Description
Book SynopsisWhen Europeans settled in the early South, they quarreled over many things--but few imbroglios were so fierce as battles over land. Landowners wrangled bitterly over boundaries with neighbors and contested areas became known as the devil''s lane. Violence and bloodshed were but some of the consequences to befall those who ventured into these disputed territories. The Devil''s Lane highlights important new work on sexuality, race, and gender in the South from the seventeenth- to the nineteenth-centuries. Contributors explore legal history by examining race, crime and punishment, sex across the color line, and slander. Emerging stars and established scholars such as Peter Wood and Carol Berkin weave together the fascinating story of competing agendas and clashing cultures on the southern frontier. One chapter focuses on a community''s resistance to a hermaphrodite, where the town court conducted a series of examinations to determine the individual''s gender. Other pieces address topics r
Trade ReviewThe Devil's Lane is useful for those who would understand gender and race in the eastern United States before 1800, and for those who seek ideas for a broader understanding of the Southwest. * Southwestern Historical Quarterly *
The inventive methodologies and high quality of the research and analysis make this pathbreaking collection an outstanding contribution to the scholarship of the American South. Certainly this exciting book will bring the early South newly alive for many readers. * William and Mary Quarterly *
This collection of seventeen essays by both established and emerging scholars is as felicitous an introduction for newcomers as it is an update for veterans of the 'brawling, sprawling convivial enterprise' that is early southern history....The power of this collection lies in its ability to convey the labyrinthine quality of racial and gender structures. * Catherine Kerrison, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography *
An excellent collection of scholarship on the early South that highlights opportunities for future research on gender and race." The Alabama Review
Some of the most provocative and exciting recent work on race, gender, and sexuality in southern colonial history." - -Religious Studies Review
