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This article shows how and why some free black families ended up living among the enslaved in the late antebellum era. Enslavers brought free people of colour into forms of informal quasi-slavery that differed little from enslavement despite their free legal status. Despite a lack of evidence, piecing together free blacks’ experiences through surviving sources reveals much about the porous boundary between slavery and freedom where enslavers manipulated marginality for financial gain. There was no sharp delineation between slavery and freedom but instead a continuum of oppression characterized by varying degrees of persecution and fragile freedoms.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has had a significant impact in the way services are accessed and perceived by patients and their carers. Trust in services has shifted, and relationships with healthcare professionals have been affected, with carers now seeking alternative and more accessible sources of support. The aim of this paper is to explore the challenges and concerns including issues around trust that carers of people living with dementia and terminal illness have brought to support helplines, the decisions they are having to make, and the impact that the pandemic has had on end of life care. Eight helpline support workers were recruited from the Dementia UK and Marie Curie organisations, and semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted through video calls on Microsoft Teams. Interviews were recorded with participants’ consent and transcribed and checked via the Microsoft Stream automated system. The data was analysed by means of thematic analysis on NVIVO 11. Interview data was coded according to the point of time in the pandemic; early, later, or general. It was found that issues of trust, perceived loss of agency and confusion regarding government guidelines were expressed from the beginning of the pandemic to the current day. These stemmed from situations including care within hospitals and care homes, particularly due to a lack of communication from the aforementioned about the welfare of their relatives, and choices being removed from carers about their relatives’ discharge pathways. There were also concerns raised about the rapidly and constantly changing guidelines for vulnerable people during the pandemic, with carers seeking information and reassurance from charity helplines rather than authority figures and the government.

WET-NURSING IS A UNIQUELY GENDERED KIND OF EXPLOITATION, AND under slavery it represented the point at which the exploitation of enslaved women as workers and as reproducers literally intersected. Feeding another woman's child with one's own milk constituted a form of labor, but it was work that could only be undertaken by lactating women who had borne their own children. As a form of exploitation specific to slave mothers, enforced wet-nursing constituted a distinct aspect of enslaved women's commodification. The evocative image of an enslaved wet nurse, carefully holding a white child to her breast in order to provide sustenance through her own milk, therefore holds much resonance for historians interested in gender, slavery, and relationships between black and white women in the antebellum South. Wet-nursing bound women together across the racial divide, and white women also sometimes wet-nursed enslaved infants. Yet ultimately, white women used wet-nursing as a tool to manipulate enslaved women's motherhood for slaveholders' own ends. This article evaluates patterns of wet-nursing in the antebellum South by locating the practice along a spectrum of gendered exploitation where enforced wet-nursing sits at one end, women's paid employment of "professional" wet nurses exists somewhere in the middle, and informal networks of support where women shared their breast milk lie at the other. Women in the antebellum South practiced forms of wet-nursing across this spectrum. Inextricably linked with ideologies of race, ethnicity, and class, historical patterns of exploitative wet-nursing have shaped contemporary distaste for the practice within the medical profession and elsewhere, even though informal networks of shared breast-feeding (for which little evidence survives) have probably been more common than has hitherto been recognized. There have been many different forms of wet-nursing in the past, involving highly complex social relations. (1) By exploring the practice within broader, long-run contexts of mothers' exploitation across time and space and under a variety of different regimes, one of which was antebellum U.S. slavery, historians can illuminate power structures that resonate with gendered, racial, and class exploitation, where a woman's race and status impacted her ability to make choices about infant feeding. Patterns of wet-nursing thus vary within different historical contexts; and while at times the practice might have involved acts of altruism by women who shared their milk, at other times, for example under antebellum slavery, wet-nursing took on a more exploitative angle. (2) Wet-nursing fostered both physical closeness and racial distance between enslaved and white women, and opportunities for resistance on the part of enslaved wet nurses remained severely limited. Conversely, slaveholding women's relative power granted them choices about whether to use a wet nurse, and occasionally (and for a variety of reasons) white women wet-nursed enslaved infants. Enslaved women, too, sometimes shared their breast milk with each other in an example of more communal mothering processes. For the most part, though, wet-nursing represented a site of exploitation for enslaved women within the broader context of the antebellum slave regime. Slaveholding men and women manipulated enslaved women's mothering through their physical labor, their reproductive abilities, and the appropriation of their breast milk. Wet-nursing is a complex and contingent process that has commonly involved women in unequal power relationships in a variety of different regimes whereby wealthier women use women from lower down the social scale as wet nurses. (3) European female emigrants replicated these feeding patterns in colonial North America, using both enslaved and white wet nurses to feed their infants. Philip Vickers Fithian, a tutor in Robert Carter's Virginia household, wrote in his 1773 diary, "I find it is common here for people of Fortune to have their young Children suckled by the Negroes! …

Greeting cards are a denigrated product category in the USA, and yet consumers use them at high rates across taste formations. Consumers with relatively high cultural capital place a premium on originality in their self-expression, hence greeting cards present a consumption problem because they are a mode of expressing the self through mass-produced means. Based on interviews with 46 women, I show that consumers with higher cultural capital are more likely to prioritize card design over sentiment; select smaller, simpler designs and sentiments; prefer cards that are handmade, look handmade, or remind them of fine art; and are more likely to use cards ironically. In this way, consumers perform exclusivity through their taste, even through a form of mass culture. However, the social embeddedness of greeting card communication means that many consumers balance considerations of taste with the requirements of effective interpersonal communication. The ability to self-consciously modulate signifiers of taste is itself an indication of cultural knowledge and therefore of cultural capital.

As mass-produced vehicles of sentiment, greeting cards draw attention to the use of socially constructed codes for communicating, even feeling, emotion. This article describes the results of interviews with 51 greeting card consumers, focusing on what makes greeting cards ‘personal’ for them, despite their mass-produced nature. Consumers negotiate their relationships with pre-printed sentiments differently depending on whether their allegiance is stronger to an expressive individualist understanding of authenticity or a ritual perspective, and these allegiances tend to reflect cultural capital. Specifically, suspicion of pre-printed sentiments is common among people with higher cultural capital, while this is the feature of greeting cards that is most important to other greeting card consumers. I argue that scholars should avoid taking an expressive individualist understanding of authenticity as a standard against which we evaluate mass culture and its consumption.

Cheerleading has long been synonymous with “spirit” because of its traditional sideline role in supporting school sports programs. In recent decades, however, cheerleading has become more athletic and competitive—even a sport in its own right. This essay is an ethnographic exploration of the emotional dimensions of cheerleading in light of these changes. We argue that spirit is a regulating but also flexible concept that is deployed in order to manage and uphold ideologies of emotion, and that these ideologies are central to the ways in which cheerleading reproduces racialized gender difference. On the one hand, the performance guidelines for spirit stabilize the emotional dimensions of cheerleading in the face of the activity's shifting priorities. On the other hand, the performance framing encourages participants to distance themselves from cheerleading's emotional script, allowing them to abdicate responsibility for it. The ambiguity surrounding the performance of spirit—whether it should be read as “r...

Greeting card communication reflects the highly gendered division of both emotional and domestic labor in US culture. It is generally thought that American men do not take as much responsibility for sending greeting cards as women, or display competence in this mode of communication. Both survey data and field work with greeting card consumers confirm this overall pattern. For many women, greeting card communication is part of a feminized habitus that includes kinship work as well as routine provisioning for the household. For men, taking an interest in greeting cards can seem like discrediting behavior for heterosexual masculinity, and so the belief that “men are bad at cards” circulates as one way of asserting hierarchical gender difference. The greeting card industry reinforces this gendered view of greeting card communication, incorporating beliefs about gendered communication styles into its marketing, advertising, and card sentiments, and framing cards as a solution to the resulting communication ga...

During the antebellum era, especially its latter stages, some Southern state legislatures and county courts received petitions on behalf of free people of colour requesting enslavement. Their reasons for doing so varied, and while these individuals are atypical in the sense that their often desperate actions were not representative of the aspirations of the majority of Southern free blacks, as a group they reveal much about the intersection of race, class and gender during a highly uncertain time in Southern history. These cases offer a fascinating insight into economic conditions and the impact of legislation upon free people of colour, marital and other familial ties across the slave-free divide, relationships across the colour line and the broader pro-slavery defence in the Old South.

Cheerleading occupies a contested space in American culture and a key point of controversy is whether it ought to be considered a sport. Drawing on interviews with college cheerleaders on coed squads, as well as five years of fieldwork in various cheerleading sites, this paper examines the debate over cheerleading and sport in terms of its gender politics. The bid for sport status on the part of cheerleaders revolves around the desire for respect more than official recognition by athletic organizations; cheerleaders recognize the prestige associated with sport, a function of its historic association with hegemonic masculinity, and they claim that prestige for cheerleading by highlighting its recent transformation into a more athletic, competitive activity that is no longer “just for girls.” However, the support function of college cheerleading, combined with its ”feminine” performance demands, make the bid for sport status controversial. Male cheerleaders in particular distance themselves from the feminine elements of cheerleading because they want to avoid being perceived as gay. The gender politics at work here illustrate both the elasticity of gender categories and the limits of that elasticity, as gendered boundaries are drawn and redrawn between what gets to count as sport and what does not, and as cheerleading simultaneously challenges and reinforces the notion of sport as a male preserve. Because masculinity and femininity are performed side-by-side in coed cheerleading, this research underscores the importance of relational analyses for examining and critiquing the construction of gender and sexuality.

Access to health care is an issue that challenges the imagined boundary between being a “consumer” and being a “citizen”. This is especially true in the United States where market-based solutions to providing health care have historically been favored over care organized through government. In the recent debate over how to organize prescription drug coverage for seniors in the United States, stakeholders quoted in the press were more likely to position health care as a consumer issue rather than as an issue of basic rights that accompany citizenship. As scholars such as Lizabeth Cohen have illustrated, being a “consumer” is not necessarily a depoliticizing stance. Organizing around consumer rights can be effective in changing policy and bringing people together politically. However, discourse that remains within a consumer rights frame can also reinforce the terms of debate laid out by interested corporations and government. This paper looks at the “consumer” and “citizenship” frames in the 2003–2004 deba...

Research into the intimate areas of slaves' lives has proven problematic for historians because the typicality of private sentiments is always hard to establish, and within slave testimony such as the WPA narratives, reference to issues of marital discord, abuse, or adultery is rare. However, the records of slave owners and the disciplinary committees of antebellum biracial churches can prove most fruitful in an investigation into slave marital antagonisms. This evidence, when used in conjunction with limited testimony conveyed within slave narratives and autobiographies for the state of South Carolina, illustrates that the system of slavery led the enslaved towards the creation of clearly defined gender roles. Women were obliged to take care of domestic affairs, while men were expected to act as protectors and providers. It was when a spouse failed to conform to these gendered expectations that marital strife ensued. Understanding the specific duties and obligations of male and female slaves therefore al...

My husband was a slave of de Sloans and didn't get to see me as often as he wanted to, and of course, as de housemaid then, dere was times I couldn't meet him, clandestine like he want me. Us had some grief over dat, but he got a pass twice a week from his marster, Marse Tommie Sloan, to come to see me…Sam was a field hand and drive de wagon way to Charleston once a year wid cotton, and always bring back something pretty for me.George P. Rawick, The American Slave : A Composite Autobiography, Vol. 2, Part 1 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972), 300.Historians have found it difficult to assess the extent and nature of slave cross-plantation marriages (that is, where husband and wife lived on different slaveholdings). This is largely because white sources give no basis for estimating their scale or character. Estate papers and business records often list slaves belonging to a particular owner, but such lists give no indication of spouses and other relatives of those slaves who might belong to neighbours. Similarly, except for scattered comments on visiting privileges given to certain slaves, or references to the possible advantages and inconveniences of allowing slaves to marry off the plantation, owners took little interest in the vigour of such unions.

Health care consumerism is an important frame in U.S. health care policy, especially in recent media and policy discourse about federal health care reform. This article reports on qualitative fieldwork with health care users to find out how people interpret and make sense of the identity of "health care consumer." It proposes that while the term consumer is normally understood as a descriptive label for users who purchase health care and insurance services, it should actually be understood as a metaphor, carrying with it a host of associations that shape U.S. health care policy debates in particular ways. Based on interviews with 36 people, patient was the dominant term people used to describe themselves, but consumer was the second most popular. Informants interpreted the health care consumer as being informed, proactive, and having choices, but there were also "semiotic traps," or difficult-to-resolve tensions for this identity. The discourse of consumerism functions in part as code for individual responsibility, and therefore as a classed moral discourse, with implications for U.S. health care policy.

This new analysis of 194 DNA exonerations, representing 171 criminal events, examines the types of evidence and DNA testing that have been used to free the victims of wrongful conviction. The types of DNA testing used to free the innocent parallels the growth of these techniques in forensic science. Short tandem repeat (STR) analysis now prevails (70%), though Y-STR analysis (16%) and mitochondrial testing (10%) are still used when STR analysis is not feasible, and the recently developed mini-STRs have been used for exonerations since 2008 (2.6%). The types of exculpatory evidence included intimate swabs (65%), clothing (53%), hair (13%), fingernail evidence (5%), cigarettes (3%), and other evidence. The most common factor associated with wrongful convictions was misidentification (75%), including misidentification by the victim (65%). False confessions (including admissions and pleas) were obtained in 30% of the cases, and informant testimony (including jailhouse and government informants) was used in 22% of the false convictions. Several types of invalid forensic science testimony were used to wrongfully convict in the 146 trials where transcripts or reliable forensic science data were available for analysis. Invalid testimony included serology (38%), hair comparison (22%), fingerprint comparison (2%), and bite mark comparison (3%). In 43% of the exonerations, the true perpetrator of the crime was identified through postconviction testing.

by Carol Wilson, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, Rutgers University Press, 2007, xi, 158pp., $21.95, ISBN: 0-8135-4058-5 Carol Wilson has written a terrific, gripping book which, once started...