What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America
What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America
Peggy Pascoe, Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History
University of Oregon
Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 2008-12
404 pages
ISBN13: 9780195094633
ISBN10: 0195094638
- Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians (2009)
- Winner of the Lawrence W. Levine Award of the Organization of American Historians (2009)
A long-awaited history that promises to dramatically change our understanding of race in America, What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States–laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between whites and members of other races. Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest. Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks. She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.
Table of Contents
[...] Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally [...]
[...] What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. By Peggy Pascoe. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009. 404 pages. Cloth ISBN13: 9780195094633, ISBN10: 0195094638) [...]
[...] “What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America” by Peggy Pascoe “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell” by Paul A. Lombardo [...]