Laws and cultural norms militated against interracial sex in Virginia before the Civil War, and yet it was ubiquitous in cities, towns, and plantation communities throughout the state. In Notorious in the Neighborhood, Joshua Rothman examines the full spectrum of interracial sexual relationships under slavery--from Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the intertwined interracial families of Monticello and Charlottesville to commercial sex in Richmond, the routinized sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and adultery across the color line. He explores the complex considerations of legal and judicial authorities who handled cases involving illicit sex and describes how the customary toleration of sex across the color line both supported and undermined racism and slavery in the early national and antebellum South. White Virginians allowed for an astonishing degree of flexibility and fluidity within a seemingly rigid system of race and interracial relations, Rothman argues, and the relationship between law and custom regarding racial intermixture was always shifting. As a consequence, even as whites never questioned their own racial supremacy, the meaning and significance of racial boundaries, racial hierarchy, and ultimately of race itself always stood on unstable ground--a reality that whites understood and about which they demonstrated increasing anxiety as the nation's sectional crisis intensified.

Oneida Ltd. grew out of the commercial remains of the Oneida Community, which was a religious/social experiment founded in Oneida, New York. It was active from 1848 to 1881. John P. L. Hatcher, a great-grandson of one of the original community members and himself a longtime employee of Oneida Ltd., explores the history of the community and subsequent company in this robust history. The community and the company achieved great things—and neither should be forgotten. Upon the break up of the religious community, many of its members remained to continue businesses, including animal traps and the table flatware that would make Oneida Ltd. a household name. By the middle of the twentieth century, the company, then called Oneida Community Ltd., commanded twenty-five percent of the silver plated flatware market. The company kept true to the community’s social and wealth sharing ideals. But the dominant success of Oneida Ltd in the manufacturing of stainless steel flatware brought low cost foreign competition and the company was bankrupt in 2006. It was a textbook case of insufficient management, poor judgement, and extravagance. Find out what happened and why in A Goodly Heritage Gone Wrong.

In The Last Fire-Eater, renowned historian of the American South William A. Link examines the life of Roger A. Pryor, a Virginia secessionist, Confederate general, and earnest proponent of postwar sectional reconciliation whose life involved a series of remarkable transformations. Pryor’s journey, Link reveals, mirrored that of the South. At times, both proved puzzling and contradictory. Pryor recast himself during a crucial period in southern history between the 1850s and the close of the nineteenth century. An archetypical southern-rights advocate, Pryor became a skilled practitioner in the politics of honor. As a politician and newspaper editor, he engaged in duels and viewed the world through the cultural prism of southern honor, assuming a more militant and aggressive stance on slavery than most of his regional peers. Later, he served in the Confederate army during the Civil War, rising to the rank of brigadier general and seeing action across the Eastern Theater. Captured late in the conflict, Pryor soon after abandoned his fiery persona and renounced extremism. He then moved to New York City, where he emerged as a prominent lawyer and supporter of the sort of intersectional detente that stood as a central facet of what southern boosters labeled the “New South.” Dramatic change characterized Pryor’s long life. Born in 1828, he died four months after the end of World War I. He witnessed fundamental shifts in the South that included the destruction of slavery, the defeat of the Confederacy, and the redefinition of manhood and honor among elite white men who relied less on violence to resolve personal grievances. With Pryor’s lifetime of remakings as its focus, The Last Fire-Eater serves as a masterful history of transformation in the South.

In Intimate Reconstructions, Catherine Jones considers how children shaped, and were shaped by, Virginia’s Reconstruction. Jones argues that questions of how to define, treat, reform, or protect children were never far from the surface of public debate and private concern in post–Civil War Virginia. Through careful examination of governmental, institutional, and private records, the author traces the unpredictable paths black and white children traveled through this tumultuous period. Putting children at the center of the narrative reveals the unevenness of the transitions that defined Virginia in the wake of the Civil War: from slavery to freedom, from war to peace, and from secession to a restored but fractured union. While some children emerged from the war under the protection of families, others navigated treacherous circumstances on their own. The reconfiguration of postwar households, and disputes over children’s roles within them, fueled broader debates over public obligations to protect all children. The reorganization of domestic life was a critical proving ground for Reconstruction. Freedpeople’s efforts to recover children strained against white Virginians’ efforts to retain privileges formerly undergirded by slavery. At the same time, orphaned children, particularly those who populated the streets of Virginia’s cities, prompted contentious debate over who had responsibility for their care, as well as rights to their labor. By revisiting conflicts over the practices of orphan asylums, apprenticeship, and adoption, Intimate Reconstructions demonstrates that race continued to shape children’s postwar lives in decisive ways. In private and public, children were at the heart of Virginians’ struggles over the meanings of emancipation and Confederate defeat.

Engaging a medley of perspectives and methodologies, The Sporting World of the Modern South examines how sports map the social, political, and cultural landscapes of the modern South. In essays on the "backcountry" fighter stereotypes portrayed in modern professional wrestling and the significance of Crimson Tide coaching legend Paul "Bear" Bryant for white Alabamians, contributors explore the symbols that have shaped southern regional identities since the Civil War. Other essays tackle gender and race relations in intercollegiate athletics, uncover the roles athletic competitions played in desegregating the South, and address the popularity of NASCAR in the southern states. Pairing the action and anecdotes of good sports writing with rock-solid scholarship, The Sporting World of the Modern South adds historical and anthropological perspectives to legends and lore from the gridiron to the racetrack. This collection, with its innovative attention to the interplay between athletics and regional identity, is an insightful and compelling contribution to southern and sports history.

This illuminating book examines how the public funerals of major figures from the Civil War era shaped public memories of the war and allowed a diverse set of people to contribute to changing American national identities. These funerals featured lengthy processions that sometimes crossed multiple state lines, burial ceremonies open to the public, and other cultural productions of commemoration such as oration and song. As Sarah J. Purcell reveals, Americans' participation in these funeral rites led to contemplation and contestation over the political and social meanings of the war and the roles played by the honored dead. Public mourning for military heroes, reformers, and politicians distilled political and social anxieties as the country coped with the aftermath of mass death and casualties. Purcell shows how large-scale funerals for figures such as Henry Clay and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson set patterns for mourning culture and Civil War commemoration; after 1865, public funerals for figures such as Robert E. Lee, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Winnie Davis elaborated on these patterns and fostered public debate about the meanings of the war, Reconstruction, race, and gender.

In the winter of 1861, Union armies had failed to win any significant victories over their Confederate counterparts. The Northern populace, overwhelmed by the bloodshed, questioned whether the costs of the war were too high. President Lincoln despondently wondered if he was going to lose the Union. As a result, tension was incredibly high when Union hero Ambrose Burnside embarked for coastal North Carolina. With the eyes of the nation and world on little Roanoke Island in the Outer Banks, Burnside began his amphibious assault on the beaches and earned a victory that shifted control of Southern waters. Join author and historian Michael Zatarga as he traces the story of the crucial fight on Roanoke Island.