Family and Justice in the Archives : Historical Perspectives on Intimacy and the Law / Peter Gossage and Lisa Moore.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gossage, Peter, 1956- author.

Moore, Lisa, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social history.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (516 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Montreal, Quebec : Concordia University Press, [2024]

Summary:

Legal archives offer extraordinary opportunities for understanding intimacies across time and space. Family and Justice in the Archives presents a series of fascinating historical essays that unpack stories of familial, domestic, and sexual intimacy from the records left behind by legal processes, providing rich new insights about family, gender, race, sex, culture, identity, and daily life. Contributors examine the written traces left by public proceedings that occurred in legally sanctioned spaces of social regulation, from notaries' offices to criminal and civil courtrooms to legislatures. Focusing on the past two centuries and spanning five continents, the essays explore a wide range of topics including marriage, citizenship, inheritance, indentured servitude, infanticide, juvenile justice, parental abuse, bigamy, and sex work. Mindful of the ethical questions that arise when scrutinizing the details of people's most vulnerable moments, these authors also demonstrate how individuals navigated and sometimes challenged legal prescriptions and processes to address systemic imbalances of power. Family and Justice in the Archives reveals the wealth of detail that emerges from a close reading of documents generated by legal processes in the past, offering valuable new perspectives on the complex personal lives of so-called ordinary people in former times.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Table of Contents

Figures and Tables

Contributors

Foreword

Introduction: Family and Justice in the Archives: Historical Perspectives on Intimacy and the Law

Part 1 Colonial Encounters

Chapter 1 Land Ownership and Inheritance among the Abenaki of Odanak

Chapter 2 Inheritance and the Indian Act

Chapter 3 Strangers before the Law

Chapter 4 The Materiality and Visuality of Intimacy in a South African Colonial Archive

Part 2 Intergenerational Justice

Chapter 5 Administering Minor Children’s Inheritance

Chapter 6 Wayward Daughters and Unnatural Fathers

Chapter 7 Unfit and Unworthy

Part 3 Intimacies in the Courtroom

Chapter 8 Intimacies in the Neighbourhood

Chapter 9 Improper Intimacies, Impossible Promises, and the Prerogatives of Patriarchy

Chapter 10 Civil Law, Mental Capacity, and Masculinity in Transnational Context

Part 4 Marriage Regulation

Chapter 11 Bigamy Prosecutions in Victoria, Australia

Chapter 12 “Quite English, Except by Marriage”

Chapter 13 The “Moscow Widowers”

Part 5 Everyday Violence

Chapter 14 Suffering for Compassion

Chapter 15 Despicable Fathers

Chapter 16 Violence against Women, the Law, and Public Opinion in Guatemala

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781988111445

1988111447

OCLC:

1452413484