What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America

A long-awaited history that promises to dramatically change our understanding of race in America, What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States--laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between whites and members of other races. Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest. Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks. She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.

Author: Peggy Pascoe
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 11/01/2010
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.32lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9780199772353
ISBN10: 0199772355
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States | 19th Century
- History | United States | 20th Century
- Law | Family Law | Marriage

About the Author

Peggy Pascoe is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon.

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