| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joshua D. Rothman. Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 341. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

Joshua D. Rothman's provocative analysis of interracial sex and families in Virginia adds many layers of nuance and detail to the study of race and sex in the South. In six thematic chapters, Rothman demonstrates that in pre-Civil War Virginia, as in other places and earlier periods, whites and blacks had sex with each other far more often, in more varied contexts, and with more variable outcomes than a strict reading of southern whites' supposed gender, race, or sexual beliefs would suggest was possible. Rothman also argues that sexual encounters across the color line might contravene conventional (elite) white morality—and the law—at one level and yet still also have their own "ethical norms" (p. 50). Respecting or violating those norms could make the difference between toleration and harassment, "common knowledge" and "public knowledge," prosecution and conviction, a sentence and its execution, at least until the 1850s, when white Virginia began to draw stricter lines and to police them more vigorously (p. 16).

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