Sex and the Civil War (eBook)

Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality

Judith Giesberg (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
152 Seiten
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
978-1-4696-3128-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Civil War soldiers enjoyed unprecedented access to obscene materials of all sorts, including mass-produced erotic fiction, cartes de visite, playing cards, and stereographs. A perfect storm of antebellum legal, technological, and commercial developments, coupled with the concentration of men fed into armies, created a demand for, and a deluge of, pornography in the military camps. Illicit materials entered in haversacks, through the mail, or from sutlers; soldiers found pornography discarded on the ground, and civilians discovered it in abandoned camps. Though few examples survived the war, these materials raised sharp concerns among reformers and lawmakers, who launched campaigns to combat it. By the war's end, a victorious, resurgent American nation-state sought to assert its moral authority by redefining human relations of the most intimate sort, including the regulation of sex and reproductionmost evident in the Comstock laws, a federal law and a series of state measures outlawing pornography, contraception, and abortion. With this book, Judith Giesberg has written the first serious study of the erotica and pornography that nineteenth-century American soldiers read and shared and links them to the postwar reaction to pornography and to debates about the future of sex and marriage.

Autor

Judith Giesberg is professor of history at Villanova University.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.2.2017
• Reihe/Serie: The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era
• Reihe/Serie: The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era
• Zusatzinfo: 26 halftones, notes, bibl., index
• Verlagsort: Chapel Hill
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 140 x 140 mm
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► 20. Jahrhundert bis 1945
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: anthony comstock • anti-abortion and birth control • anti-pornography • anti-slavery • Censorship • Charles Dickens • Children and youth • Civil War photography • erotic carte de visite • gender and manhood in the U.S. Civil War • gender and women in the U.S. Civil War • pornography in the U.S. Civil War • sex and sexuality • sexual lives of soldiers • stanhopes • stereographs • United States Christian Commission • U.S. Courts Martial • Young Men’s Christian Association • Young Men’s Christian Association
• ISBN-10: 1-4696-3128-8 / 1469631288
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4696-3128-8 / 9781469631288