The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South

Focusing on matters of race and sex and the intersection of the two, this collection of nearly 20 essays covers the American South for a period of about 200 years ending in 1808. The focus is scholarly, but the book is accessible to history buffs and general readers alike. (The title comes from a term used to describe land in dispute in the colonial South.) In one essay, "The Facts Speak Loudly Enough," Peter H. Woods tells the shocking story of the massacre of several dozen blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, on the eve of the American Revolution. Another, Paul Finkelman's "Crimes of Love, Misdemeanors of Passion: The Regulation of Race and Sex in the Colonial South," explores the ways in which authorities tried to proscribe miscegenation in Virginia from the 1600s on, and notes one practical reason that there has always been race mixing in America: in the 1630s, the ratio of male immigrants to female in Virginia was 6-1.