Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations: Mixed-Heritage Families in Brooklyn

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2011-06-18 11:27Z by Steven

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations: Mixed-Heritage Families in Brooklyn

Brooklyn Historical Society
Brooklyn, New York

April 2011

Project Description

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) is a public programming series and oral history project about mixed-heritage families, race, ethnicity, culture, and identity, infused with historical perspective. CBBG is currently in the planning phase (April 2011 – March 2012) and will result in a multi-faceted interpretive website expected to be completed in 2015.

By providing a public forum for conversations about mixed-heritage families, Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations will inform the dialogue with historical perspectives on social constructions of race, ethnicity, and community; changes in immigration and citizenship laws and practices; and changes in marriage and partnership laws and practices. Through an interpretive website, online discussions initiated and led by scholars, public programs and events, Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) will invite the public to share their own stories, respond to other people’s stories, react to, and learn from scholarly interpretations of these stories…

Scholarly Advisors

Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Oral History Research Office
Columbia University

Martha Hodes, Professor of History
New York University

Keren R. McGinity, History
University of Michigan

Suleiman Osman, Assistant Professor of American Studies
George Washington University

Renee Romano, History
Oberlin College

Michael J. Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Associate Professor of History
Kent State University

Karen Woods Weierman, Associate Professor of English (Literary History)
Worcestor State University

Project Staff

Sady Sullivan, Director of Oral History
Brooklyn Historical Society

For more information, click here. View the PDF brochure here.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870

Posted in Books, History, Law, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, Slavery, Social Science, United States on 2009-12-05 23:05Z by Steven

One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870

University of Massachusetts Press
June 2005
288 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-55849-483-1

Karen Woods Weierman, Associate Professor of English
Worcester State University

Examines the roots of a pernicious and persistent American taboo

The proscription against interracial marriage was for many years a flashpoint in American culture. In One Nation, One Blood, Karen Woods Weierman explores this taboo by investigating the traditional link between marriage and property. Her research reveals that the opposition to intermarriage originated in large measure in the nineteenth-century desire for Indian land and African labor. Yet despite the white majority’s overwhelming rejection of nonwhite peoples as marriage partners, citizens, and social equals, nineteenth-century reformers challenged the rule against intermarriage. Dismissing the new “race science” that purported to prove white superiority, reformers held fast to the religious notion of a common humanity and the republican rhetoric of freedom and equality, arguing that God made all people “of one blood.”

The years from 1820 to 1870 marked a crucial period in the history of this prejudice. Tales of interracial marriage recounted in fiction, real-life scandals, and legal statutes figured prominently in public discussion of both slavery and the fate of Native Americans. In Part One of this book, Weierman focuses on Indian-white marriages during the 1820s, when Indian removal became a rallying cry for New England intellectuals.

In Part Two she shifts her attention to black-white marriages from the antebellum period through the early years of Reconstruction. In both cases she finds that the combination of a highly publicized intermarriage scandal, new legislation prohibiting interracial marriage, and fictional portrayals of the ills associated with such unions served to reinforce popular prejudice, justifying the displacement of Indians from their lands and upholding the system of slavery. Even after the demise of slavery, restrictions against intermarriage remained in place in many parts of the country long into the twentieth century. Not until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision did the Supreme Court finally rule that such laws were unconstitutional.

Finishing on a contemporary note, Weierman suggests that the stories Americans tell about intermarriage today—stories defining family, racial identity, and citizenship—still reflect a struggle for resources and power.

Tags: , , , ,