Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation

Changing Places is a transnational history of the birth, life, and death of a modern borderland and of frontier peoples' changing relationships to nations, states, and territorial belonging. The cross-border region between Germany and Habsburg Austria---and after 1918 between Germany and Czechoslovakia---became an international showcase for modern state building, nationalist agitation, and local pragmatism after World War I, in the 1930s, and again after 1945.

Caitlin Murdock uses wide-ranging archival and published sources from Germany and the Czech Republic to tell a truly transnational story of how state, regional, and local historical actors created, and eventually destroyed, a cross-border region. Changing Places demonstrates the persistence of national fluidity, ambiguity, and ambivalence in Germany long after unification and even under fascism. It shows how the 1938 Nazi annexation of the Czechoslovak "Sudetenland" became imaginable to local actors and political leaders alike. At the same time, it illustrates that the Czech-German nationalist conflict and Hitler's Anschluss are only a small part of the larger, more complex borderland story that continues to shape local identities and international politics today.

Established by Congress in early 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands---more commonly known as "the Freedmen's Bureau"---assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the post-Civil War South. Although it was called the Freedmen's Bureau, the agency profoundly affected African American women. Until now remarkably little has been written about the relationship between black women and this federal govenment agency.

As Mary Farmer-Kaiser clearly demonstrates in this revealing work, by failing to recognize freedwomen as active agents of change and overlooking the gendered assumptions at work in Bureau efforts, scholars have ultimately failed to understand fully the Bureau's relationships with freedwomen, freedmen, and black communities in this pivotal era of American history.

"A lively and compelling book on the complex relationship between the Freedmen's Bureau and freedwomen."---Carol Faulkner, Syracuse University

"Mary Farmer-Kaiser's much-anticipated and excellent new book, Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau, offers the first systematic examination of what she calls `the gendered nature of bureau work.' In masterful fashion, she explores the work of the Freedmen's Bureau as an institution while simultaneously placing the former slaves, women in particular, at the center of her analysis. In doing so, she convincingly demonstrates, in refreshingly clear and jargon-free prose, that issues of gender are essential to any understanding of the bureau and of emancipation."---John C. Rodrigue, Stonehill College, author of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867

Caitlin E. Murdock is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach.
Mary Farmer-Kaiser is Associate Professor of History as well as James D. Wilson/Borsf Memorial Professor in Southern Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.