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"For generations female slaves have played prominent roles throughout American history, but more than a century after Emancipation, no comprehensive overview of the history of the female American slave exists. In this book, historian Emily West offers the first comprehensive overview of the lives of enslaved women in America by placing their stories within the broader context of slavery in this country from the colonial era through to the end of the Civil War"--Provided by publisher

In the antebellum South, the presence of free people of color was problematic to the white population. Not only were they possible assistants to enslaved people and potential members of the labor force; their very existence undermined popular justifications for slavery. It is no surprise that, by the end of the Civil War, nine Southern states had enacted legal provisions for the ""voluntary"" enslavement of free blacks. What is surprising to modern sensibilities and perplexing to scholars is that some individuals did petition to rescind their freedom. Family or Freedom investigates th

Consumer reviews on platforms like Amazon are summarized into star ratings, used to weight search results, and consulted by consumers to guide purchase decisions. They are emblematic of the interactive digital environment that has purportedly transferred power from marketers to 'regular people', and yet they represent the infiltration of promotional concerns into online information, as has occurred in search and social media content. Consumers' ratings and reviews do promotional work for brands - not just for products but the platforms that host reviews - that money can't always buy. Gains in power by consumers are quickly met with new strategies of control by companies who depend on reviews for reputational capital. Focusing on ecommerce giant Amazon, this article examines the complexities of online reviews, where individual efforts to provide product feedback and help others make choices become transformed into an information commodity and promotional vehicle. It acknowledges the ambiguous nature of reviews due to the rise of industries and business practices that influence or fake reviews as a promotional strategy. In response are yet other business practices and platform policies aiming to provide better information to consumers, protect the image of platforms that host reviews, and punish 'bad actors' in competitive markets. The complexity in the production, regulation, and manipulation of product ratings and reviews illustrates how the high stakes of attention in digital spaces create fertile ground for disinformation, which only emphasizes to users that they inhabit a 'post-truth' reality online.

In 2000 former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, age 80, died, and was remembered in a televised state funeral in his native Montreal after four days of vigils and round-the-clock coverage. Trudeau had dominated the Canadian political scene over three decades, launching into it in 1968 on a wave of what was described then and since as Trudeaumania. Some dubbed the public response to his death as a new, more subdued version of Trudeaumania. It was deemed to be unprecedented, both in its scale and its emotional intensity. Based on a large sample of both English and French-language newspaper, magazine, and television coverage, this paper uses the media coverage of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's death and funeral to investigate contemporary rites of national mourning, their representation by the press, and their evaluation by scholars. The concern was voiced by some at the time of Trudeau's death that for funerals of public figures like these the news media drop even the pretense of objectivity, and slip into "memorial broadcasting." My analysis leads me to argue that, generally speaking, the news coverage of the Trudeau funeral framed the event as a time of national mourning and idealized Canadian emotional unity in remembering Trudeau, while simultaneously acknowledging the political dissent and division that he inspired. Despite divided opinion about what exactly Trudeau had meant for Canada, he provided a common object of attention and memory – "everyone" participated in the remembering, even if they came to different conclusions about the same events. The felt obligation or compulsion to remember and observe did not necessarily indicate reverence and respect for the man and his policies, but acknowledgement of his relevance to national group membership, even when that group membership was resented (as for many Québécois). I suggest that both the way the events were covered in the press and scholarly responses to these kinds of rites of national mourning point to a distrust of the emotional authenticity of ritualized crowd response. The prominence of emotional scripts in public mourning creates doubt about the authenticity of the motivations or emotions of mourners, leading to an insistence upon the spontaneity and voluntary nature of crowd participation by reporters and commentators. This paper argues that critiques of political spectacles and their media representations need to go beyond suspicion of ritualized group emotion, and attend to the conditions of crowd production and the nature of its media representation.

The American greeting card industry, in particular industry leader Hallmark Cards, makes substantial efforts to deflect cultural critiques in its communications with the public, demonstrating how culture industries actively manage their negative associations with mass culture as well as the public's fears of an advancing 'commodity frontier'. Hallmark frames its cultural production as creative while de-emphasizing its industrial nature, and, whenever possible, aligns itself with the legitimating cultural categories of art and the folk to counter the idea that greeting cards are false, manufactured sentiment. Hallmark also argues that the consumer is sovereign in order to contradict critics' claims that it imposes its mass-produced cards on the public. The way the greeting card industry seeks to manage cultural anxiety about industrialized culture is discussed, as well as the limits of their response.

This article assesses the impact of the threat of forced separations on the relationships between slaves in antebellum South Carolina. The majority of slaves had to live under the constant threat, and sometimes the reality, of being separated from their loved ones. It is suggested, however, that through cross-plantation family ties, slaves managed to resist many of the potential threats to family and to marriage viability. Cross-plantation family networks meant that local separations had a lesser impact on slave family and community ties than did long-distance sales. Local sales, gifts, and divisions of estates among heirs did mean, however, that family patterns often were multidimensional, with some family members belonging to the same owner and others belonging to more or less distant neighbors.

This study uses a novel experimental approach to isolate "expressive" or "noninstrumental" payoffs to voting along identity lines, separating them from "substantive" motivations. Applying social identity theory to the case of gender in U.S. elections, the study answers the question: Do some men and women receive a purely expressive payoff from preferring same‐gender candidates? A series of experiments test whether a purely expressive payoff from voting along gender lines is stronger among certain voters. Employing a self‐affirmation treatment and measures of group‐identity attachment, as well as a voting vignette, the evidence shows that Republican men receive a purely expressive payoff from voting for male over female candidates. That is, Republican men's preference for a male over a female candidate can be reduced by a self‐affirmation treatment that has subjects focus on their individuating characteristics, thereby temporarily "detaching" them from their group attachments. Women and Democratic men are not affected by the self‐affirmation treatment. This study deepens our understanding of voter gender bias in the United States, with a particular focus on the implications of ingroup bias among certain partisan voters for the supply of female candidates within party primary elections.