Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History.

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999. xvi plus 542 pp.).

In his 1995 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, reprinted as the opening essay of this important collection, Gary Nash called the attention of his audience to the "hidden history of mestizo America." Lost amidst America's long and frequently tragic experience with racial and ethnic classification and separation is a past significantly shaped by sexual intermixture, cultural boundary crossing, and lives lived and identities forged in tension with dominant ideologies. Looking backward with a sensitivity to this "hybridity," Nash proposed, might hold a key for moving beyond racialism in our future, and for finding a politics that transcends biological determinism without sacrificing the value of difference.

The twenty-three other essays assembled here by Martha Hodes (eight of which have been previously published in whole or in part) collectively explore the possibilities such a reconceptualization of the past holds. The subtitle of the volume is a bit misleading, since nearly all of the pieces deal principally with the European colonial territories that now comprise the continental United States rather than with Mexico or Canada. Still, the breadth of human experience and historical subfields traversed by the authors is astonishing. Working from discussions of the intersection of race and sex, the essays yield insight to historical issues of gender, sexuality, marriage and the family, class, religion, slavery, violence, national and personal identity, politics and political activism, diplomacy, culture, economics and commercial exchange, law, and crime, just to name those themes most prominent and recurring.

The collection is divided into five parts and arranged chronologically. Generally, the essays within each part are logically juxtaposed. Moreover, the separate parts are connected smartly to one another, producing a discernible, if subtle and fractured, narrative that describes important ebbs and flows in the history of sex across racial and ethnic lines in America since the 1690s. The essays in part one examine various regions of colonial North America, and cumulatively investigate European, Native American, and African American societies and cultures encountering each other, sexually and otherwise, for the first time. The authors here describe an era characterized by domination and distrust, but also by uncertainty, intercultural negotiation, and mutual accommodation. The early emergence of racial antipathy and the construction of racial hierarchy--both inseparable from sex and sexuality-are never far from the surface in the stories told by Jennifer Spear about French Louisiana, Graham Hodges about German Lutherans in New York, Daniel Mandell about New England, and Richard Godbeer about the eighteenth-century Southern backcountry.

Part two moves on to the early national and antebellum periods. Here, slavery takes center stage. Most of the essays in this section focus on interracial sexual activity between whites and blacks-particularly in the South-which was commonplace despite being legally and culturally taboo. In the words of Sharon Block, who compares and contrasts the sexual vulnerability of white servant and black enslaved women, sex across the color line under slavery frequently yielded coercive situations where "economic mastery created sexual mastery." As Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., and Josephine Boyd Bradley and Kent Anderson Leslie demonstrate in fascinating case studies, however, familial connections between whites and blacks under slavery also enabled some people of African descent to carve out personal identities and establish economic positions that transcended both their color and their ancestry.

In her essay on antebellum New York City, Leslie Harris demonstrates how fears of "amalgamation" were central to political discourse about abolitionism, urban poverty, and immigration. As a number of essays in part three make evident, interracial sex had even more volatile political implications in the Reconstruction-era South. In his examination of legal regulation of interracial sex and marriage in the South to 1900 (which appears grouped with the essays on the colonial period, when it might have been better placed with pieces on the nineteenth century), Peter Bardaglio shows that white male anxiety, especially about sex between black men and white women, reached unprecedented levels after emancipation as whites looked to retain control over African Americans in slavery's absence. Hannah Rosen illustrates the politicized aspects of sexual violence directed by white men at black freedwomen, while Laura Edwards shows how political conflict between North and South after the Civil War could crystallize around a supposed instance of interracial rape. Scott Nelson, meanwhile, reveals how white men projected imagined interracial sexual relationships onto shifting economic relationships in Spartanburg, South Carolina, leading the Ku Klux Klan in the area to carry out acts of violence against freedmen.

The essays in part four neatly tie sex across color lines to salient themes of American history between the 1880s and the l920s. Pablo Mitchell focuses on the changing Southwest as he describes the emergence of an Anglo-Hispano elite in territorial New Mexico, drawing attention to how "strategic marriages" across racial and ethnic lines were central to the consolidation of economic and political power in the region. Bryant Simon also draws on the connections between changing economic orders, race, and sex in his discussion of lynching, white masculinity, and popular politics among South Carolina millworkers in the early-twentieth century. Leslie Dunlap looks at the efforts of white Southern women to reform rape laws in the Progressive era, the role of black female activists in this movement, and the crumbling of their tenuous coalition amidst disfranchisement, segregation, and increasingly entrenched white supremacy. Barbara Bair investigates a more peculiar coalition between black nationalists and white sup remacists to secure passage of Virginia's Racial Integrity Act in the 1920s, demonstrating how the groups' respective visions of racial purity shared the notion that control of "racialized female bod[ies]" was central to the future of civilization.

Finally, the essays in part five bring us through the early 1970s and expand the topical coverage of the collection. Estelle Freedman, for example, examines the shifting constructions of black and white prison lesbianism in criminological literature. Henry Yu discusses the fascination of social scientists with sex and marriage between whites and Asian Americans, while Jennifer Ritterhouse explores the difficult but ultimately productive and mutually valued friendship between a white woman and an African-American man during the civil rights era. Almost without exception, the pieces Hodes has brought together here are well-written and insightful. My neglect to mention them all reflects only the sheer number of essays and is not a commentary on their content. In any event, the overview above only scratches the surface of the material in this book, which is invaluable to those looking to further the project of unearthing America's "hidden history."