In the era of slave emancipation no ideal of freedom had greater power than that of contract. The antislavery claim was that the negation of chattel status lay in the contracts of wage labor and marriage. Signifying self-ownership, volition, and reciprocal exchange among formally equal individuals, contract became the dominant metaphor for social relations and the very symbol of freedom. This 1999 book explores how a generation of American thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates, jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society. Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom were grounded in changing circumstances of labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At the heart of these arguments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities and which could not.

Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.

Illustrations ONLY available in Paperback version. To live the full experience, please purchase the paperback. The Contract, by JG-Leathers was previously published as two separate books by Gord Books. The author has not only combined these powerful stories into one stunning novel, but added 40,000 words and ten of his own sketches. The complete complement of all the original illustrations by Simon Benson are also included; made available with the gracious permission of Gord." Susan Henderson is a bored young woman looking for some spice in her life. Upon reading an advertisement in an up-scale women s magazine that stated excellent pay was being offered for a five year, foreign service position, provided the applicant passed rigorous intelligence, appearance, and aptitude tests. She is soon enticed into a world of ever-increasing, inescapable bondage, then soon held deep in the fastness of a Middle Eastern Palace. Here she learns her true place in life, discovering a world within her own mind that also cannot be escaped or evaded. Susan Henderson's voyage continues when she is inducted into different deviant training programs. Much to her distress, she soon discovers what it is like to be a domestic animal and spends a substantial length of time in this role. She is eventually freed to be taken on a shopping expedition in the real world, controlled thoroughly at all times. Soon after, she becomes a human equine, undergoing intense training as a Horse Woman, then as a four legged, ridden Pony Girl, and finally, as one of the Sheik's famous Lipizzaner Mares. JG Leather s proves he is the professor of prose with his finely tuned descriptions.

As states across the country battle internally over same-sex marriage in the courts, in legislatures, and at the ballot box, activists and scholars grapple with its implications for the status of gays and lesbians and for the institution of marriage itself. Yet, the struggle over same-sex marriage is only the most recent political and public debate over marriage in the United States. What is at stake for those who want to restrict marriage and for those who seek to extend it? Why has the issue become such a national debate? These questions can be answered only by viewing marriage as a political institution as well as a religious and cultural one. In its political dimension, marriage circumscribes both the meaning and the concrete terms of citizenship. Marriage represents communal duty, moral education, and social and civic status. Yet, at the same time, it represents individual choice, contract, liberty, and independence from the state. According to Priscilla Yamin, these opposing but interrelated sets of characteristics generate a tension between a politics of obligations on the one hand and a politics of rights on the other. To analyze this interplay, American Marriage examines the status of ex-slaves at the close of the Civil War, immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, civil rights and women's rights in the 1960s, and welfare recipients and gays and lesbians in the contemporary period. Yamin argues that at moments when extant political and social hierarchies become unstable, political actors turn to marriage either to stave off or to promote political and social changes. Some marriages are pushed as obligatory and necessary for the good of society, while others are contested or presented as dangerous and harmful. Thus political struggles over race, gender, economic inequality, and sexuality have been articulated at key moments through the language of marital obligations and rights. Seen this way, marriage is not outside the political realm but interlocked with it in mutual evolution.

A vivid examination of slave life in New Orleans in the early nineteenth century.

American constitutional lawyers and legal historians routinely assert that the Supreme Court's state action doctrine halted Reconstruction in its tracks. But it didn't. Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction demolishes the conventional wisdom - and puts a constructive alternative in its place. Pamela Brandwein unveils a lost jurisprudence of rights that provided expansive possibilities for protecting blacks' physical safety and electoral participation, even as it left public accommodation rights undefended. She shows that the Supreme Court supported a Republican coalition and left open ample room for executive and legislative action. Blacks were abandoned, but by the president and Congress, not the Court. Brandwein unites close legal reading of judicial opinions (some hitherto unknown), sustained historical work, the study of political institutions, and the sociology of knowledge. This book explodes tired old debates and will provoke new ones.

In the late 1860s the U.S. federal government initiated the most abrupt transition from slavery to citizenship in the Americas. The transformation, of course, did not stick, but it did permanently alter the terms of American citizenship and initiated a century long struggle over the place of African Americans in the American polity. Southern Progressives, crucial in this account, were faced with a significant ideological challenge: how to reconcile their liberal principles with their commitments to racial hierarchy. The ideological work performed by Southern Progressives was instrumental to the establishment of white supremacist institutions in the heart of a putatively liberal democracy and illuminate how combinations of liberal and illiberal principles have affected the history of American political thought. In this work, Marek Steedman demonstrates how Southern Progressives combined commitments to liberal, even democratic, politics with equally strong commitments to the maintenance of racial hierarchy. He shows that there are systematic features of the traditions of liberal and republican thought, on the one hand, and ideologies of race, on the other, that facilitate their combination. Jim Crow Citizenship relates familiar developments in American state-building, legal development, and political thought to race, thus showing how race intertwines with these developments, often shaping them in decisive fashion.

Breaking the Devil's Contract is a guide to learning how people engage with and submit to demonic forces. This book will help you to recognize all of the areas of your life that you have made a contract with the enemy. This contract gives the enemy the right to be in your life to control your thoughts and actions. You give the permission and the enemy takes the wheel with your agreement every step of the way. You can break this contract with God's help but you must find out how to do it in this book. Have you ever wondered why you keep sinning in a certain area of your life? Have you wondered why you keep doing the things that you do not want to do? Learn how to break this cycle with the Power of God! Break the Devil's Contract and be free in Jesus to serve God with all of your heart! You will never have to obey the Devil again when he tells you what to do! Restore the Joy of your salvation! Start reading today to break the Devil's Contract! In this book you will learn how to: - Understand the Devil's Contract and how it is formed - Break the Devil's Contract using the Power of God - Be free from satanic control, powers, and curses - Understand and use the Armor of God against the enemy - Walk in the Authority and Power of the Holy Spirit - Be filled with the Holy Spirit and the Fruits of the Spirit - Have the Abundant Life of Joy and Victory Jesus promised Rev. Paul T. Cross has a Master's Degree in Theology and has been in ministry for over 20 years. Rev. Cross is called by God to the Pastoral and Deliverance Ministry. He is anointed to teach the Word of God to help people learn how to break the power of the enemy. If you apply the truth in this book to your life then you will Break the Devil's Contract and never be oppressed by the Devil again! The Joy of the Lord is your strength! Get your Joy back and follow the Lord to victory!

From the Mormon Church's public announcement of its sanction of polygamy in 1852 until its formal decision to abandon the practice in 1890, people on both sides of the "Mormon question" debated central questions of constitutional law. Did principles of religious freedom and local self-government protect Mormons' claim to a distinct, religiously based legal order? Or was polygamy, as its opponents claimed, a new form of slavery--this time for white women in Utah? And did constitutional principles dictate that democracy and true liberty were founded on separation of church and state? As Sarah Barringer Gordon shows, the answers to these questions finally yielded an apparent victory for antipolygamists in the late nineteenth century, but only after decades of argument, litigation, and open conflict. Victory came at a price; as attention and national resources poured into Utah in the late 1870s and 1880s, antipolygamists turned more and more to coercion and punishment in the name of freedom. They also left a legacy in constitutional law and political theory that still governs our treatment of religious life: Americans are free to believe, but they may well not be free to act on their beliefs.

Examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature.