Book Description
A collection of 180 county court petitions designed to offer as broad a selection as possible and include the voices of all participants: black and white, slave and free, slaveholder and non-slaveholder, male and female.
Author : Loren Schweninger
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 13,46 MB
Release : 2001
Category : African Americans
ISBN : 9780252026324
A collection of 180 county court petitions designed to offer as broad a selection as possible and include the voices of all participants: black and white, slave and free, slaveholder and non-slaveholder, male and female.
Author : Loren Schweninger
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 36,2 MB
Release : 2024-02-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0252056299
An incomparably rich source of period information, the second volume of The Southern Debate over Slavery offers a representative and extraordinary sampling of the thousands of petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to county courts between the American Revolution and Civil War. These petitions, filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaves and free blacks, women and men, abolitionists and staunch defenders of slavery, constitute a uniquely important primary source. The collection records with great immediacy and minute detail the dynamics and legal restrictions that shaped southern society.
Author : Harvard University Press
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 27,5 MB
Release : 2020-08-06
Category : History
ISBN : 0674251660
Racism in America has been the subject of serious scholarship for decades. At Harvard University Press, we’ve had the honor of publishing some of the most influential books on the subject. The excerpts in this volume—culled from works of history, law, sociology, medicine, economics, critical theory, philosophy, art, and literature—are an invitation to understand anti-Black racism through the eyes of our most incisive commentators. Readers will find such classic selections as Toni Morrison’s description of the Africanist presence in the White American literary imagination, Walter Johnson’s depiction of the nation’s largest slave market, and Stuart Hall’s theorization of the relationship between race and nationhood. More recent voices include Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the pernicious myth of Black criminality, Elizabeth Hinton on the link between mass incarceration and 1960s social welfare programs, Anthony Abraham Jack on how elite institutions continue to fail first-generation college students, Mehrsa Baradaran on the racial wealth gap, Nicole Fleetwood on carceral art, and Joshua Bennett on the anti-Black bias implicit in how we talk about animals and the environment. Because the experiences of non-White people are integral to the history of racism and often bound up in the story of Black Americans, we have included writers who focus on the struggles of Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians as well. Racism in America is for all curious readers, teachers, and students who wish to discover for themselves the complex and rewarding intellectual work that has sustained our national conversation on race and will continue to guide us in future years.
Author : William A. Link
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 44,89 MB
Release : 2018-02-19
Category : History
ISBN : 0813063590
“This is a remarkable collection of essays. Citizenship clearly forms the backbone for these investigations but the range of the contributors’ backgrounds (in terms of disciplinary training) and the approaches they take to the question makes this collection both broad and deep. As it turns out, there is no other way to tackle a concept as central but also as slippery as citizenship. A shorter or more focused collection would miss the nuances and insights that this one offers.”—Aaron Sheehan-Dean, author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia “President Obama’s citizenship continues to be questioned by the ‘birthers,’ the Cherokee Nation has revoked tribal rights from descendants of Cherokee slaves, and Parliament in the U.K. is debating ‘citizenship education.’ It is in both this broader context and in the narrower academic one that Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South stands as a smart, exciting, and most welcome contribution to southern history and southern studies.”—Michele Gillespie, author of Katharine and R.J. Reynolds: Partners of Fortune and the Making of the New South “Combining historical and cultural studies perspectives, eleven well-crafted essays and a provocative epilogue engage the economic, political, and cultural dynamics of race and belonging from the era of enslavement through emancipation, reconstruction, and the New South.”—Nancy A. Hewitt, author of Southern Discomfort More than merely legal status, citizenship is also a form of belonging, shaping individual and group rights, duties, and identities. The pioneering essays in this volume are the first to address the evolution and significance of citizenship in the American South during the long nineteenth century. They explore the politics and contested meanings of citizenry from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in a tumultuous period when slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and segregation redefined relationships between different groups of southern men and women, both black and white.
Author : Emily West
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 38,41 MB
Release : 2012-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0813136938
In the antebellum South, the presence of free people of color was problematic to the white population. Not only were they possible assistants to enslaved people and potential members of the labor force; their very existence undermined popular justifications for slavery. It is no surprise that, by the end of the Civil War, nine Southern states had enacted legal provisions for the "voluntary" enslavement of free blacks. What is surprising to modern sensibilities and perplexing to scholars is that some individuals did petition to rescind their freedom. Family or Freedom investigates the incentives for free African Americans living in the antebellum South to sacrifice their liberty for a life in bondage. Author Emily West looks at the many factors influencing these dire decisions -- from desperate poverty to the threat of expulsion -- and demonstrates that the desire for family unity was the most important consideration for African Americans who submitted to voluntary enslavement. The first study of its kind to examine the phenomenon throughout the South, this meticulously researched volume offers the most thorough exploration of this complex issue to date.
Author : Loren Schweninger
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 28,37 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 0807835692
Families in Crisis in the Old South: Divorce, Slavery, and the Law
Author : Kathleen M. Hilliard
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 26,15 MB
Release : 2014
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1107046467
This book examines the political economy of the master-slave relationship viewed through the lens of consumption and market exchange. What did it mean when human chattel bought commodities, "stole" property, or gave and received gifts? Forgotten exchanges, this study argues, measured the deepest questions of worth and value, shaping an enduring struggle for power between slaves and masters. The slaves' internal economy focused intense paternalist negotiation on a ground where categories of exchange - provision, gift, contraband, and commodity - were in constant flux. At once binding and alienating, these ties endured constant moral stresses and material manipulation by masters and slaves alike, galvanizing conflict and engendering complex new social relations on and off the plantation.
Author : Daniel Carpenter
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 649 pages
File Size : 35,21 MB
Release : 2021-05-04
Category : History
ISBN : 0674258878
Winner of the James P. Hanlan Book Award Winner of the J. David Greenstone Book Prize Winner of the S. M. Lipset Best Book Award This pioneering work of political history recovers the central and largely forgotten role that petitioning played in the formative years of North American democracy. Known as the age of democracy, the nineteenth century witnessed the extension of the franchise and the rise of party politics. As Daniel Carpenter shows, however, democracy in America emerged not merely through elections and parties, but through the transformation of an ancient political tool: the petition. A statement of grievance accompanied by a list of signatures, the petition afforded women and men excluded from formal politics the chance to make their voices heard and to reshape the landscape of political possibility. Democracy by Petition traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent. Indigenous tribes in Canada, free Blacks from Boston to the British West Indies, Irish canal workers in Indiana, and Hispanic settlers in territorial New Mexico all used petitions to make claims on those in power. Petitions facilitated the extension of suffrage, the decline of feudal land tenure, and advances in liberty for women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Even where petitioners failed in their immediate aims, their campaigns advanced democracy by setting agendas, recruiting people into political causes, and fostering aspirations of equality. Far more than periodic elections, petitions provided an everyday current of communication between officeholders and the people. The coming of democracy in America owes much to the unprecedented energy with which the petition was employed in the antebellum period. By uncovering this neglected yet vital strand of nineteenth-century life, Democracy by Petition will forever change how we understand our political history.
Author : Dianne M Stewart
Publisher : Seal Press
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 42,83 MB
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1580058167
A “powerful, persuasive, and devastatingly haunting” examination of America’s racist, centuries-long oppression of Black love (Carol Anderson, bestselling author of White Rage) According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis. Dianne M. Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners. Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.
Author : Randy J. Sparks
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 25,29 MB
Release : 2016-04-04
Category : History
ISBN : 0674495160
The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, and its toll in lives damaged or destroyed is incalculable. Most of those stories are lost to history, making the few that can be reconstructed critical to understanding the trade in all its breadth and variety. Randy J. Sparks examines the experiences of a range of West Africans who lived in the American South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arrived on American shores. The subjects of Africans in the Old South include Elizabeth Cleveland Hardcastle, the mixed-race daughter of an African slave-trading family who invested in South Carolina rice plantations and slaves, passed as white, and integrated herself into the Lowcountry planter elite; Robert Johnson, kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery in Georgia, who later learned English, won his freedom, and joined the abolition movement in the North; Dimmock Charlton, who bought his freedom after being illegally enslaved in Savannah; and a group of unidentified Africans who were picked up by a British ship in the Caribbean, escaped in Mobile’s port, and were recaptured and eventually returned to their homeland. These exceptional lives challenge long-held assumptions about how the slave trade operated and who was involved. The African Atlantic was a complex world characterized by constant movement, intricate hierarchies, and shifting identities. Not all Africans who crossed the Atlantic were enslaved, nor was the voyage always one-way.