Martha Elizabeth Hodes's Books

Mourning Lincoln

By: Martha Hodes

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A historian examines how everyday people reacted to the president’s assassination in this “highly original, lucidly written book” (James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom). The news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, just days after Confederate surrender, astounded a war-weary nation. Massive crowds turned out for services and ceremonies. Countless expressions of grief and dismay were printed in newspapers and preached in sermons. Public responses to the assassination have been well chronicled, but this book is the first to delve into the personal and intimate responses of everyday people—northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians, black people and white, men and women, rich and poor. Exploring diaries, letters, and other personal writings penned during the spring and summer of 1865, historian Martha Hodes captures the full range of reactions to the president’s death—far more diverse than public expressions would suggest. She tells a story of shock, glee, sorrow, anger, blame, and fear. “’Tis the saddest day in our history,” wrote a mournful man. It was “an electric shock to my soul,” wrote a woman who had escaped from slavery. “Glorious News!” a Lincoln enemy exulted, while for the black soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, it was all “too overwhelming, too lamentable, too distressing” to absorb. Longlisted for the National Book Award, Mourning Lincoln brings to life a key moment of national uncertainty and confusion, when competing visions of America’s future proved irreconcilable and hopes for racial justice in the aftermath of the Civil War slipped from the nation’s grasp. Hodes masterfully explores the tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination in human terms—terms that continue to stagger and rivet us today.

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Page Count

407

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300213565

ISBN 13

9780300213560

The Sea Captain's Wife

A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

By: Martha Elizabeth Hodes

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The Sea Captain's Wife

A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

By: Martha Elizabeth Hodes

What a terrific book! I could hardly put it down... A story of triumph over adversity."--James McPherson. Award-winning historian Hodes presents the true, extraordinary story of Eunice Connolly, a woman whose misfortune and defiance make up the grand themes of American history--opportunity and racism, war and freedom.

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Page Count

400

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393052664

ISBN 13

9780393052664

The Sea Captain's Wife

A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

By: Martha Elizabeth Hodes

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The Sea Captain's Wife

A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

By: Martha Elizabeth Hodes

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Page Count

400

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393052664

ISBN 13

9780393052664

White Women, Black Men

Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-century South

By: Martha Elizabeth Hodes

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White Women, Black Men

Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-century South

By: Martha Elizabeth Hodes

This book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America's past: liaisons between Southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation. Hodes provides details of the wedding of a white servant-woman and a slave man in 1681, an antebellum rape accusation that uncovered a relationship between an unmarried white woman and a slave, and a divorce plea from a white farmer based on an adulterous affair between his wife and a neighborhood slave. Drawing on sources that include courtroom testimony, legislative petitions, pardon pleas, and congressional testimony, she presents the voices of the authorities, eyewitnesses, and the transgressors themselves--and these voices seem to say that in the slave South, whites were not overwhelmingly concerned about such liaisons, beyond the racial and legal status of the children that were produced. Only with the advent of black freedom did the issue move beyond neighborhood dramas and into the arena of politics, becoming a much more serious taboo than it had ever been before. Hodes gives vivid examples of the violence that followed the upheaval of war, when black men and white women were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and unprecedented white rage and terrorism against such liaisons began to erupt. An era of terror and lynchings was inaugurated, and the legacy of these sexual politics lingered well into the twentieth century.

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Page Count

356

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300077505

ISBN 13

9780300077506

Mourning Lincoln

By: Martha Hodes

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Mourning Lincoln

By: Martha Hodes

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

407

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300213565

ISBN 13

9780300213560

White Women, Black Men

Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-century South

By: Martha Elizabeth Hodes

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

White Women, Black Men

Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-century South

By: Martha Elizabeth Hodes

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N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

356

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300077505

ISBN 13

9780300077506

Book's by Martha Elizabeth Hodes

Mourning Lincoln

Mourning Lincoln

The Sea Captain's Wife

The Sea Captain's Wife

The Sea Captain's Wife

The Sea Captain's Wife

White Women, Black Men

White Women, Black Men

Mourning Lincoln

Mourning Lincoln

White Women, Black Men

White Women, Black Men

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