Volume 45, Number 3 · February 19, 1998
Dangerous Liaisons
By C. Vann Woodward
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South
by Martha Hodes
Yale University Press, 388 pp., $30.00
Getting at the truth of such subjects as fornication, rape, bastardy, adultery, divorce, and domestic violence is difficult enough in any case. But when they are mixed with constantly changing attitudes about race, class, freedom, slavery, servitude, and male authority and honor, especially in times of civil war, invasion, defeat, and slave emancipation, and accompany the politics and violence of white supremacy, the search for 'truth' often seems hopeless. This may explain why historians have tended to avoid such subjects and the frustration they involve.[1]
Review, 4065 words
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