In recent years, sociologists have noted how the aggressive policing of small debts such as unpaid parking tickets contributes to the disproportionate incarceration of poor people and people of color. Justin T. Clark demonstrates how, centuries ago, debt played a similarly underappreciated role in the development of North American carceral punishment. Surprisingly, most early eighteenth-century prisoners in Boston were debtors, not criminals. After a series of evangelical religious awakenings, New England authorities began to imagine that imprisonment could serve a punitive (and not simply a procedural) function for criminals as well. This history may help us better understand the conditions leading to what legal historians have called the present “re-establishment” of debtor’s prisons.
Emancipated mothers whose children had been apprenticed against their wishes challenged those apprenticeships in the courts and enlisted the assistance of the Freedmen’s Bureau through the late 1860s. While the immediate goal was child recovery, freedwomen’s protests of apprenticeship marked a pursuit of long-denied reproductive justice rather than just an effort to contend with an individual act of kidnapping. By placing Black mothers at the center of postwar custody battles, Jessica Wicks-Allen illuminates how gender shaped the fight for family integrity in slavery’s aftermath and underscores the political and emotional stakes of reunion.
Nicole Martin encourages historians to view Reconstruction from an unexpected perspective: western boardinghouses of Nevada’s Comstock Lode. While western mining centers lay on the fringes of the consolidating nation, they provide a powerful lens for understanding how the idealized free-labor home at the heart of Reconstruction policy played out in rapidly industrializing economies struggling to reconcile older and newer values. By drawing on the private and public writings of people who lived in and ran Comstock boardinghouses, she insists that we turn our view of Reconstruction inward into the intimate lives of ordinary Americans to better understand the on-the-ground compromises that contributed to the success of American empire.
Crack cocaine cast a long shadow over the 1980s. While much is known about the carceral efforts to curb the drug’s influence, far less is understood about the urban political economy driving its spread. Pedro A. Regalado examines the rise of drug capitalism in New York City, revealing how long-simmering tensions in the city’s rental housing market created an opening for an illegal enterprise that extracted profit from buildings that landlords had struggled to exploit. Tenants fought back, defending the habitation value of housing and forging new alliances with police, housing courts, and elected leaders—a pattern that took hold nationwide.
