Search results for ""Author Nancy F. Cott""

We commonly think of marriage as a private matter between two people, a personal expression of love and commitment. In this pioneering history, Nancy F. Cott demonstrates that marriage is and always has been a public institution.From the founding of the United States to the present day, imperatives about the necessity of marriage and its proper form have been deeply embedded in national policy, law, and political rhetoric. Legislators and judges have envisioned and enforced their preferred model of consensual, lifelong monogamy--a model derived from Christian tenets and the English common law that posits the husband as provider and the wife as dependent.In early confrontations with Native Americans, emancipated slaves, Mormon polygamists, and immigrant spouses, through the invention of the New Deal, federal income tax, and welfare programs, the federal government consistently influenced the shape of marriages. And even the immense social and legal changes of the last third of the twentieth century have not unraveled official reliance on marriage as a "pillar of the state."By excluding some kinds of marriages and encouraging others, marital policies have helped to sculpt the nation's citizenry, as well as its moral and social standards, and have directly affected national understandings of gender roles and racial difference. Public Vows is a panoramic view of marriage's political history, revealing the national government's profound role in our most private of choices. No one who reads this book will think of marriage in the same way again.

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At a time when print media reigned supreme and newspapers were legion, Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, Vincent Sheean, and Rayna Raphaelson Prohme impulsively left their homes to reinvent themselves as international journalists and adopt the power of the press as their own. In Fighting Words, acclaimed historian Nancy F. Cott follows these four largely unknown young Americans to reveal how foreign journalism shaped America's sense of its place in the world.Dorothy, John, Vincent, and Rayna serve as a counter to the devil-may-care jazz babies of the 1920s who scandalized their elders to no purpose beyond frivolity. Instead, the four directly confronted major political challenges that still reverberate today- democracy versus authoritarianism, global responsibility versus isolationism, press objectivity versus propaganda. They revealed the political instability that circled most of the globe as a legacy of the redrawing of world order after World War I. By the early 1930s, unlike Americans at home fixated on the Depression and New Deal, they were in the antifascist vanguard, well aware of Hitler's impending menace. At the same time, they were actively rethinking relationships between men and women. All four navigated sexual affairs and frictions, marriages and divorces. Their experiences traced the development not only of international journalism but also the making of the modern self at a time when the value of sexual freedom grated against traditional morality.A group biography of four extraordinary Americans abroad, and a paean to a golden age of journalism, Fighting Words shows how these young cosmopolitans reshaped America's sense of its own place in the world.

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The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.

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Fourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.

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