships and the sanctions imposed on those who conducted them. Fischer shows how the personal and yet often very public sexual lives of Native American, African American, and European American women and men contributed to the new racial order in this developing slave society. Liaisons between European men and native women, among white and black servants, and between servants and masters, as well as sexual slander among whites and acts of sexualized violence against slaves, were debated, denied, and recorded in the courtrooms of colonial North Carolina. Indentured servants, slaves, Cherokee and Catawba women, and other members of less privileged groups sometimes resisted colonial norms, making sexual choices that irritated neighbors, juries, and magistrates and resulted in legal penalties and other acts of retribution. The sexual practices of ordinary people vividly bring to light the little-known but significant ways in which notions of racial difference were alternately contested and affirmed before the American Revolution.Fischer makes an innovative contribution to the history of race, class, and gender in early America by uncovering a detailed record of illicit sexual exchanges in colonial North Carolina and showing how acts of resistance to sexual rules complicated ideas about inherent racial difference."
Download or read book Charity and Sylvia written by Rachel Hope Cleves and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional wisdom holds that same-sex marriage is a purely modern innovation, a concept born of an overtly modern lifestyle that was unheard of in nineteenth century America. But as Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates in this eye-opening book, same-sex marriage is hardly new. Born in 1777, Charity Bryant was raised in Massachusetts. A brilliant and strong-willed woman with a clear attraction for her own sex, Charity found herself banished from her family home at age twenty. She spent the next decade of her life traveling throughout Massachusetts, working as a teacher, making intimate female friends, and becoming the subject of gossip wherever she lived. At age twenty-nine, still defiantly single, Charity visited friends in Weybridge, Vermont. There she met a pious and studious young woman named Sylvia Drake. The two soon became so inseparable that Charity decided to rent rooms in Weybridge. In 1809, they moved into their own home together, and over the years, came to be recognized, essentially, as a married couple. Revered by their community, Charity and Sylvia operated a tailor shop employing many local women, served as guiding lights within their church, and participated in raising their many nieces and nephews. Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of their extraordinary forty-four year union. Drawing on an array of original documents including diaries, letters, and poetry, Cleves traces their lives in sharp detail. Providing an illuminating glimpse into a relationship that turns conventional notions of same-sex marriage on their head, and reveals early America to be a place both more diverse and more accommodating than modern society might imagine, Charity and Sylvia is a significant contribution to our limited knowledge of LGBT history in early America.
Download or read book American Sexual Histories written by Elizabeth Reis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of American Sexual Histories features an updated collection of sixteen articles and their corresponding primary sources that investigate issues related to human sexuality in America from the colonial era to the present day. Fully updated with ten new chapters, featuring recently published essays by prominent scholars in the field Provides readers with the source documents that historians have analyzed in their articles Allows readers to see how historians craft arguments based on available sources Encourages readers to evaluate historical documents, test the interpretations of historians, and draw their own conclusions
Download or read book Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America written by Zeb Tortorici and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America brings together a broad community of scholars to explore the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin America’s colonial and early national periods. Together the essays examine how "the unnatural” came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be “against nature”—sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation—along with others that approximated the unnatural—hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. In doing so, this anthology makes important and necessary contributions to the historiography of gender and sexuality. Amid the growing politicized interest in broader LGBTQ movements in Latin America, the essays also show how these legal codes endured to make their way into post-independence Latin America.
Download or read book Women in Early America written by Thomas A Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-03-20 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic Women in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women—both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant—who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies. In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President’s house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation. Foster showcases the latest research of junior and senior historians, drawing from recent scholarship informed by women’s and gender history—feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Collectively, these essays address the need for scholarship on women’s lives and experiences. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, “add women, and stir,” but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.
Download or read book Moral Combat written by R. Marie Griffith and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an esteemed scholar of American religion and sexuality, a sweeping account of the century of religious conflict that produced our culture wars Gay marriage, transgender rights, birth control -- sex is at the heart of many of the most divisive political issues of our age. The origins of these conflicts, historian R. Marie Griffith argues, lie in sharp disagreements that emerged among American Christians a century ago. From the 1920s onward, a once-solid Christian consensus regarding gender roles and sexual morality began to crumble, as liberal Protestants sparred with fundamentalists and Catholics over questions of obscenity, sex education, and abortion. Both those who advocated for greater openness in sexual matters and those who resisted new sexual norms turned to politics to pursue their moral visions for the nation. Moral Combat is a history of how the Christian consensus on sex unraveled, and how this unraveling has made our political battles over sex so ferocious and so intractable.
Download or read book Intimate Matters written by John D'Emilio and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-12-03 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fascinating . . . chart[s] a gradual but decisive shift in the way Americans have understood sex and its meaning in their lives.” —New York Times Book Review The first full length study of the history of sexuality in America, Intimate Matters offers trenchant insights into the sexual behavior of Americans, from colonial times to today. D’Emilio and Freedman give us a deeper understanding of how sexuality has dramatically influenced politics and culture throughout our history. “Intimate Matters was cited by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy when, writing for a majority of court on July 26, he and his colleagues struck down a Texas law criminalizing sodomy. The decision was widely hailed as a victory for gay rights. . . . The justice mentioned Intimate Matters specifically in the court’s decision.” —Chicago Tribune “With comprehensiveness and care . . . D’Emilio and Freedman have surveyed the sexual patterns for an entire nation across four centuries.” —Nation “Comprehensive, meticulous and intelligent.” —Washington Post Book World “This book is remarkable . . . [Intimate Matters] is bound to become the definitive survey of American sexual history for years to come.” —Roy Porter, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
