Abstract Studies of mixed-race couples have largely centered on higher courts, yet most marital disputes involving poor couples went to the magistrates’ courts or petty sessions. This article uses a database of 107 cases (fifty-two separations for persistent cruelty and fifty-five cases of assault summonses between couples) to assess the role of gender, class, and race in working-class marriages. The study reveals a curious pattern. For the most part, gender (mixed with class) remained the most important factor in the adjudication of domestic violence cases. Husbands had legal and economic advantages that privileged reconciliation over separations; magistrates knew wives could not survive on the small sums most men could afford. However, newspaper coverage showed strong racial biases, especially after the race riots of 1919. Stories implied that people of color were “savages” or that the cultural differences between husbands and wives were too great to overcome. The one place the law and newspapers worked together was when violence interacted with vice crimes, especially with stereotypes such as Chinese opium sellers or men of African descent involved in sex work. When the law and newspapers worked together, their prejudices could influence the husbands’ treatment. Ironically, this emphasis had the effect of normalizing domestic violence.

Abstract Created in 1972, the Chongololo magazine and wildlife clubs in Zambia broke with earlier examples of conservation advocacy and thought in the southern African nation. Under colonialism, racially exclusive, civil-society conservation activism focused on protecting charismatic megafauna in distant national parks. In national-era Zambia, the wildlife magazine and clubs, geared toward diverse communities of Zambian children, encouraged a simultaneously more localized and more expansive environmentalism. As a close reading of the magazines and associated archival material demonstrates, the act of writing to children, and the writing and thinking that children themselves did, encouraged new ecological thinking about a wider variety of spaces and possibilities for conservation work, particularly during the 1970s. Chongololo imagined people as ecological actors, and expanded the parameters of what counted as environmentalism and nature. This occurred in the context of the national state’s attention to conservation work, and also of that state’s ambivalence about youth activism. Thereafter, declining fortunes of the conservation sector and dependency on international support created a more uneven trajectory for the Chongololo movement. Nonetheless, by the 1990s, environmentalism in Zambia looked very different, in part as a result of the thinking and educating that Chongololo did.

Abstract In 1837, a 30-year-old enslaved African woman known as Teresa Lucumí faced charges of criminal infanticide following the gruesome death of her son. Local authorities in her small western Cuban town received news of the crime from Teresa’s enslaver, who recounted a harrowing story of an enslaved mother turned violent murderer. Extracting a confession, authorities took Teresa into custody. Subsequent court records suggest that this confession was likely fabricated. When an appeals judge asked Teresa to ratify her account, she declared that local authorities had silenced her. She then recounted a version of events that not only challenged the story her enslavers told, but also implicated them in chronic physical abuse, rape, attempted murder against her, and murder of her son, likely sired by her enslaver. With its two diametrically opposed explanations of the child’s death, Teresa’s case allows a rare exploration of the way enslavers constructed narratives of infanticide, how police and judges interacted with them, and why they apparently proved so compelling. Tracing their medical and legal logics, I question the extent to which the infanticide narrative that so captivated judges reflected the enslaved woman’s experience. I propose that the stories ratified by criminal infanticide cases like Teresa’s more accurately reflect enslavers’ strategies for navigating evolving medical, legal, and moral frameworks governing slavery after the legal abolition of the slave trade to Cuba. The label “infanticide” does more to obscure than to explain how this woman negotiated the complexities of motherhood in Cuba’s nineteenth-century slave society.