Download or read book The Slave in the Swamp written by William Tynes Cowa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2005. In 19th century plantation literature, the runaway slave in the swamp was a recurring bogey-man whose presence challenged myths of the plantation system. By escaping to the swamps with its wild and threatening connotations, the runaway gained an invisibility that was more threatening to the institution than open rebellion. In part, the proslavery plantation novel served to transform that image of the free slave in the swamp from its untouchable, abstract state to a form that could be possessed, understood, and controlled. Essentially, writers defending the institution would conjure forth the rebellious image in order to dispel it safely.
Download or read book City of Refuge written by Marcus Peyton Nevius and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.
Download or read book Freewater written by Amina Luqman-Dawson and published by Jimmy Patterson. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the John Newbery Medal Winner of the Coretta Scott King Author Award Award-winning author Amina Luqman-Dawson pens a lyrical, accessible historical middle-grade novel about two enslaved children’s escape from a plantation and the many ways they find freedom. After an entire young life of enslavement, twelve-year-old Homer escapes Southerland Plantation with his little sister Ada, leaving his beloved mother behind. Much as he adores her and fears for her life, Homer knows there’s no turning back, not with the overseer on their trail. Through tangled vines, secret doorways, and over a sky bridge, the two find a secret community called Freewater, deep in the recesses of the swamp. In this new, free society made up of escaped slaves and some born-free children, Homer cautiously embraces a set of spirited friends, almost forgetting where he came from. But when he learns of a threat that could destroy Freewater, he hatches a plan to return to Southerland plantation, overcome his own cautious nature, and free his mother from enslavement. Loosely based on a little-mined but important piece of history, this is an inspiring and deeply empowering story of survival, love, and courage.
Download or read book Dismal Freedom written by J. Brent Morris and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.
Download or read book Slavery s Exiles written by Sylviane A. Diouf and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forgotten stories of America maroons—wilderness settlers evading discovery after escaping slavery Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women’s proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.
Download or read book Dred written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published by . This book was released on 1856 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written partly in response to the criticisms of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by both white Southerners and black abolitionists, Stowe's second novel, "Dred," attempts to explore the issue of slavery from an African American perspective. Through the compelling stories of Nina Gordon, the mistress of a slave plantation, and Dred, a black revolutionary, Stowe brings to life conflicting beliefs about race, the institution of slavery, and the possibilities of violent resistance.
Download or read book Them Dark Days written by William Dusinberre and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Them Dark Days is a study of the callous, capitalistic nature of the vast rice plantations along the southeastern coast. It is essential reading for anyone whose view of slavery’s horrors might be softened by the current historical emphasis on slave community and family and slave autonomy and empowerment. Looking at Gowrie and Butler Island plantations in Georgia and Chicora Wood in South Carolina, William Dusinberre considers a wide range of issues related to daily life and work there: health, economics, politics, dissidence, coercion, discipline, paternalism, and privilege. Based on overseers’ letters, slave testimonies, and plantation records, Them Dark Days offers a vivid reconstruction of slavery in action and casts a sharp new light on slave history.
Download or read book The Slave in the Swamp written by William Tynes Cowan and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Runaway Slaves written by John Hope Franklin and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2000-07-20 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold and precedent-setting study details numerous slave rebellions against white masters, drawn from planters' records, government petitions, newspapers, and other documents. The reactions of white slave owners are also documented. 15 halftones.
Download or read book Poems on Slavery written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and published by . This book was released on 1842 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Desolate Place for a Defiant People written by Daniel Sayers and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2014-11-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 250 years before the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was a brutal landscape—2,000 square miles of undeveloped and unforgiving wetlands, peat bogs, impenetrable foliage, and dangerous creatures. It was also a protective refuge for marginalized communities, including Native Americans, African-American maroons, free African Americans, and outcast Europeans. Here they created their own way of life, free of the exploitation and alienation they had escaped. In the first thorough examination of this vital site, Daniel Sayers examines the area’s archaeological record, exposing and unraveling the complex social and economic systems developed by these defiant communities that thrived on the periphery. He develops an analytical framework based on the complex interplay between alienation, diasporic exile, uneven geographical development, and modes of production to argue that colonialism and slavery inevitably created sustained critiques of American capitalism.
Download or read book Unbound A Novel in Verse written by Ann E. Burg and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author of All the Broken Pieces and Serafina's Promise comes a breathtaking new novel that is her most transcendent and widely accessible work to date. The day Grace is called from the slave cabins to work in the Big House, Mama makes her promise to keep her eyes down. Uncle Jim warns her to keep her thoughts tucked private in her mind or they could bring a whole lot of trouble and pain. But the more Grace sees of the heartless Master and hateful Missus, the more a rightiness voice clamors in her head-asking how come white folks can own other people, sell them on the auction block, and separate families forever. When that voice escapes without warning, it sets off a terrible chain of events that prove Uncle Jim's words true. Suddenly, Grace and her family must flee deep into the woods, where they brave deadly animals, slave patrollers, and the uncertainty of ever finding freedom. With candor and compassion, Ann E. Burg sheds light on a startling chapter of American history--the remarkable story of runaways who sought sanctuary in the Great Dismal Swamp--and creates a powerful testament to the right of every human to be free.
Download or read book Song Yet Sung written by James McBride and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tale set against a backdrop of slave rights conflicts in the nineteenth-century Chesapeake Bay region finds young runaway Liz Spocott inadvertently inspiring a slave breakout from the attic prison of a notorious slave thief who vengefully calls slave catcher Denwood Long out of retirement. 100,000 first printing.
Download or read book The Black Russian written by Vladimir Alexandrov and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “altogether astonishing” true story of a black American finding fame and fortune in Moscow and Constantinople at the turn of the 20th century (Booklist, starred review). The Black Russian tells the true story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, a man born in 1872 to former slaves who became prosperous farmers in Mississippi. But when his father was murdered, Frederick left the South to work as a waiter in Chicago and Brooklyn. Seeking greater freedom, he traveled to London, then crisscrossed Europe, and—in a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time—went to Russia. Because he found no color line there, Frederick settled in Moscow, becoming a rich and famous owner of variety theaters and restaurants. When the Bolshevik Revolution ruined him, he barely escaped to Constantinople, where he made another fortune by opening celebrated nightclubs as the “Sultan of Jazz.” Though Frederick reached extraordinary heights, the long arm of American racism, the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic, and Frederick’s own extravagance brought his life to a sad close, landing him in debtor’s prison, where he died a forgotten man in 1928. “In his assiduously researched, prodigiously descriptive, fluently analytical” narrative (Booklist, starred review), Alexandrov delivers “a tale . . . so colourful and improbable that it reads more like a novel than a work of historical biography.” (The Literary Review). “[An] extraordinary story . . . [interpreted] with great sensitivity.” —The New York Review of Books
Download or read book The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company written by Charles Royster and published by Knopf. This book was released on 1999 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this absorbing narrative Charles Royster traces the rise and fall of the eighteenth-century transatlantic culture that was built on the insatiable demand in Europe for Virginia tobacco and the equally insatiable American demand for European manufactured goods. Moving from the plantations of Virginia and Antigua to the warehouses of London and Glasgow, from the Gold Coast of Africa to the valleys of the Allegheny Mountains, from the iron furnaces of southern Wales to the subscribers' room of Lloyd's of London, Professor Royster gives us the story of the Dismal Swamp Company, a fantastically delusional enterprise that proposed draining and developing a vast morass along the Virginia-North Carolina border. Examining the interconnected lives of the company's partners, Royster reveals a colonial order built on a system of cronyism, conspicuous consumption, and debt that seems hauntingly familiar. He writes about the many schemers and dreamers (including George Washington, Robert "King" Carter, two William Byrds, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Morris) who failed to amass their desired fortunes, and a few realists (Samuel Gist, Dr. Thomas Walker, and Anthony Bacon) who succeeded, but at the dire expense of others. And we see the breakdown of this culture and the transition to a more democratic, though similar, system after the Revolution. Throughout Royster's narrative we seepossessors possessed by their possessions, slaveholders possessed by slavery, and heirs possessed by litigation. Connecting all their stories are their unceasing efforts to make something substantial out of the insubstantial--chief among them the almost unbelievable delusion that fortunes could bemade from the Dismal Swamp.
Download or read book Dred written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published by . This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bonded Leather binding
Download or read book Atchafalaya Houseboat written by Gwen Roland and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-04-24 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1970s, two idealistic young people—Gwen Carpenter Roland and Calvin Voisin—decided to leave civilization and re-create the vanished simple life of their great-grandparents in the heart of Louisiana's million-acre Atchafalaya River Basin Swamp. Armed with a box of crayons and a book called How to Build Your Home in the Woods, they drew up plans to recycle a slave-built structure into a houseboat. Without power tools or building experience they constructed a floating dwelling complete with a brick fireplace. Towed deep into the sleepy waters of Bloody Bayou, it was their home for eight years. This is the tale of the not-so-simple life they made together—days spent fishing, trading, making wine, growing food, and growing up—told by Gwen with grace, economy, and eloquence. Not long after they took up swamp living, Gwen and Calvin met a young photographer named C. C. Lockwood, who shared their "back to the earth" values. His photographs of the couple going about their daily routine were published in National Geographic magazine, bringing them unexpected fame. More than a quarter of a century later, after Gwen and Calvin had long since parted, one of Lockwood's photos of them appeared in a National Geographic collector's edition entitled 100 Best Pictures Unpublished—and kindled the interest of a new generation. With quiet wisdom, Gwen recounts her eight-year voyage of discovery—about swamp life, wildlife, and herself. A keen observer of both the natural world and the ways of human beings, she transports readers to an unfamiliar and exotic place.
