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What does it mean to own something? How does a thing become mine? Liberal philosophy since John Locke has championed the salutary effects of private property but has avoided the more difficult questions of property’s ontology. Chad Luck argues that antebellum American literature is obsessed with precisely these questions. Reading slave narratives, gothic romances, city-mystery novels, and a range of other property narratives, Luck unearths a wide-ranging literary effort to understand the nature of ownership, the phenomenology of possession. In these antebellum texts, ownership is not an abstract legal form but a lived relation, a dynamic of embodiment emerging within specific cultural spaces—a disputed frontier, a city agitated by class conflict. Luck challenges accounts that map property practice along a trajectory of abstraction and “virtualization.” The book also reorients recent Americanist work in emotion and affect by detailing a broader phenomenology of ownership, one extending beyond emotion to such sensory experiences as touch, taste, and vision. This productive blend of phenomenology and history uncovers deep-seated anxieties—and enthusiasms—about property across antebellum culture.

American fiction --- Material culture in literature. --- Property in literature. --- Personal belongings in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Affect. --- American Literature. --- Antebellum Culture. --- Eighteenth-Century. --- Embodiment. --- Nineteenth-Century. --- Ownership. --- Phenomenology. --- Property. --- Space.

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In Pursuit of Leviathan traces the American whaling industry from its rise in the 1840's to its precipitous fall at the end of the nineteenth century. Using detailed and comprehensive data that describe more than four thousand whaling voyages from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the leading nineteenth-century whaling port, the authors explore the market for whale products, crew quality and labor contracts, and whale biology and distribution, and assess the productivity of the American fleet. They then examine new whaling techniques developed at the end of the nineteenth century, such as modified clippers and harpoons, and the introduction of darting guns. Despite the common belief that the whaling industry declined due to a fall in whale stocks, the authors argue that the industry's collapse was related to changes in technology and market conditions. Providing a wealth of historical information, In Pursuit of Leviathan is a classic industry study that will provide intriguing reading for anyone interested in the history of whaling.

Whaling --- Economic aspects --- History --- Commercial whaling --- Hunting, Whale --- Whale fisheries --- Whale hunting --- Fisheries --- E-books --- whaling, history, economics, voyages, new bedford, massachusetts, ports, labor, products, commerce, innovation, whale biology, productivity, technology, clippers, harpoons, darting guns, nonfiction, profits, blubber, ambergris, market forces, crew, sailors, fleet, 19th century, antebellum, eastern seaboard, natural resources, capital.

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The lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American SouthDespite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentiments evolved or changed? Deep Roots shows that the entrenched political and racial views of contemporary white southerners are a direct consequence of the region's slaveholding history, which continues to shape economic, political, and social spheres. Today, southern whites who live in areas once reliant on slavery-compared to areas that were not-are more racially hostile and less amenable to policies that could promote black progress. Highlighting the connection between historical institutions and contemporary political attitudes, the authors explore the period following the Civil War when elite whites in former bastions of slavery had political and economic incentives to encourage the development of anti-black laws and practices. Deep Roots shows that these forces created a local political culture steeped in racial prejudice, and that these viewpoints have been passed down over generations, from parents to children and via communities, through a process called behavioral path dependence. While legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act made huge strides in increasing economic opportunity and reducing educational disparities, southern slavery has had a profound, lasting, and self-reinforcing influence on regional and national politics that can still be felt today.A groundbreaking look at the ways institutions of the past continue to sway attitudes of the present, Deep Roots demonstrates how social beliefs persist long after the formal policies that created those beliefs have been eradicated.

Slavery --- Political aspects --- Southern States --- Politics and government --- African Americans. --- Alabama. --- Civil Rights Movement. --- Emancipation. --- Jim Crow. --- Plessy. --- Reconstruction. --- Tennessee. --- U.S. racial order. --- affirmative action. --- antebellum. --- black farmers, black labor. --- black-white thermometer scores. --- cotton. --- de facto segregation. --- de jure segregation. --- high-slave. --- institutional path dependence. --- institutional reinforcement. --- intergenerational socialization. --- labor coercion. --- low-slave. --- lynching. --- partisanship. --- racial resentment. --- slave mortality. --- the Black Belt. --- transfer of attitudes. --- unionist. --- violence. --- white migration.

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Heterosexual Histories constructs a new framework for the history of heterosexuality, examining unexplored assumptions and insisting that not only sex but race, class, gender, age, and geography matter to its past. Each of the fourteen essays in this volume examines the history of heterosexuality from a different angle, seeking to study this topic in a way that recognizes plurality, divergence, and inequity. [The editors] have formed a collection that spans four centuries, addressing the many different racial groups, geographies, and subcultures of heterosexuality in North America. The essays range across disciplines with experts from various fields examining heterosexuality from unique perspectives: a historian shows how defining heterosexuality, sex, and desire were integral to the formation of British America and the process of colonization; a legal scholar examines the connections between race, sexual citizenship, and nonmarital motherhood; a gender studies expert analyzes the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and explores the intersections of heterosexuality with shame and second-wave feminism. Together, these essays explain how differently earlier Americans understood the varieties of gender and different-sex sexuality, how heterosexuality emerged as a dominant way of describing gender, and how openly many people acknowledged and addressed heterosexuality's fragility. By contesting presumptions of heterosexuality's stability or consistency, Heterosexual Histories opens the historical record to interrogations of the raced, classed, and gendered varieties of heterosexuality and considers the implications of heterosexuality's multiplicities and changes.-- ""Heterosexual Histories" is en edited volume that explores heterosexuality in various cultural, historical, and societal contexts"--

Heterosexuality --- History. --- African American. --- Asian American. --- British America. --- Cold War. --- Colonial. --- Early Americans. --- Humiliation. --- Judeo-Christian. --- Mexican. --- Monica Lewinsky. --- North America. --- U.S. Southwest. --- academics. --- antebellum. --- attraction. --- beauty. --- bodies. --- citizenship. --- class. --- clinical practice. --- color line. --- couples. --- desirability. --- desire. --- discrimination. --- emotion. --- employment. --- episiotomy. --- faith communities. --- feminism. --- gender. --- gynecology. --- heteronormative. --- heteronormativity. --- history. --- homosexuality. --- households. --- illegitimacy. --- illicit. --- interracial. --- interraciality. --- law. --- love. --- marriage. --- middle-class. --- migration. --- morality. --- newspapers. --- normal body. --- normal. --- parody. --- pleasure. --- power. --- print culture. --- prostitution. --- queer critique. --- queerness. --- race. --- racialized heterosexuality. --- reform. --- regulation. --- religion. --- representation. --- reproductive. --- research. --- science. --- settler colonialism. --- sexes. --- sexual harassment. --- sexual identity. --- sexual revolution. --- slavery. --- spectacle. --- suburbia. --- swinging. --- unmarried mothers.

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It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time. Gikandi focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European--mainly British--life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. He explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, Gikandi engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure. Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks, Slavery and the Culture of Taste sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.

Slavery --- Slavery in literature. --- Abolition of slavery --- Antislavery --- Enslavement --- Mui tsai --- Ownership of slaves --- Servitude --- Slave keeping --- Slave system --- Slaveholding --- Thralldom --- Crimes against humanity --- Serfdom --- Slaveholders --- Slaves --- Slavery and slaves in literature --- Slaves in literature --- Moral and ethical aspects. --- Slavery in literature --- Moral and ethical aspects --- Esclavage --- Dans la littérature. --- Aspect moral. --- Esclavage dans la littérature --- Aspect moral --- Enslaved persons --- Enslaved persons in literature --- Africa. --- American plantocracy. --- Barack Obama. --- Britain. --- Christopher Codrington. --- James Tallmadge Jr. --- Missouri. --- W. E. B. Du Bois. --- West Indies. --- William Beckford. --- antebellum South. --- art. --- beauty. --- black difference. --- black self. --- black slaves. --- blacks. --- bondage. --- bourgeois culture. --- consumption. --- culture. --- enslavement. --- festival. --- freedom. --- identity. --- involuntary servitude. --- modern identity. --- race. --- selfhood. --- sensibility. --- slave money. --- slavery. --- slaves. --- sorrow songs. --- statehood. --- sugar colonies. --- taste. --- violence. --- black people. --- enslaved persons. --- Dans la littérature.