List of IllustrationsPreface: Flowers for the BrideAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Perfect Marriage?Part 1. Secrets of New Nations1. Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot: Against History?2. Ernest Gribble and JeanniePart 2. Marriage and Modernity among the Cherokees3. Socrates, Cherokee Sovereignty, and the Regulation of White Men4. John Ross and Mary Bryan StaplerPart 3. Queensland’s Marital Middle Ground5. Husbands under Surveillance6. Consent and Aboriginal WivesPart 4. Embodying New Worlds7. Polygamy’s New Worlds8. Entwined Sovereignties and the Great UnweddingEpilogue: Transnational FamiliesNotesBibliographyIndex
Ann McGrath is a professor of history and the
director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at
Australian National University. She is the author and editor of
numerous books, including How to Write History That People
Want to Read; Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration;
and Contested Ground: A History of Australian Aborigines under
the British Crown. McGrath won the 2016 John Douglas Kerr Medal of
Distinction from the Royal Historical Society of Queensland for
research and writing Australian history.
“The real drama in Illicit Love lies with the lovers, in
relationships, not regulations. . . . McGrath’s ‘love’—both for and
between her characters—gives a depth to this fresh and sometimes
dazzling book that must resonate with us all.”—Lisa Ford, American
Historical Review
"McGrath simultaneously provides a broad examination of
intermarriage law on two continents and breathes life into the
intimate relationships forged between men and women of many races
and communities. . . . Illicit Love is a powerful testament to the
power of personal stories to complicate our understanding of larger
historical processes."—James Joseph Buss, Western Historical
Quarterly
“This is a beautiful book, a tale of family, racial mixture, and
identity in two settler colonial societies. . . . McGrath’s stories
of love and marriage across the color line, told in luminous prose,
will delight. . . . Illicit Love ought to be a
prizewinner.”—Paul Spickard, author of Race in Mind
“Read this book to explore both the direct and the twisted paths
linking marriage and sovereignty, in richly detailed case studies
spanning two disparate continents on both of which racial hierarchy
characterized settler colonialism.”—Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan
Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University
“Superbly researched and imaginatively presented, McGrath’s
reconstruction of stories of marriages and sexual intimacies across
the lines of race and domination between settler-colonial and
indigenous peoples in the U.S. and Australia, is a remarkable
instance of interleaving of the two ‘national’ histories. . . .
This doubly trans-national history has an unmistakable element of
freshness about it that readers will no doubt welcome.”—Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of
History at the University of Chicago and the author of The Calling
of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth
“Ann McGrath’s brilliant history of intermarriage in the new
nations of America and Australia reads like a novel. She uncovers
hidden stories of forbidden love between settlers and Indigenous
men and women that both shaped and confounded the colonial project.
Writing in a style as tender as the very intimacies she describes,
McGrath has created a model of how to wed private with political
histories.”—Margaret Jacobs, author of White Mother to a Dark Race
and A Generation Removed
“Ann McGrath reminds us that ‘weddings’ have long mixed politics
and intimate passions in the interests of family, tribe, and
nation. Heart-wrenching stories and subtle distinctions are laid
bare in fine prose, and we find the kinship between Australia and
the United States even closer than we might have thought.”—James F.
Brooks, author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and
Community in the Southwest Borderlands
“This is a convincing and lively analysis of how marriage helped
create the modern nation. Using case studies from the Cherokee
Nation and northern Australia, McGrath deftly makes the case for
the key role played by marriage in settler colony histories.
McGrath’s moving account is transnational history at its
best.”—Philippa Levine, author of The British Empire, Sunrise to
Sunset and Gender and Empire
“Investigating marriages between the colonized and their
colonizers, Illicit Love is an astonishing transnational history of
transgression, revealing intertwined lives and irreconcilable
ideas, courage and conflict, denial and defiance, secrets and
surveillance, love and violence. . . . McGrath asks novel
questions, tells untold stories, and writes a new history of
empire. This innovative and inventive work will itself open up new
worlds for its readers.”—Martha Hodes, author of White Women, Black
Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South
“Illicit Love is a stunning piece of comparative history. With the
storytelling abilities of a novelist, and the detective skills of
the accomplished historian that she is, Ann McGrath reveals how
interracial relationships stirred a myriad of emotions among
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans and Australians,
and raised what became enduring questions about the meaning of
Cherokee and Aboriginal identities.”—Gregory Smithers, author of
Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia,
1780s–1890s
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