One of the books I spent my food-money on in New Orleans ...

One of the books I spent my food-money on in New Orleans recently - and which even more recently showed up on my doorstep - was Judith K. Schafer's "Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans" (that's the sub-title - I'm not going to leap up and double-check the title but it's Something Something And Abandonned Women). Fascinating, and FILLED with background detail for the January books: not just bordellos, but laws and court decisions of the 1850s (which is slightly after my time-period, but not much) concerning crimes related to sex and sexuality - how they were viewed (by the newspapers) and how they were punished. (A woman could be arrested and sent to the parish work-house for 60 days for wearing men's clothes - AND would be mocked at in the newspapers, despite the fact that many women did this simply because men's jobs paid a living wage, and women's didn't.)

This is the type of history I love. Not theories of history - which I have several times been asked about on teaching job interviews - but demographics and studies of sources.

Evidently, by the way, sex between whites and blacks was NOT limited to white men keeping free colored mistresses or molesting the slave women. Despite what various historians have indicated (for one reason or another) the newspapers and court records indicate that there was a great deal of black-man/white-woman goings on going on... Either way was illegal, but generally only the white women got busted for it, and they were punished pretty severely. Evidently didn't stop 'em.