Remembering Slavery


Book Description

The groundbreaking, bestselling history of slavery, with a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed With the publication of the 1619 Project and the national reckoning over racial inequality, the story of slavery has gripped America’s imagination—and conscience—once again. No group of people better understood the power of slavery’s legacies than the last generation of American people who had lived as slaves. Little-known before the first publication of Remembering Slavery over two decades ago, their memories were recorded on paper, and in some cases on primitive recording devices, by WPA workers in the 1930s. A major publishing event, Remembering Slavery captured these extraordinary voices in a single volume for the first time, presenting them as an unprecedented, first-person history of slavery in America. Remembering Slavery received the kind of commercial attention seldom accorded projects of this nature—nationwide reviews as well as extensive coverage on prime-time television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS Sunday Morning, and CNN. Reviewers called the book “chilling . . . [and] riveting” (Publishers Weekly) and “something, truly, truly new” (The Village Voice). With a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, this new edition of Remembering Slavery is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand one of the most basic and essential chapters in our collective history.




The American Freedman


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And It Begins Like This


Book Description

LaTanya McQueen's essays offer a bold examination of the weight history, both personal and societal, places on our present moment. And it Begins Like This is a book brave enough to challenge our accepted notions of the past to put black women in their rightful place, in the forefront of the ongoing struggle for dignity and equality. It's a book that is both moving and absolutely necessary.




The Chickasaw Freedmen


Book Description

Littlefield's account of the freed blacks' social and economic life is a valuable discussion. Students of the West and race relations will welcome this book.




The Freedmen's Book


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Remembering Slavery


Book Description

"A Best Book of the Year" —Library Journal and Booklist Using excerpts from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writer's Project, this astonishing collection makes available in print the only known recordings of people who actually experienced slavery--recordings that had gathered dust in the Library of Congress until they were rendered audible for the first time specifically for this collection. Heralded as "a minor miracle" (Ted Koppel, Nightline), "powerful and intense" (Atlanta Journal Constitution), and "invaluable" (Chicago Tribune), Remembering Slavery is sure to enrich readers for years to come. "Gripping and poignant... Moving recollections fill a void in the slavery literature." —The Washington Post Book World "Chilling [and] riveting... This project will enrich every American home and classroom." —Publisher's Weekly "Quite literally, history comes alive in this unparalleled work." —Library Journal "Ira Berlin's fifty-page introduction is as good a synthesis of current scholarship as one will find, filled with fresh insights for any reader." —The San Diego Union Tribune




The Invisibles


Book Description

The Invisibles chronicles the African American presence inside the White House from its beginnings in 1782 until 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that granted slaves their freedom. During these years, slaves were the only African Americans to whom the most powerful men in the United States were exposed on a daily, and familiar, basis. By reading about these often-intimate relationships, readers will better understand some of the views that various presidents held about class and race in American society, and how these slaves contributed not only to the life and comforts of the presidents they served, but to America as a whole.




Resurrection City, 1968


Book Description

In May of 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. announced the Poor People's Campaign to demanded economic and human rights for poor Americans of diverse backgrounds. The Campaign was organized by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of Dr. King's assassination. After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp called Resurrection City on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968. Published in 1970, Old News: Resurrection City was photographer Jill Freedman's first book. The book documents the encampment in all its complexity Freedman lived in the encampment for its entire six weeks, photographing the residents, their daily lives, their protests, and their eventual eviction. The new 50th anniversary edition of the book, titled Resurrection City, 1968 will reprint most of the 185 pictures from the original publication, presenting them in a more vivid printing and design. Freedman's hard-hitting original text will be included as well. Two introductory essays will be included, by John Edwin Mason, historian of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, and by Aaron Bryant, Curator of Photography, Visual Culture, and Contemporary Political History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.




Reconstruction


Book Description

From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America, with a new introduction from the author. Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed. Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.




Sick from Freedom


Book Description

Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.