Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Over the Threshold is the first in-depth work to explore the topic of intimate violence in the American colonies and the early Republic. The essays examine domestic violence in both urban and frontier environments, between husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves. This compelling collection puts commonly held notions about intimate violence under strict historical scrutiny, often producing surprising results.
Table of Contents
Intimate violence now and then / Christine Daniels -- Personal violence in a "peaceable kingdom" : Pennsylvania, 1682-1801 / G.S. Rowe and Jack D. Marietta -- Governing the passions : the eighteenth century quest for domestic harmony in Philadelphia's middle-class households / Jacquelyn C. Miller -- Spousal murder in northern New England, 1776-1865 / Randolph A. Roth -- "My mind is to drown you and leave you behind" : "Omie Wise", intimate violence, and masculinity / Edward E. Baptist -- "He murdered her because he loved her" " Passion, masculinity, and intimate homicide in antebellum America / Ed Hatton -- "A new home" for whom? : Caroline Kirkland exposes domestic abuse on the Michigan frontier / Jenifer Banks -- Keeping the peace : domestic assault and private prosecution in antebellum Baltimore / Stephanie Cole -- "Unnatural mothers" : infanticide, motherhood, and class in the mid-Atlantic, 1730-1830 / Merril D. Smith -- Laying claim to Elizabeth Shoemaker : family violence on Baltimore's waterfront, 1808-1812 / James D. Rice -- Domestic violence : manners, class, and abuse in Rebecca Rush's Kelroy / Jeffrey H. Richards -- "As if there was not master or woman in the land" : gender, dependency, and household violence in Virginia, 1646-1720 / Terri L. Snyder -- Theater of terror : domestic violence in Thomas Thistlewood's Jamaica, 1750-1786 / Trevor Burnard -- "I have got the gun and will do as I please with her" : African-Americans and violence in Maryland, 1782-1830 / T. Stephen Whitman -- Within the slave cabin : violence in Mississippi slave families / Christopher Morris.