Peter Wallenstein is an award-winning professor of history at Virginia Tech. One of his many books is Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History (2002). One reviewer, Thomas J. Davis, wrote in Library Journal that it offered a “compelling analysis” and “superb legal history” that he saw as “filling a remarkable void in the literature.” Laws governing interracial marriage, while differing widely from state to state and from time to time, threatened many couples’ freedom across America. A later book, Race, Sex, and the Freedom to Marry: Loving v. Virginia (2014), details the nine-year struggle by one couple who just wanted to be left alone as “Mr. and Mrs. Loving,” but—to remain married, out of prison, and living in their home community—ended up bringing down the entire system of laws like Virginia’s.
