SEX AND CONQUEST: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas
Richard C. Trexler
Recent Reviews:
"Courageously original."--International
History Review
"[Trexler's] work is a highly sophisticated
analysis of the relation between eros and conquest, of the roles
that societal violence imposes on some of the members of the
community. . . . His book is doubtless not only the best study of
the American berdache, but also a significant contribution to the
understanding of the development of power and authority in human
society."--American
Historical Review
"This excellent book focuses on the erotics of power at the time of the initial colonization of the western hemisphere and examines male culture of the period by assessing both Iberian and American attitudes toward transvestism and homosexuality. This highly original work of history, however, never loses sight of the comparative and contemporary implications of its findings. . . . Trexler . . . has mined the documentary record of the period with great caution and sophistication to yield a meticulous exposition of the interpretation the Spaniards and Portuguese placed on the sexual culture they encountered in the new world and the construction of their own sexual behavior and attitudes in this critical early period."--Foreign Affairs
"[A] work of erudition and detail."--Men and
Masculinities
"Trexler weaves for us an impressive analysis of
the presence of the berdache and the importance of gendered and
sexualized violence in Iberian and Native societies."--The
Committee on Gay and Lesbian History
"In its exposure of the links between sexual abuse of boys and the sexualized subordination of women, Sex and Conquest offers rare insight into gender inequality. Trexler's analysis of male dominance in sacred and secular hierarchies offers evidence and depth, as well as sweep and vision."--Catharine A. MacKinnon, author of Only Words
"A persuasive tour de force of deserted
histories."--Gerald Vizenor, author of Manifest Manners:
Postindian Warriors of Survivance
Book Clubs and Awards for SEX AND CONQUEST
Winner of the John Boswell Prize awarded by the Committee on
Lesbian and Gay History
Richard C. Trexler is Distinguished Professor of History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. An earlier book, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, in paperback from Cornell, is perhaps the most influential book in Italian Renaissance history published in the last twenty-five years.
WHP Rights limited to the Western Hemisphere plus the
Philippine Republic.
History|Cultural Studies| Native American Studies
More about this Title
Paper Available in 304pp 6 x 9
ISBN: 0-8014-8482-0 $17.95 | £13.50 Quantity
Cloth 1995 300pp 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
11 black-and-white photos.
ISBN: 0-8014-3224-3 $39.95 | £29.50
"ASYLUM FOR MANKIND" America, 1607-1800
Marilyn C. Baseler
Marilyn C. Baseler is currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Ever since the Age of Discovery, Europeans have viewed the New World as a haven for the victims of religious persecution and a dumping ground for social liabilities. Marilyn C. Baseler shows how the New World's role as a refuge for the victims of political, as well as religious and economic, oppression gradually devolved on the thirteen colonies that became the United States. She traces immigration patterns and policies to show how the new American Republic became an "asylum for mankind."
Baseler explains how British and colonial officials and landowners lured settlers from rival nations with promises of religious toleration, economic opportunity, and the "rights of Englishmen," and identifies the liberties, disabilities, and benefits experienced by different immigrant groups. She also explains how the exploitation of slaves, who immigrated from Africa in chains, subsidized the living standards of Europeans who came by choice.
American revolutionaries enthusiastically assumed the responsibility for serving as an asylum for the victims of political oppression, according to Baseler, but soon saw the need for a probationary period before granting citizenship to immigrants unexperienced in exercising and safeguarding republican liberty. Revolutionary Americans also tried to discourage the immigration of those who might jeopardize the nation's republican future. Her work defines the historical context for current attempts by municipal, state, and federal governments to abridge the rights of aliens.
U.S. History Cloth 1998 368pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 4 tables ISBN: 0-8014-3481-5 $42.50 | £31.50
DISOWNING SLAVERY Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860
Joanne Pope Melish
Joanne Pope Melish is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.
U. S. History|African American Studies
Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources--from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides--Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well.
Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population of free people of color in its midst. Because emancipation was gradual, whites transferred prejudices shaped by slavery to their relations with free people of color, and their attitudes were buttressed by abolitionist rhetoric which seemed to promise riddance of slaves as much as slavery. She tells how whites came to blame the impoverished condition of people of color on their innate inferiority, how racialization became an important component of New England ante-bellum nationalism, and how former slaves actively participated in this discourse by emphasizing their African identity.
Placing race at the center of New England history, Melish contends that slavery was important not only as a labor system but also as an institutionalized set of relations. The collective amnesia about local slavery's existence became a significant component of New England regional identity.
Cloth 1998 320pp 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 9 black-and-white photographs ISBN: 0-8014-3413-0 $35.00 | £25.95
MASTERS, SLAVES, AND SUBJECTS The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790
Robert Olwell
Robert Olwell is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.
The slave societies of the American colonies were quite different from the "Old South" of the early-nineteenth-century United States. In this engaging study of a colonial older South, Robert Olwell analyzes the structures and internal dynamics of a world in which both masters and slaves were also imperial subjects. While slavery was peculiar within a democratic republic, it was an integral and seldom questioned part of the eighteenth-century British empire.
Olwell examines the complex relations among masters, slaves, metropolitan institutions, officials, and ideas in the South Carolina low country from the end of the Stono Rebellion through the chaos of the American Revolution. He details the interstices of power and resistance in four key sites of the colonial social order: the criminal law and the slave court; conversion and communion in the established church; market relations and the marketplace; and patriarchy and the plantation great house.
Olwell shows how South Carolina's status as a colony influenced the development of slavery and also how the presence of slavery altered English ideas and institutions within a colonial setting. Masters, Slaves, and Subjects is a pathbreaking examination of the workings of American slavery within the context of America's colonial history.
U.S. History|African American Studies
Paper 1998 296pp 6 x 9 1 table, 3 maps, 3 black-and-white photographs ISBN: 0-8014-8491-x $17.95 | £13.50
Cloth 1998 296pp 6 x 9 1 table, 3 maps, 3 black-and-white photographs ISBN: 0-8014-3488-2 $49.95 | £36.95
UNITED IRISHMEN, UNITED STATES Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic
David A. Wilson
David A. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. He is the author of three books, most recently Ireland, a Bicycle, and a Tin Whistle.
Among the thousands of political refugees who flooded into the United States during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, none had a greater impact on the early republic than the United Irishmen. They were, according to one Federalist, "the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell." "Every United Irishman," insisted another, "ought to be hunted from the country, as much as a wolf or a tyger." David A. Wilson's lively book is the first to focus specifically on the experiences, attitudes, and ideas of the United Irishmen in the United States.
Wilson argues that America served a powerful symbolic and psychological function for the United Irishmen as a place of wish-fulfillment, where the broken dreams of the failed Irish revolution could be realized. The United Irishmen established themselves on the radical wing of the Republican Party, and contributed to Jefferson's "second American Revolution" of 1800; John Adams counted them among the "foreigners and degraded characters" whom he blamed for his defeat. After Jefferson's victory, the United Irishmen set out to destroy the Federalists and democratize the Republicans. Some of them believed that their work was preparing the way for the millennium in America. Convinced that the example of America could ultimately inspire the movement for a democratic republic back home, they never lost sight of the struggle for Irish independence. It was the United Irishmen, writes Wilson, who originated the persistent and powerful tradition of Irish-American nationalism.
COBEI World rights except for the British Common Wealth (excluding Canada) and Ireland
Cloth 1998 256pp 6 x 9 6 drawings ISBN: 0-8014-3175-1 $29.95 | £22.50
September 29, 2000