Download or read book Southern Black Women and their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction written by Karen Cook Bell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful exploration of the complexity of Black women's wartime and postwar experiences across the American South.
Download or read book A Hard Fight for We written by Leslie A. Schwalm and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-02-03 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African-American women fought for their freedom with courage and vigor during and after the Civil War. Leslie Schwalm explores the vital roles of enslaved and formerly enslaved women on the rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina, both in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery. From there, she chronicles their efforts as freedwomen to recover from the impact of the war while redefining their lives and labor. Freedwomen asserted their own ideas of what freedom meant and insisted on important changes in the work they performed both for white employers and in their own homes. As Schwalm shows, these women rejected the most unpleasant or demeaning tasks, guarded the prerogatives they gained under the South's slave economy, and defended their hard-won freedoms against unwanted intervention by Northern whites and the efforts of former owners to restore slavery's social and economic relations during Reconstruction. A bold challenge to entrenched notions, A Hard Fight for We places African American women at the center of the South's transition from a slave society.
Download or read book To Joy My Freedom written by Tera W. Hunter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-05-20 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta—the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south—in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers’ domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post–Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception—and at the heart—of the new south.
Download or read book To Joy My Freedom written by Tera W. Hunter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta—the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south—in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers’ domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post–Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception—and at the heart—of the new south.
Download or read book Running from Bondage written by Karen Cook Bell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling examination of the ways enslaved women fought for their freedom during and after the Revolutionary War.
Download or read book Climbing Up to Glory written by Wilbert L. Jenkins and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2002-05-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War was undeniably an integral event in American history, but for African Americans, whose personal liberties were dependent upon its outcome, it was an especially critical juncture. The Union defeat of the Confederacy brought African Americans a simultaneous victory over their captors, freeing them from slavery and domination and establishing them as masters of their own fate. But African Americans were far from passive victims of the war. Black soldiers fought on both sides of the conflict_Union and Confederate. In Climbing Up to Glory: A Short History of African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wilbert L. Jenkins explores this defining period in a story that documents the journey of average African Americans as they struggled to reinvent their lives following the abolition of slavery. In this highly readable book, Jenkins examines the unflagging determination and inner strength of African Americans as they sought to construct a solid economic base for themselves and their families by establishing their own businesses and banks and strove to own their own land. He portrays the racial violence and other obstacles blacks endured as they pooled meager resources to institute and maintain their own schools and attempted to participate in the political process. The family unit was also impacted by these profound societal changes. During this tumultuous time, African Americans struggled to rebuild families torn apart by slavery and to legalize family relationships such as slave marriages that were previously deemed unlawful. Compelling and informative, Climbing Up to Glory is an unforgettable tribute to a glowing period in African-American history sure to enrich and inspire American and African-American history enthusiasts.
Download or read book Freedom s Women written by Noralee Frankel and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Frankel's scholarship in this carefully researched and clearly written study is impressive.... The study is thoroughly documented with 70 pages of footnotes and a 14-page bibliography, refleccting Frankel's grasp of the secondary literature as well as extensive work in primary documents." -- Choice Freedom's Women examines African American women's experiences during the Civil War and early Reconstruction years in Mississippi. Exploring issues of family and work, the author shows how African American women's attempts to achieve more control over their lives shaped their attitudes toward work, marriage, family, and community.
Download or read book Gender and the Jubilee written by Sharon Romeo and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CHAPTER 5 The Legacy of Slave Marriage: Freedwomen's Marital Claims and the Process of Emancipation -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W
Download or read book Black Reconstruction in America The Oxford W E B Du Bois written by W. E. B. Du Bois and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 1134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication in 1935, Black Reconstruction has only grown in historical and literary importance. In the 1960s it joined the canon of the most influential revisionist historical works. Its greatest achievement is weaving a credible, lyrical historical narrative of the hostile and politically fraught years of 1860-1880 with a powerful critical analysis of the harmful effects of democracy, including Jim Crow laws and other injustices. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by David Levering Lewis, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.
Download or read book Scarlett Doesn t Live Here Anymore written by Laura F. Edwards and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Establishing the household as the central institution of southern society, Edwards delineates the inseparable links between domestic relations and civil and political rights in ways that highlight women's active political role throughout the nineteenth century. She draws on diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, government records, legal documents, court proceedings, and other primary sources to explore the experiences and actions of individual women in the changing South, demonstrating how family, kin, personal reputation, and social context all merged with gender, race, and class to shape what particular women could do in particular circumstances.
Download or read book Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era written by Jonathan A. Noyalas and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The African American experience in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction This book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the Black experience in the region until now. Correcting previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better there than in other parts of the South, Jonathan Noyalas demonstrates the strong hold of slavery in the region. He explains that during the war, enslaved and free African Americans navigated a borderland that changed hands frequently—where it was possible to be in Union territory one day, Confederate territory the next, and no-man’s land another. He shows that the region’s enslaved population resisted slavery and supported the Union war effort by serving as scouts, spies, and laborers, or by fleeing to enlist in regiments of the United States Colored Troops. Noyalas draws on untapped primary resources, including thousands of records from the Freedmen’s Bureau and contemporary newspapers, to continue the story and reveal the challenges African Americans faced from former Confederates after the war. He traces their actions, which were shaped uniquely by the volatility of the struggle in this region, to ensure that the war’s emancipationist legacy would survive. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller
Download or read book Stepdaughters of History written by Catherine Clinton and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-11-02 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Stepdaughters of History, noted scholar Catherine Clinton reflects on the roles of women as historical actors within the field of Civil War studies and examines the ways in which historians have redefined female wartime participation. Clinton contends that despite the recent attention, white and black women’s contributions remain shrouded in myth and sidelined in traditional historical narratives. Her work tackles some of these well-worn assumptions, dismantling prevailing attitudes that consign women to the footnotes of Civil War texts. Clinton highlights some of the debates, led by emerging and established Civil War scholars, which seek to demolish demeaning and limiting stereotypes of southern women as simpering belles, stoic Mammies, Rebel spitfires, or sultry spies. Such caricatures mask the more concrete and compelling struggles within the Confederacy, and in Clinton’s telling, a far more balanced and vivid understanding of women’s roles within the wartime South emerges. New historical evidence has given rise to fresh insights, including important revisionist literature on women’s overt and covert participation in activities designed to challenge the rebellion and on white women’s roles in reshaping the war’s legacy in postwar narratives. Increasingly, Civil War scholarship integrates those women who defied gender conventions to assume men’s roles—including those few who gained notoriety as spies, scouts, or soldiers during the war. As Clinton’s work demonstrates, the larger questions of women’s wartime contributions remain important correctives to our understanding of the war’s impact. Through a fuller appreciation of the dynamics of sex and race, Stepdaughters of History promises a broader conversation in the twenty-first century, inviting readers to continue to confront the conundrums of the American Civil War.
Download or read book Lifting the Chains written by William H. Chafe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It was 1863. Abraham Galloway--son of a white father and an enslaved mother--stood next to the Army recruiter, holding a gun to the soldier's head. He had escaped slavery in the hold--of a ship four years earlier, fleeing to Canada, then became a master spy for the Union Army. Now, in the days after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Galloway had returned to North Carolina, becoming the leader of more than 4,000 escaped slaves who had joined him in New Bern, North Carolina. We will join the Union Army, Galloway told the recruiter, but only on our terms. Galloway then laid down his demands: the right to vote; the right to serve on juries; the right to run for elected office; equal pay for Black and white soldiers; schools for their children; jobs for women; and care for their families. In retrospect, the demands seem revolutionary. But not so, given the roles that Blacks were playing in the war. Hence, the recruiter said yes. Within days, 10,000 Blacks had joined Galloway to enlist in the Union Army. Those soldiers--along with nearly 200,000 other Blacks who enlisted--proved pivotal to destroying the system of plantation slavery. Soon, they would inaugurate the quest to create a truly democratic America"--
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 African Americans Death and the New Birth of Freedom written by Ashley Towle and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book examines how African Americans in the South made sense of the devastating loss of life unleashed by the Civil War and emancipation. During and after the war, African Americans died in vast numbers from battle, disease, and racial violence. While freedom was a momentous event for the formerly enslaved, it was also deadly. Through an investigation into how African Americans reacted to and coped with the passing away of loved ones and community members, Ashley Towle argues that freedpeople gave credence to their free status through their experiences with mortality. African Americans harnessed the power of death in a variety of arenas, including within the walls of national and private civilian cemeteries, in applications for widows’ pensions, in the pulpits of black churches, around séance tables, on the witness stand at congressional hearings, and in the columns of African American newspapers. In the process of mourning the demise of kith and kin, black people reconstituted their families, forged communal bonds, and staked claims to citizenship, civil rights, and racial justice from the federal government. In a society upended by civil war and emancipation, death was political.
Download or read book The American Civil Rights Movement 1865 1950 written by Russell Brooker and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-12-07 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Civil Rights Movement 1865–1950 is a history of the African American struggle for freedom and equality from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It synthesizes the disparate black movements, explaining consistent themes and controversies during those years. The main focus is on the black activists who led the movement and the white people who supported them. The principal theme is that African American agency propelled the progress and that whites often helped. Even whites who were not sympathetic to black demands were useful, often because it was to their advantage to act as black allies. Even white opponents could be coerced into cooperation or, at least, non-opposition. White people of good will with shallow understanding were frustrating, but they were sometimes useful. Even if they did not work for black rights, they did not work against them, and sometimes helped because they had no better options. Until now, the history of the African American movement from 1865 to 1950 has not been covered as one coherent story. There have been many histories of African Americans that have treated the subject in one chapter or part of a chapter, and several excellent books have concentrated on a specific time period, such as Reconstruction or World War II. Other books have focused on one aspect of the time, such as lynching or the nature of Jim Crow. This is the first book to synthesize the history of the movement in a coherent whole.
Download or read book From Slavery to Freedom Narrative Of The Life Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Up From Slavery The Souls of Black Folk Illustrated written by Frederick Douglass and published by Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American history is the part of American history that looks at the past of African Americans or Black Americans. Of the 10.7 million Africans who were brought to the Americas until the 1860s, 450 thousand were shipped to what is now the United States. Most African Americans are descended from Africans who were brought directly from Africa to America and became slaves. The future slaves were originally captured in African wars or raids and transported in the Atlantic slave trade. Our collection includes the following works: Narrative Of The Life by Frederick Douglass. The impassioned abolitionist and eloquent orator provides graphic descriptions of his childhood and horrifying experiences as a slave as well as a harrowing record of his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom. Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Powerful by portrayal of the brutality of slave life through the inspiring tale of one woman's dauntless spirit and faith. Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. Washington rose to become the most influential spokesman for African Americans of his day. He describes events in a remarkable life that began in slavery and culminated in worldwide recognition. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois. W. E. B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Contents: 1. Frederick Douglass: Narrative Of The Life 2. Harriet Ann Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 3. Booker Taliaferro Washington: Up From Slavery 4. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
