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From the Publisher
"Compelling."-African American Review
"Smith-Pryor's narrative of the trial and precipitating events is compelling. . . She delineates the complex past of the Jones family . . . with care and skill."
-African American Review
"Smith-Pryor uses the Rhinelander trial to weave a narrative of classification, confusion, and cultural dislocation in the Jazz Age. . . . Reveals much about how Americans in the Northeast lived in and across the color line and how, in the north as much as the south, white supremacy shaped property, place, and possibility."
-Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"An enjoyable book that clarifies many of the complicated social and legal issues surrounding the dissolution of the Rhinelander marriage."
-The Journal of American History
"Smith-Pryor tells the trial's story in play-by-play fashion, alternating those chapters with analytical interludes that describe the complexities of race in the 1920s US. . . . Recommended."
-Choice
"Offers a fascinating thesis of why so many white Americans in the 1920s had become anxious about the concept of passing."
-Flavour Magazine
Overview
In 1925 Leonard Rhinelander, the youngest son of a wealthy New York society family, sued to end his marriage to Alice Jones, a former domestic servant and the daughter of a "colored" cabman. After being married only one month, Rhinelander pressed for the dissolution of his marriage on the grounds that his wife had lied to him about her racial background. The subsequent marital annulment trial became a massive public spectacle, not only in New York but across the nation-despite the fact that the state had never ...