Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States

Barbara Young Welke is Associate Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota. She is the recipient of several prizes including the Surrency Prize from The American Society for Legal History for her article 'When All the Women Were White and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Race, Law and the Road to Plessy' and the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize in the history of American law and society for her book, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920. Her earlier articles have appeared in Law and Social Inquiry and the Law and History Review.

'A book that 'every historian should read' is a rare phenomenon, but in my estimation this is one of them. Barbara Young Welke's remarkable achievement is to say something original and unexpected about race and gender. By setting both in relation to disability, she shows how these intertwined categories of identity have profoundly shaped the modern understanding of citizenship and legal personhood. That she does so in lucid and often powerful prose is icing on the cake.' Douglas Baynton, University of Iowa

• Introduction; 1. Constructing a universal legal person: able white manhood; 2. Subjects of law: disabled persons, racialized others, and women; 3. Borders: resistance, defense, structure, and ideology; Conclusion: abled, racialized, and gendered power in the making of the twentieth-century American state; Coda.