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Marcia A. Zug, Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches: Zug traces mail-order marriages made by Europeans in North America, first as part of the colonial project/to prevent European men from marrying and becoming loyal to Native American women, and then later to allow American men who feel excluded from the marriage market because of American women’s demands to find women who appreciate what they have to give. She argues that most such marriages are successful, and that, because many of the women who come are well-educated and ambitious, and perceive the most “traditional” of American men as incredibly progressive compared to Russian or Korean etc. men, prejudices against mail-order marriage are bad. Though the participants in today’s versions say they’re not feminists, Zug thinks that’s really code for “not feeling like winners in today’s economy,” as if those are mutually exclusive things.
It is indeed an engaging history, but also frustrating. Questions that, if grappled with, could have made this project better: Does the fact that individual women have really good reasons to do a thing make that thing feminist? If foreign brides are a good way to deal with “unmarriageable” American men, what happens to the now-more-disproportionately-male society they have left? Does the racist history of mail-order bride programs, in which women were imported in order to preserve racial purity so that European men wouldn’t intermarry with Native Americans, have any analog in today’s attempts by mail-order brides and bride-seekers to preserve gender distinctions? Did the successes of those mail-order European brides come at the expense of native women (in some specific cases where native wives and children were cast off, the answer is clearly yes), and would something else have changed in those societies had mail-order brides not relieved some of the pressure?
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: Well, I don’t like Jefferson any better after this book, a painstaking reconstruction of what’s known about the Hemings family at Monticello, starting with Sally Hemings’ mother and continuing through several generations of Hemingses. The book could have been profitably shortened—because so little documentary evidence remains (some having been deliberately destroyed by Jefferson’s family, and some apparently having been carefully not created in the first place), a lot of times Gordon-Reed ends up speculating about, e.g., what a young woman far from home and far from older family members might have felt, courted by a man who enjoyed charming people and having his life be conflict-free. Gordon-Reed says that Sally and her brother, who could have stayed in France as free blacks, returned with Jefferson after a promise from Jefferson that he’d free Sally’s children and her brother, but she doesn’t make clear whether this promise is known from a family tradition or just inferred from subsequent events. I was also really interested in the fact that several of Sally’s children left Monticello and “passed” by adopting a white identity (which actually would have been legally theirs before Virginia’s anti-black laws became even more vicious and adopted the one-drop rule) that required them to break off contact with the remaining Hemingses—the focus on Monticello makes it hard to ask “what happened then?”
Roger W. Shuy, The Language of Fraud Cases: Discussion of a number of cases in which he worked on where evidence included recorded conversations with informants, some of whom did a better job than others of implicating the targets. Repetitive but useful points about conversational goals and the ambiguities that can develop when people have undisclosed agendas or assumptions about the point of the conversation.
It is indeed an engaging history, but also frustrating. Questions that, if grappled with, could have made this project better: Does the fact that individual women have really good reasons to do a thing make that thing feminist? If foreign brides are a good way to deal with “unmarriageable” American men, what happens to the now-more-disproportionately-male society they have left? Does the racist history of mail-order bride programs, in which women were imported in order to preserve racial purity so that European men wouldn’t intermarry with Native Americans, have any analog in today’s attempts by mail-order brides and bride-seekers to preserve gender distinctions? Did the successes of those mail-order European brides come at the expense of native women (in some specific cases where native wives and children were cast off, the answer is clearly yes), and would something else have changed in those societies had mail-order brides not relieved some of the pressure?
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: Well, I don’t like Jefferson any better after this book, a painstaking reconstruction of what’s known about the Hemings family at Monticello, starting with Sally Hemings’ mother and continuing through several generations of Hemingses. The book could have been profitably shortened—because so little documentary evidence remains (some having been deliberately destroyed by Jefferson’s family, and some apparently having been carefully not created in the first place), a lot of times Gordon-Reed ends up speculating about, e.g., what a young woman far from home and far from older family members might have felt, courted by a man who enjoyed charming people and having his life be conflict-free. Gordon-Reed says that Sally and her brother, who could have stayed in France as free blacks, returned with Jefferson after a promise from Jefferson that he’d free Sally’s children and her brother, but she doesn’t make clear whether this promise is known from a family tradition or just inferred from subsequent events. I was also really interested in the fact that several of Sally’s children left Monticello and “passed” by adopting a white identity (which actually would have been legally theirs before Virginia’s anti-black laws became even more vicious and adopted the one-drop rule) that required them to break off contact with the remaining Hemingses—the focus on Monticello makes it hard to ask “what happened then?”
Roger W. Shuy, The Language of Fraud Cases: Discussion of a number of cases in which he worked on where evidence included recorded conversations with informants, some of whom did a better job than others of implicating the targets. Repetitive but useful points about conversational goals and the ambiguities that can develop when people have undisclosed agendas or assumptions about the point of the conversation.
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