The Heart in the Glass Jar begins with one man's literal heart (that of a prominent statesman in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico) but is truly about the hearts, bodies, legal entanglements, and letters--as both symbols and material objects--of northern Mexicans from the 1860s through the 1930s.
William E. French's innovative study of courtship practice and family formation examines love letters of everyday folk within the framework of literacy...