Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state's long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary. Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage across color lines. How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the powerful story this book tells. Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions. Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Laura J. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities. Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives' sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America.

What was the Scottish Enlightenment? Long since ignored or sidelined, it is now a controversial topic - damned by some as a conservative movement objectively allied to the enemies of enlightenment, placed centre stage by others as the archetype of what is meant by 'Enlightenment'. In this book leading experts reassess the issue by exploring both the eighteenth-century intellectual developments taking place within Scotland and the Scottish contribution to the Enlightenment as a whole. The Scottish experience during this period forms the underlying theme of early chapters, with contributors examining the central philosophy of the 'science of man', the reality of 'applied enlightenment' in Scotland, and the Presbyterian hostility to the spread of 'heretical' ideas. Moving beyond Scotland's borders, contributors in later chapters examine the wider recognition of Scotland's intellectual activity, both within Europe and across the Atlantic. Through a series of case studies authors assess the engagement of European intellectuals with Scottish thinkers, looking at the French interpretation of Adam Smith's notion of sympathy, divergent approaches to the writing of history in Scotland and Germany, and the variety of Neapolitan responses to Scottish thought; the final chapter analyses the links between the 'moderate Enlightenment' in Scotland and America. Through these innovative studies this book provides a rich and nuanced understanding of Enlightenment thought in Scotland and its impact in Europe and North America, highlighting the importance of placing the national context in a transnational perspective.

From its earliest days, America served as an arena for the revolutions in alternative spirituality that eventually swept the globe. Esoteric philosophies and personas--from Freemasonry to Spiritualism, from Madame H. P. Blavatsky to Edgar Cayce--dramatically altered the nation's culture, politics, and religion. Yet the mystical roots of our identity are often ignored or overlooked. Opening a new window on the past, Occult America""presents a dramatic, pioneering study of the esoteric undercurrents of our history and their profound impact across modern life.