In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.

Albion W. Tourgee (1838-1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool's Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging Louisiana's law segregating railroad cars, Tourgee published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as nonfiction works of history, law, and politics. This volume is the first collection focused on Tourgee's literary work and intends to establish his reputation as one of the great writers of fiction about the Reconstruction era arguably the greatest for the wide historical and geographical sweep of his novels and his ability to work with multiple points of view. As a white novelist interested in the rights of African Americans, Tourgee was committed to developing not a single Black perspective but multiple Black perspectives, sometimes even in conflict. The challenge was to do justice to those perspectives in the larger context of the story he wanted to tell about a multiracial America. The seventeen essays in this volume are grouped around three large topics: race, citizenship, and nation. The volume also includes a Preface, Introduction, Afterword, Bibliography, and Chronology providing an overview of his career. This collection changes the way that we view Tourgee by highlighting his contributions as a writer and editor and as a supporter of African American writers. Exploring the full spectrum of his literary works and cultural engagements, Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgee reveals a new Tourgee for our moment of renewed interest in the literature and politics of Reconstruction.

Albion W. Tourgee (1838-1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool's Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging Louisiana's law segregating railroad cars, Tourgee published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as nonfiction works of history, law, and politics. This volume is the first collection focused on Tourgee's literary work and intends to establish his reputation as one of the great writers of fiction about the Reconstruction era arguably the greatest for the wide historical and geographical sweep of his novels and his ability to work with multiple points of view. As a white novelist interested in the rights of African Americans, Tourgee was committed to developing not a single Black perspective but multiple Black perspectives, sometimes even in conflict. The challenge was to do justice to those perspectives in the larger context of the story he wanted to tell about a multiracial America. The seventeen essays in this volume are grouped around three large topics: race, citizenship, and nation. The volume also includes a Preface, Introduction, Afterword, Bibliography, and Chronology providing an overview of his career. This collection changes the way that we view Tourgee by highlighting his contributions as a writer and editor and as a supporter of African American writers. Exploring the full spectrum of his literary works and cultural engagements, Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgee reveals a new Tourgee for our moment of renewed interest in the literature and politics of Reconstruction.

The color of blood is red, not black or white. Yet blood, along with fingerprints, skin, and color is commonly cited as objective evidence of racial identity. Drawing on this concept of "evidence", Sarah Chinn deftly interweaves analyses of the history of science, popular culture, forensic technology and literary texts to examine how racial identity has been constructed in the United States over the past century.

Chinn begins her provocative study with an analysis of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson to explore how new ways of reading bodies developed at the end of the nineteenth century. Using Twain's story of a light-skinned slave baby exchanged with his white master, Chinn analyses growth of the American scientific passion for turning people into numbers and bodily characteristics into racial "identities". Contrasting Nella Larsen's Passing, Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry, and the notorious Rhinelander miscegenation scandal of the 1920's, Chinn goes onto explore the meanings of skin color and racial identity during the Jazz Age.

Chinn further investigates the meaning of "blood" through the American Red Cross' racial segregation of blood donated by African Americans and Japanese Americans.

Finally, as technology (e.g. DNA testing) increasingly allows the body to be "read", Chinn argues that it is simply the latest enactment of a discourse that seeks to cement racial, gender, and class identities as empirical rather than constructed and capable of change. However, the announcement of genetic evidence that Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemmings' children offers an alternative vision: that DNA can show Americans that their bodies are evidence not ofexclusivity but of multiplicity.