CHESTER,
Pa.– Dr. Sarah Roth, associate
professor and chair of history at Widener University, has published “Gender and
Race in Antebellum Popular Culture” with Cambridge University Press. In the
book, Roth examines how white women played a critical role in shifting how
African American men were perceived in the decades leading to the Civil War
through their contributions to popular culture media.
Roth
examines a range of literature from antebellum America, including some obscure
selections, to show that as the reading and writing of popular narratives
emerged as largely feminine enterprises, a radical reshaping of black
masculinity in American culture occurred. She shows that narratives created by
white female authors often made white women appear superior to male slaves,
leading to the demasculinization of black men and consequently impacting the
political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America.
“I began
this book because I was looking for a way to understand how ordinary white
people in the 19th Century thought about race,” Roth said. “There
were studies focusing on the theories intellectuals had about race, and a lot
had been written on both the abolitionist movement and on political arguments
in favor of slavery. But I wanted to know how middle-class people not directly
involved in either the slave system or in antislavery efforts viewed African
Americans in the decades leading up to the Civil War.”
Roth
explains that when scholars have written about race, middle-class whites,
particularly white northern women, have been left out of historical literature
with the exception of the tiny minority who were active in the abolitionist
cause. However, middle-class northerners were the people who in the 1860s would
either go off to fight and die for the Union themselves or would stand by as
their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers did so. Therefore, to understand
what the Civil War meant to this middle-class white majority within northern
society, Roth found it important to understand the evolution of their racial
views in the decades preceding the war.
In
“Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture,” Roth uses short stories
and novels to uncover those racial attitudes. “This seemed an effective means
of getting at popular perceptions about race, since the reading of fiction
expanded monumentally among the middle class during the antebellum period, and
much of the most widely read fiction dealt explicitly with race and slavery,” she said.
Roth sees
the audience for her book as students, academics and members of the general
public who have an interest in the history of race in America, the causes of
the Civil War and the impact white women had on both.
“Gender
and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture” is available through Amazon beginning
in July 2014. Roth earned her bachelor’s in history from Southwestern
University and her master’s and doctorate in American history from the
University of Virginia. In addition to her role at Widener as associate
professor and chair of history, she also serves as coordinator for the
university’s African and African American Studies Program. She is a resident of
Wallingford, Pa.
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