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'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part
Love and Marriage in African America
Frances Smith Foster
218 pages
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127x177mm
978-0-19-532852-3
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Hardback
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18 February 2010
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This item is temporarily out of stock, but may be ordered now for delivery when back in stock.
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- Presents a powerful corrective to the negative attitudes held about African American antebellum marriage
- Includes new material and perspectives that demonstrate the vitality of print culture in African America from the late 18th century to the Civil War
- Introduces readers to a wide variety of authors and little known literatures of early African America
- Draws on extensive archival research: Foster uses little-known journals, newspapers, historical records, folklore, poetry, and other documents by African Americans to illuminate attitudes toward courtship, sex, and marriage
Conventional wisdom says that marriage was rare or illegal for slaves and that if African Americans married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is believed that this history explains the dysfunction of the African American family to this day. In this groundbreaking book, Frances Smith Foster shows that this common wisdom is flawed as it is based upon partial evidence and it ignores the writings African Americans created for themselves. Rather than
relying on documents produced for abolitionists, the state, or other biased parties, Foster draws upon a trove of little-examined alternative sources and in so doing offers a correction to this widely held but misinformed viewpoint. The works examined include family histories, folkloric stories, organizational records, personal memoirs, sermons and especially the fascinating and varied writings published in the Afro-Protestant Press of the times. She shows that "jumping the broom" was but one of many wedding rituals and that love, marriage and family were highly valued and central to early African American society. Her book offers a provocative new understanding of a powerful belief about African American history and sheds light on the roles of memory and myth, story and history in
defining contemporary society and shaping the future.Readership: Readers of The New York Review of Books, New Republic, Nation, Book Forum, Harper's, Ebony, The Chronicle, American Quarterly, American Literary History; Callaloo, Black Issues Book Review, Journal of American History; students and professors of African American studies.
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Frances Smith Foster, Charles Howard Chandler Professor in English and Women's Studies and Chair of the English Department, Emory University
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1.: Where Is the Love?
2.: Whose Story Is It, Anyhow?
3.: Who Giveth This Woman and Other Fallacies
4.: Marriage is a Mystery of History
5.: Taking Stock in Bondings
6.: Under Matrimonial Obligations
7.: Choosing Partners
8.: Courting Customs
9.: Until Death-Or Distance-Do Us Part
10.: The Good Wife and the Happy Husband
11.: Writing Things Right
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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