S09 E03 Chesser & Holly: A Collision of Love, Race, and Law in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas

In 1888, James Chesser and Georgianna Holly married in the growing city of Fort Smith, Arkansas. A few months later during James's arrest, courts argued that Georgianna was legally a man. Legal and social structures at the time struggled for language to define this mixed-race couple in a time before rampant anti-sodomy and anti-miscegenation laws. In this episode, Rachel Trusty (Bucknell University) lays out what is known about their lives before and after arrest, and contextualizes their situation in the broader local-national politics of a post-Civil War border town. Full transcript available at Post-production support by Genevieve Johnson (Newcastle University) and Ryan Charlton (Georgia State University).

You can listen to S09 E03 Chesser & Holly: A Collision of Love, Race, and Law in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

S09 E03 Chesser & Holly: A Collision of Love, Race, and Law in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas is an episode from C19: America in the 19th Century by C19 Podcast.

This episode is 00:37:11 long.

This episode was published on Sep 22, 2025.

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