2010 Hurst Prize Winner: Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally

Posted in Articles, Law, New Media, Social Science, United States, Women on 2010-06-20 04:15Z by Steven

2010 Hurst Prize Winner: Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally

Legal History Blog
2010-06-03

Mary L. Dudziak, Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science
University of Southern California

Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon, Department of History, has won the Willard Hurst Prize for 2010 from the Law and Society Association for her new book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press). Here’s the Prize Committee’s citation:

What Comes Naturally is a comprehensive, interesting, and important sociolegal history that takes us through the history of miscegenation law beyond its commonly accepted geography. It analyzes how by “naturalizing” miscegenation law, politics, religious beliefs and scientific knowledge came together to sustain a set of legal parameters that eventually became policy in the post Civil War world throughout the United States, enhancing and expanding the Black/White race dichotomy, while complicating it in gendered terms. The book is an outstanding contribution richly nuanced and insightful. It expands our understanding of conceptions of race, not only in the South, but elsewhere. It contains as well a superb elucidation of the role that gender played in the process of defining and elaborating on miscegenation…

Read the entire article here.

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