| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History. By Peter Wallenstein. (New York: Palgrave, 2002. xii, 305 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-312-29474-3.)

Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America. By Renee C. Romano. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. xvi, 368 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-01033-7.)

Taken together, Peter Wallenstein's Tell the Court I Love My Wife and Renee C. Romano's Race Mixing provide a comprehensive account of intermarriage from the 1600s through contemporary times. Wallenstein chronicles the regulation of race and marriage from colonial times until 1967, when the United States Supreme Court declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. Romano focuses on black-white unions from the post–World War II era until the present.

The love of law appears to be Wallenstein's primary passion in his meticulously researched and painstakingly detailed narrative about the legislation and lawsuits that shaped intermarriage. In this law-centered story, the lived experiences of individuals figure at most peripherally as facts to "tell the court" or perhaps legislators. Wallenstein traces the roots of regulation of interracial marriage to colonial America, and he shows how this system adapted to meet the challenges of policing racial boundaries in an increasingly complicated system of white and nonwhite, slave and free. Mixed-race offspring blurred these boundaries by laying claim to freedom, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, based on alleged white or Native American ancestry.

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