Reconstruction,Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865–1900

On the eve of Congressional Reconstruction, all seven states of the Lower South had laws against interracial marriage. During the Republican interlude that began in 1867–68, six of the seven states (all but Georgia) suspended those laws, whether through judicial invalidation or legislative repeal. Yet by 1894 all six had restored such bans. The trajectory of miscegenation laws in the Lower South between 1865 and 1900 permits a reconsideration of the range of possibilities the Reconstruction era brought to public policy. More than that, it forces a reconsideration of the origins of the Jim Crow South. Legally mandated segregation in public transit, as C. Vann Woodward observed in 1955, took hold late in the century. But such segregation in public education, as Howard R. Rabinowitz pointed out with his formula ‘from exclusion to segregation,’ originated during the first postwar years. Segregation on the marital front – universal at the start of the period and again at the end, but relaxed in most Lower South states for a time in between – combined the two patterns into yet a third. Adding another layer of complexity was the issue of where the color line was located, and thus which individuals were classified on each side of it.     

The Origins of American Expansion in Hawaii and Samoa, 1865–1900

From Nixon to Reagan, official US perceptions of West German trade with the Soviet Union (Osthandel) underwent a remarkable evolution. Despite initial skepticism, the Nixon and Ford administrations placed no major obstacles to West German–Soviet economic relations. Carter, however, changed the situation. His stance on human rights and economic sanctions against the Soviets for various developments - along with his belief that West Germany should follow the United States' lead - led Carter to ask Schmidt to curtail Osthandel, an action that contributed to Schmidt's notoriously poor relationship with the US President. Despite coming from a different political party, Reagan initially continued Carter's outlook on Osthandel. Yet rather than emphasize human rights, he publicly stressed Poland's self-determination as the reason to implement his aggressive policy to curb trade with the USSR, even though his advisers feared the strategic implications of greater German dependence on Soviet energy. Carter's and Reagan's early approaches were ineffective. Their actions, especially the latter's, strained US relations with Germany, the United States' most important ally in central Europe. Equally important, both Carter's and Reagan's policies undermined détente with Moscow. Because Nixon and Ford's approach to Osthandel harmed neither US–German relations nor US–Soviet relations, these presidents' responses had conspicuous advantages over succeeding administrations.     

The invention of the basset hound: breed,blood and the late Victorian dog fancy, 1865–1900

In this article the authors explore the practices and conceptualisations of British dog breeding and the showing of pedigree dogs by the ‘the dog fancy’, focusing specifically on the story of a single breed: the basset hound. This was not simply a story of British dog fanciers appropriating a French dog breed; indeed, this was impossible because the very notion of a dog ‘breed’, defined by conformation and legitimated by pedigree, was in the process of invention. They show how the British dog-show fancy chose one, from many and varied types of French hound, to be the basset hound, and how this choice was legitimated by reference to an imagined history, where the British dog fancy rescued a noble animal from French indifference to breed and blood. The chosen physical form was standardised to arbitrary ideal, but was by means no static. In the spirit of the times, it was ‘improved’, first by the empirical methods of animal breeders, using pedigrees to secure good and pure ‘blood’, and then by the application of science, particularly artificial insemination and hereditarian theories.     

Republican citizenship in the post-Civil War South and French Algeria 1865–1900

This essay compares the American South and French Algeria from 1865 to roughly 1900. Their similarities and connections reveal the paradox of republicanism in an era of growing nation-state power. The Civil War’s outcome, particularly slavery’s abolition, inspired American and French liberals alike. But after bold initiatives to establish full citizenship for people of color in the 1860s, provincial, white rule was established in both territorial areas. Fears of socialism provoked by the Paris Commune figured in this pivot. The essay shows us transnational aspects of race-based, contingent citizenship in the post-slavery era of these two republican empires.     

Claiming Their Own Space: Australian Women Missionaries in Korea, 1891–1900

The first group of Australian women missionaries arrived in Korea in 1891, representing the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union of Victoria. Their pioneering work was soon hindered by tensions that arose between themselves and a male cleric authority in the field. The article investigates this dispute, which lasted for several years and eventually entangled not only the individual Australian missionaries but also their home organisations as well as North American missionaries. It argues that Australian women missionaries’ involvement in this public dispute is a rare but significant example of a paradox in the foreign missionary enterprise, which imposed patriarchal order and at the same time established conditions that helped women enter the public space and even challenge the male-centred gender order. The article goes on to identify some distinctive characteristics of the Australian women’s missionary work.