In "Signposts," Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's seminal 1984 work, "Ambivalent Legacy," inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history.
Contributors to "Signposts" explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in "Signposts" show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South.
Contributors: Alfred L. Brophy, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely Jr., Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden.

Lisa Lindquist Dorr tells the story of the vast smuggling network that brought high-end distilled spirits and, eventually, other cargoes (including undocumented immigrants) from Great Britain and Europe through Cuba to the United States between 1920 and the end of Prohibition. Because of their proximity to liquor-exporting islands, the numerous beaches along the southern coast presented ideal landing points for smugglers and distribution points for their supply networks. From the warehouses of liquor wholesalers in Havana to the decks of rum runners to transportation networks heading northward, Dorr explores these operations, from the people who ran the trade to the determined efforts of the U.S. Coast Guard and other law enforcement agencies to stop liquor traffic on the high seas, in Cuba, and in southern communities. In the process, she shows the role smuggling played in creating a more transnational, enterprising, and modern South.

Another addition to the Southern Women series, Alabama Women celebrates women's histories in the Yellowhammer State by highlighting the lives and contributions of women and enriching our understanding of the past and present. Exploring such subjects as politics, arts, and civic organizations, this collection of eighteen biographical essays provides a window into the social, cultural, and geographic milieux of women's lives in Alabama. Featured individuals include Augusta Evans Wilson, Maria Fearing, Julia S. Tutwiler, Margaret Murray Washington, Pattie Ru ner Jacobs, Ida E. Brandon Mathis, Ruby Pickens Tartt, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Sara Martin May eld, Bess Bolden Walcott, Virginia Foster Durr, Rosa Parks, Lurleen Burns Wallace, Margaret Charles Smith, and Harper Lee.

Another addition to the Southern Women series, Alabama Women celebrates women's histories in the Yellowhammer State by highlighting the lives and contributions of women and enriching our understanding of the past and present. Exploring such subjects as politics, arts, and civic organizations, this collection of eighteen biographical essays provides a window into the social, cultural, and geographic milieux of women's lives in Alabama. Featured individuals include Augusta Evans Wilson, Maria Fearing, Julia S. Tutwiler, Margaret Murray Washington, Pattie Ru ner Jacobs, Ida E. Brandon Mathis, Ruby Pickens Tartt, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Sara Martin May eld, Bess Bolden Walcott, Virginia Foster Durr, Rosa Parks, Lurleen Burns Wallace, Margaret Charles Smith, and Harper Lee.

For decades, historians have primarily analyzed charges of black-on-white rape in the South through accounts of lynching or manifestly unfair trial proceedings, suggesting that white southerners invariably responded with extralegal violence and sham trials when white women accused black men of assault. Lisa Lindquist Dorr challenges this view with a careful study of legal records, newspapers, and clemency files from early-twentieth-century Virginia. White Virginians' inflammatory rhetoric, she argues, did not necessarily predict black men's ultimate punishment.

While trials were often grand public spectacles at which white men acted to protect white women and to police interracial relationships, Dorr points to cracks in white solidarity across class and gender lines. At the same time, trials and pardon proceedings presented African Americans with opportunities to challenge white racial power. Taken together, these cases uncover a world in which the mandates of segregation did not always hold sway, in which whites and blacks interacted in the most intimate of ways, and in which white women and white men saw their interests in conflict.

In Dorr's account, cases of black-on-white rape illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of segregated southern society: the tension between civilization and savagery, the desire for orderly and predictable racial boundaries despite conflicts among whites and relationships across racial boundaries, and the dignity of African Americans in a system dependent on their supposed inferiority. The rhetoric of protecting white women spoke of white supremacy and patriarchy, but its practice revealed the limits of both.