Download or read book California a Slave State written by Jean Pfaelzer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold history of slavery and resistance in California, from the Spanish missions, indentured Native American ranch hands, Indian boarding schools, Black miners, kidnapped Chinese prostitutes, and convict laborers to victims of modern trafficking"A searing survey of '250 years of human bondage' in what is now the state of California. . . . Readers will be outraged."--Publishers Weekly California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives--the first slaves transported into California--and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California's carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers. By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers. Slavery shreds California's utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America's uneasy paths to freedom.
Download or read book Unification of a Slave State written by Rachel N. Klein and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the turbulent transformation of South Carolina from a colony rent by sectional conflict into a state dominated by the South's most unified and politically powerful planter leadership. Rachel Klein unravels the sources of conflict and growing unity, showing how a deep commitment to slavery enabled leaders from both low- and backcountry to define the terms of political and ideological compromise. The spread of cotton into the backcountry, often invoked as the reason for South Carolina's political unification, actually concluded a complex struggle for power and legitimacy. Beginning with the Regulator Uprising of the 1760s, Klein demonstrates how backcountry leaders both gained authority among yeoman constituents and assumed a powerful role within state government. By defining slavery as the natural extension of familial inequality, backcountry ministers strengthened the planter class. At the same time, evangelical religion, like the backcountry's dominant political language, expressed yet contained the persisting tensions between planters and yeomen. Klein weaves social, political, and religious history into a formidable account of planter class formation and southern frontier development.
Download or read book A World of Its Own written by Matt Garcia and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2010-01-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the history of intercultural struggle and cooperation in the citrus belt of Greater Los Angeles, Matt Garcia explores the social and cultural forces that helped make the city the expansive and diverse metropolis that it is today. As the citrus-growing regions of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys in eastern Los Angeles County expanded during the early twentieth century, the agricultural industry there developed along segregated lines, primarily between white landowners and Mexican and Asian laborers. Initially, these communities were sharply divided. But Los Angeles, unlike other agricultural regions, saw important opportunities for intercultural exchange develop around the arts and within multiethnic community groups. Whether fostered in such informal settings as dance halls and theaters or in such formal organizations as the Intercultural Council of Claremont or the Southern California Unity Leagues, these interethnic encounters formed the basis for political cooperation to address labor discrimination and solve problems of residential and educational segregation. Though intercultural collaborations were not always successful, Garcia argues that they constitute an important chapter not only in Southern California's social and cultural development but also in the larger history of American race relations.
Download or read book Freedom s Frontier written by Stacey L. Smith and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.
Download or read book West of Slavery written by Kevin Waite and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white southerners defended the institution of African American chattel slavery as well as systems of Native American bondage. This surprising history uncovers the Old South in unexpected places, far beyond the region's cotton fields and sugar plantations. Slaveholders' western ambitions culminated in a coast-to-coast crisis of the Union. By 1861, the rebellion in the South inspired a series of separatist movements in the Far West. Even after the collapse of the Confederacy, the threads connecting South and West held, undermining the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.
Download or read book Archy Lee s Struggle for Freedom written by Brian McGinty and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In San Francisco, CA, in 1858, a young African American man was freed from the claims of a white man who sought to return him to slavery in Mississippi. This was one year after the Supreme Court’s notorious Dred Scott decision and during the California Gold Rush, which saw the population of the state rise from 7,000 to more than 60,000 in a few short years. Archy Lee was the name of the man who, with the aid of anti-slavery lawyers and determined opponents of human bondage, had just won his freedom from the claims of Charles Stovall. With the aid of pro-slavery lawyers and equally determined supporters, Stovall had sought to capture him and carry him back to a far-away slave plantation. Yet the book is not solely about Archy Lee. It is also about the travel routes that the gold-seekers followed to California in the 1850s, some by land over the Great Plains, some by sea around Cape Horn, yet others by sailing from the east coast of North America to the isthmus of Panama, where they crossed over the land there by train and continued on by sea to San Francisco. It is about the efforts of the racially motivated lawmakers to suppress the rights of all of California’s residents except whites, and to subject people of African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American descent to second-, third-, or even fourth-class citizenship. It is about the residents of the state—including many whites—who fought back against those efforts, seeking to ameliorate or repeal the discriminatory laws and introduce a measure of fairness and justice into California’s civil life. It is about the lawyers and judges who participated in Archy Lee’s legal struggles in 1858, some supporting his claims for freedom while others ferociously opposed them and, in the process, elevated their own political and professional profiles.
Download or read book Archy Lee written by Rudolph M. Lapp and published by Heyday. This book was released on 2008 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Stovall of Mississippi brought his slave into the free state of California leading, in 1852, to the landmark trial to free Archy Lee
Download or read book West of Jim Crow written by Lynn M. Hudson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Americans who moved to California in hopes of finding freedom and full citizenship instead faced all-too-familiar racial segregation. As one transplant put it, "The only difference between Pasadena and Mississippi is the way they are spelled." From the beaches to streetcars to schools, the Golden State—in contrast to its reputation for tolerance—perfected many methods of controlling people of color. Lynn M. Hudson deepens our understanding of the practices that African Americans in the West deployed to dismantle Jim Crow in the quest for civil rights prior to the 1960s. Faced with institutionalized racism, black Californians used both established and improvised tactics to resist and survive the state's color line. Hudson rediscovers forgotten stories like the experimental all-black community of Allensworth, the California Ku Klux Klan's campaign of terror against African Americans, the bitter struggle to integrate public swimming pools in Pasadena and elsewhere, and segregationists' preoccupation with gender and sexuality.
Download or read book South to Freedom written by Alice L Baumgartner and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico. The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historianAlice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.
Download or read book The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War written by Leonard L. Richards and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-02-12 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards gives us an authoritative and revealing portrait of an overlooked harbinger of the terrible battle that was to come. When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, Americans of all stripes saw the potential for both wealth and power. Among the more calculating were Southern slave owners. By making California a slave state, they could increase the value of their slaves—by 50 percent at least, and maybe much more. They could also gain additional influence in Congress and expand Southern economic clout, abetted by a new transcontinental railroad that would run through the South. Yet, despite their machinations, California entered the union as a free state. Disillusioned Southerners would agitate for even more slave territory, leading to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and, ultimately, to the Civil War itself.
Download or read book Making a Slave State written by Ryan A. Quintana and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is the state produced? In what ways did enslaved African Americans shape modern governing practices? Ryan A. Quintana provocatively answers these questions by focusing on the everyday production of South Carolina's state space—its roads and canals, borders and boundaries, public buildings and military fortifications. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and moving through the post–War of 1812 internal improvements boom, Quintana highlights the surprising ways enslaved men and women sat at the center of South Carolina's earliest political development, materially producing the state's infrastructure and early governing practices, while also challenging and reshaping both through their day-to-day movements, from the mundane to the rebellious. Focusing on slaves' lives and labors, Quintana illuminates how black South Carolinians not only created the early state but also established their own extralegal economic sites, social and cultural havens, and independent communities along South Carolina's roads, rivers, and canals. Combining social history, the study of American politics, and critical geography, Quintana reframes our ideas of early American political development, illuminates the material production of space, and reveals the central role of slaves' daily movements (for their owners and themselves) to the development of the modern state.
Download or read book Slaves in the Family written by Edward Ball and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen years after its hardcover debut, the FSG Classics reissue of the celebrated work of narrative nonfiction that won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, with a new preface by the author The Ball family hails from South Carolina—Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Part historical narrative, part oral history, part personal story of investigation and catharsis, Slaves in the Family is, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word ‘family.'"
Download or read book Slaves of the State written by Dennis Childs and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed in 1865, has long been viewed as a definitive break with the nation’s past by abolishing slavery and ushering in an inexorable march toward black freedom. Slaves of the State presents a stunning counterhistory to this linear narrative of racial, social, and legal progress in America. Dennis Childs argues that the incarceration of black people and other historically repressed groups in chain gangs, peon camps, prison plantations, and penitentiaries represents a ghostly perpetuation of chattel slavery. He exposes how the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause—allowing for enslavement as “punishment for a crime”—has inaugurated forms of racial capitalist misogynist incarceration that serve as haunting returns of conditions Africans endured in the barracoons and slave ship holds of the Middle Passage, on plantations, and in chattel slavery. Childs seeks out the historically muted voices of those entombed within terrorizing spaces such as the chain gang rolling cage and the modern solitary confinement cell, engaging the writings of Toni Morrison and Chester Himes as well as a broad range of archival materials, including landmark court cases, prison songs, and testimonies, reaching back to the birth of modern slave plantations such as Louisiana’s “Angola” penitentiary. Slaves of the State paves the way for a new understanding of chattel slavery as a continuing social reality of U.S. empire—one resting at the very foundation of today’s prison industrial complex that now holds more than 2.3 million people within the country’s jails, prisons, and immigrant detention centers.
Download or read book The Other Slavery written by Andrés Reséndez and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST | WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE. A landmark history—the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early twentieth century. Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of Natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery—more than epidemics—that decimated Indian populations across North America. Through riveting new evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, and Indian captives, The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see. “The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that’s long overdue...In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Résendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary.” — Literary Hub, 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade ““One of the most profound contributions to North American history.”—Los Angeles Times
Download or read book Mining for Freedom written by Sylvia Alden Roberts and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you know that an estimated 5,000 blacks were an early and integral part of the California Gold Rush? Did you know that black history in California precedes Gold Rush history by some 300 years? Did you know that in California during the Gold Rush, blacks created one of the wealthiest, most culturally advanced, most politically active communities in the nation? Few people are aware of the intriguing, dynamic often wholly inspirational stories of African American argonauts, from backgrounds as diverse as those of their less sturdy- complexioned peers. Defying strict California fugitive slave laws and an unforgiving court testimony ban in a state that declared itself free, black men and women combined skill, ambition and courage and rose to meet that daunting challenge with dignity, determination and even a certain elan, leaving behind a legacy that has gone starkly under-reported. Mainstream history tends to contribute to the illusion that African Americans were all but absent from the California Gold Rush experience. This remarkable book, illustrated with dozens of photos, offers definitive contradiction to that illusion and opens a door that leads the reader into a forgotten world long shrouded behind the shadowy curtains of time."
Download or read book Slave State written by Curtis Ray Davis and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that Louisiana's criminal justice system, is a genocidal weapon that has historically targeted African American's in order to keep them marginalized and maintain white supremacy. Slave State is a collection of essays written by an innocent man convicted of murder and sentenced to serve out the balance of his natural life in the infamous Angola State Prison. The author is arrested in California in 1990 and transported to Louisiana where he finds himself in a surreal condition of confinement that resembles Louisiana as it existed in the early 1800's. Once he is placed back in slavery he learns that the political correctness and civility presented by whites in the U.S. is only an act. When he arrives at the Louisiana Penitentiary, he is met with a venomous racist system that most people assume died away years ago.
Download or read book The American Slave Coast written by Ned Sublette and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Book Award Winner 2016 The American Slave Coast offers a provocative vision of US history from earliest colonial times through emancipation that presents even the most familiar events and figures in a revealing new light. Authors Ned and Constance Sublette tell the brutal story of how the slavery industry made the reproductive labor of the people it referred to as "breeding women" essential to the young country's expansion. Captive African Americans in the slave nation were not only laborers, but merchandise and collateral all at once. In a land without silver, gold, or trustworthy paper money, their children and their children's children into perpetuity were used as human savings accounts that functioned as the basis of money and credit in a market premised on the continual expansion of slavery. Slaveowners collected interest in the form of newborns, who had a cash value at birth and whose mothers had no legal right to say no to forced mating. This gripping narrative is driven by the power struggle between the elites of Virginia, the slave-raising "mother of slavery," and South Carolina, the massive importer of Africans—a conflict that was central to American politics from the making of the Constitution through the debacle of the Confederacy. Virginia slaveowners won a major victory when Thomas Jefferson's 1808 prohibition of the African slave trade protected the domestic slave markets for slave-breeding. The interstate slave trade exploded in Mississippi during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, drove the US expansion into Texas, and powered attempts to take over Cuba and other parts of Latin America, until a disaffected South Carolina spearheaded the drive to secession and war, forcing the Virginians to secede or lose their slave-breeding industry. Filled with surprising facts, fascinating incidents, and startling portraits of the people who made, endured, and resisted the slave-breeding industry, The American Slave Coast culminates in the revolutionary Emancipation Proclamation, which at last decommissioned the capitalized womb and armed the African Americans to fight for their freedom.
