What Comes Naturally -- weekend bonus

OK, it's a history book, but it's real close to genealogy: Oxford University Press has just published University of Oregon historian Peggy Pascoe's What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America.

WorldCat shows it in very few libraries as yet, and Santa Claus just left town, so I haven't seen a copy, but it sounds good. One blurb says that she "argues that property and power rather than the desire for racial purity propelled the creation of the body of legislation that stood at the center of racial discrimination against people of color."

In the same category of awaiting (I'm not as sure that I'll read this one, though) is Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, by David S. Brown (Elizabethtown College), due out in July from the University of Chicago Press. Hey, I just like the idea of thinking -- even for a moment -- of Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, William Appleman Williams, Christopher Lasch, William Cronon, and Thomas Frank -- primarily as Midwesterners.