Love and Race Caught in the Public Eye

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION | In 1925, an annulment trial involving the son of a privileged, aristocratic New York family and a working-class woman of mixed-race ancestry gripped the nation. Whether she had misrepresented her race was the crux of the trial; however, the larger, more complex question of how racial identity is constructed became the focus of the American public's eye. Here, historian Earl Lewis, dean of the graduate school at the University of Michigan, and Heidi Ardizzone, visiting assistant professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, discuss the discoveries that led to the writing of Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White.

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