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Professor Yarbrough is the author of several articles
as well as a new book, Race and the Cherokee Nation:
Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century. The book
uses innovative data to pose big questions, specifically
the complex relationship between the construction of
sexual boundaries and the formation of tribal and racial
identities. The study analyzes how Cherokee lawmakers
used marriage laws to construct conceptions of race
and gender in the face of Jackson's Indian policies
and how the Civil War and Reconstruction reconfigured
the thinking of Cherokee legislators. Informed by a
sophisticated analysis of marriage records, district
clerk records, legal statutes, contemporary newspapers,
and personal papers, the book guides the readers into
the complex world of Cherokee communities, how marriage
laws functioned in the life of everyday people in the
Cherokee Nation, and how Cherokee and African-American
conceptions of sexuality and interracial sex differed.
Professor Yarbrough is also co-editing a collection
of essays, tentatively titled Gender and Sexuality
in the Indigenous Americas, 1400-1850, and has
embarked on a new study of marriage, sex, race, and
identity, this time among the Choctaws with the focus
primarily on one family, specifically that of William
Beams, a white man who married a Choctaw woman and had
several children with both her and, later, with a slave
woman of African descent. Her other new project is an
examination of the impact of the American Civil War
on the Choctaw Nation. Professor Yarbrough teaches courses
on nineteenth-century American history, including a
new offering titled the " Nineteenth-Century Black
Experience." Professor Yarbrough received her Ph.D.
from Emory University.
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