Under Democratic control, with sugar and cotton no longer kings and limited public investment, a new generation of economically diminished but politically powerful planters and smallholders implemented Jim Crow in this majority Black region. Angola Penitentiary and convict leasing schemes, segregated public accommodations, minstrel shows, and lynchings recreated white supremacy. Sexual violence inflicted lasting harm and, when it resulted in childbirth, literally remade Black families. Virgil Harrell’s second wife, my great- great-grandmother Martha, experienced this kind of violation, one that led to the birth of my great-grandmother Ruth. African Americans had good reason to leave, but many chose to stay. They created families and communities that, while not always harmonious, offered sustenance and healing. People like Martha and Virge Harrell sought sanctuary in their families, communities, and institutions. Some accumulated property and joined regional and national networks. They reclaimed their vulnerable bodies in ecstatic worship in their own churches, in athletic competitions at the parish fair, and in the raunchy, jook-joint blues.

In July 1866 Rachel Robins and Virgil Harrell married. After centuries of commoditized kinship, my grandmother’s grandfather celebrated citizenship by claiming kin. But emancipated people had a freedom vision that exceeded liberal ideology. As in other post-emancipation societies, many wanted land to become smallholders. They elected John Gair and other Black politicians. At great personal cost, they organized, voted, and armed to defend themselves against vigilante forces. But this couple and others learned the limits of liberal inclusion. Emancipation and enfranchisement set a new stage for an old conflict between people who believed in the power of democracy and those committed to white power over all else.

The chapter creates the context for the rest of the study by outlining the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts’ operations in Europe from August 1944 to May 1945. It also discusses the troops’ undisciplined and criminal conduct, including acts of robberies, assaults, murders, excessive alcohol consumption, and desertion and straggling. It pays particular attention to the issue of rape. The Red Army personnel committed hundreds of thousands of rapes in Romania during the exploitation phase of the Iassi–Kishinev Offensive. The same soldiers behaved with more restraint in “neutral” Bulgaria and “allied” Yugoslavia. In Hungary, the extremely brutal and protracted combat led to an escalation in violence against civilians, which reached its zenith in Austria. The chapter estimates that there were around 150,000 deserters and stragglers, who greatly contributed to the violence against civilians.

The chapter argues that the Red Army’s troops prized sexual activity as one of the defining characteristics of strong manhood. They tended to consider all women – Soviet civilians, their female comrades, and European women – as potential sexual partners. Although many Soviet soldiers and officers viewed all women in this way, how much violence they were willing to employ to obtain sex, and what they could get away with, varied considerably between different groups of women. The most vulnerable to attacks were women from “enemy” countries, which explains the mass nature of sexual violence in Romania, Hungary, and Austria. The chapter also discusses the soldiers’ absurd and untrue stories of foreign women as depraved seductresses, which had the goal of justifying the violence. It also discusses sexual relations between Soviet soldiers and European civilians that were transactional and free of outright violence.

Chapter 5 moves to Veracruz and the inaugural moments of General Winfield Scott’s 1847 Mexico City campaign. It uses neglected court-martial records to show how the army’s newly formed rescuer-identity shaped General Winfield Scott’s new military commissions. The commissions radically expanded the scope of military justice to encompass not only soldiers but all persons in occupied territory, and this instrument of martial power endures today. Yet, the first capital case tried by military commission – in which the army hanged Isaac Kirk, a Black man from Tennessee, for allegedly raping Maria Antonia Gallegas, a Mexican woman – has remained until now completely unstudied. A close reading of the case file, including the previously uncited testimonies of Gallegas and several enlisted men, lays bare the race and gender dynamics at the heart of army culture and produces new insights into how Scott managed to put his military commission system into effect without foundation in law.

The Revolutionary War was simultaneously a time of increased emphasis on marriage and family, as well as individual rejection of the marital monopoly on sex. Some individuals broke common sexual mores by engaging in fornication or extramarital affairs. Others sought more freedom, such as when the enslaved ran away from their masters and reconfigured their families on their own terms, or when abused wives fought for more safety. However, race, gender, and wealth all affected the extent to which a person’s sexuality was judged and criminalized. The imperial crisis and Revolutionary War offered opportunities to those who wished to break sexual taboos and a continued sense of the importance of loyalty to marriage and family ideals to others. By the end of the war, the elaboration of new divorce laws in some states and the reduction in criminal trials for fornication created more options for sexual freedoms.

Rooted in the lives of eleven enslaved individuals – African, African American, and Native American – this essay demonstrates that slavery in the eighteenth-century Americas was characterized by a wide range of laws, economies, cultures, and demographies. Rather than centering the meta-structures of Atlantic slavery, which are well known and often over-emphasized, the chapter focuses on the varied human experiences within colonial systems that sought to dehumanize and control enslaved people. The enslaved lived meaningful lives that were constrained, but never defined, by their legal and social status as slaves. Their biographies offer valuable insights into slavery in the mid eighteenth century.

This chapter critically engages Assata: An Autobiography by former Black Liberation Army operative and political exile Assata Shakur. The argument examines how Shakur develops psychologically and politically as both a Black revolutionary and a Black revolutionary woman. The chapter offers close readings of the political messages shared throughout Assata then contextualizes Shakur’s frameworks by turning to her experiences as a runaway teen in the Village in New York City. Her story – from childhood until her time being held as a political prisoner – compels attention to how blackness and gender collide and at times collapse. This chapter illustrates how her political communiqué “To My People,” broadcast by Shakur while incarcerated, was informed by the lessons on Black gender and sexual vulnerability she learned from Miss Shirley, a transgender woman who was her surrogate caregiver during her time living in the Village.

Chapter VI explores the means through which imperial impositions and military occupation deliberately narrate, interact with, and affect internal dynamics of patriarchy in colonised Palestine – relating this to both articulations and expressions of violence against women within this context. Moving beyond the “essentialising cultural logics” that render patriarchal violence as a ‘static’ and ‘fixed’ component of ‘Palestinian culture’, this chapter thus joins with the pursuit of many Palestinian feminists to examine the complex “interplay between a colonial politics of exclusion and a localised culture of control” as it is narrated and deployed in relation to violence against Palestinian women (Shalhoub-Kervorkian and Daher-Nashif 2013, 298). Yet, I caution against centralising Israel’s military occupation as causal or ‘explanatory’ of internal dynamics of violence, arguing that making this link uncritically risks positioning Palestinian women’s bodies as discursive and material sites upon which an internal patriarchal order ‘in crisis’ can be normatively reclaimed.

Chapters V explores the sexual politics of Israel’s colonial regime, serving to undo the all-too-common misconception that sexual violence is “extremely limited” in this context. Emphasising the obfuscation of dynamics of race and coloniality, I start with exploration of hegemonic analyses of conflict-related sexual violence, and the related depiction of Israeli militarism as devoid of sexual violence. I then analyse the eroticisation of the Israeli military and colonial ‘conquest’, and the fetishization of the bodies that undertake it – entangling colonial domination with notions and physiological sensations of erotic pleasure. Finally, I discuss the policing of militarised hierarchies through the logic of sexual violence, trickling from those ‘on top’ to inferior soldiers – by age, gender, and class – to the occupied Palestinian body. I thus argue that sexualised violence pervades the entire structure of Israeli settler colonialism, fusing military activity and colonisation with hetero-masculinised notions of domination, virility, pleasure, and control.

This final chapter investigates what Pepys’s famously frank and comprehensive diary does not say – and how readers have dealt, or failed to deal, with those omissions. The focus is on a selection of the people mentioned in Pepys’s papers whose lives are barely mentioned in official documents or who went otherwise unrecorded: his wife Elizabeth, women and girls in whom he had a sexual interest, and certain of the Black people who worked for him or lived near him. Pepys’s diary and his other surviving records contain valuable information on their lives – information which shows Pepys to have been a sexual predator and an enslaver. For a range of reasons, these are aspects of his life missing from his popular reputation. Getting the most from the diary, and using it to explore the lives of others, requires understanding and countering influential traditions about Pepys and how his diary should be read.