Brandi Clay Brimmer. Claiming Union Widowhood

Historians of nineteenth-century African American and Civil War–era history have long valued military pension files for the unparalleled insight they provide into the private lives of Black soldiers and their families. Filled with intimate, firsthand detail about marriages, divorces, births, deaths, and illnesses, the pension files remain one of the most important sources of social history about the generation who fought for and experienced emancipation in the 1860s. But that intimacy valued by historians, Brandi C. Brimmer argues in this eye-opening and deeply researched book, Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South, was the product of an extraordinarily intrusive process endured by Black women who sought pensions as widows of Black soldiers. They did not come forward and expose their private lives freely—they were compelled to do so in order to obtain a pension and make ends meet financially. A rich archive of their lives resulted—a treasure trove, as it’s been called—but as with all archives there is another story of how it got there and how its form and content were shaped by the power dynamics present at its creation. In telling that story, Brimmer thus brings welcome and necessary attention to how this archive of pension files came into existence.

Archaeology · Emancipation · Pension · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Power (physics) · Race (biology) · Sociology · Treasure · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies