Download or read book The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America written by Robert H. Churchill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.
Download or read book Abolitionist Geographies written by Martha Schoolman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional narratives of the period leading up to the Civil War are invariably framed in geographical terms. The sectional descriptors of the North, South, and West, like the wartime categories of Union, Confederacy, and border states, mean little without reference to a map of the United States. In Abolitionist Geographies, Martha Schoolman contends that antislavery writers consistently refused those standard terms. Through the idiom Schoolman names “abolitionist geography,” these writers instead expressed their dissenting views about the westward extension of slavery, the intensification of the internal slave trade, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by appealing to other anachronistic, partial, or entirely fictional north–south and east–west axes. Abolitionism’s West, for instance, rarely reached beyond the Mississippi River, but its East looked to Britain for ideological inspiration, its North habitually traversed the Canadian border, and its South often spanned the geopolitical divide between the United States and the British Caribbean. Schoolman traces this geography of dissent through the work of Martin Delany, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. Her book explores new relationships between New England transcendentalism and the British West Indies; African-American cosmopolitanism, Britain, and Haiti; sentimental fiction, Ohio, and Liberia; John Brown’s Appalachia and circum-Caribbean marronage. These connections allow us to see clearly for the first time abolitionist literature’s explicit and intentional investment in geography as an idiom of political critique, by turns liberal and radical, practical and utopian.
Download or read book Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South written by Damian Alan Pargas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective. It analyzes how different migrant groups anticipated, reacted to, and experienced forced removal, as well as how they adapted to their new homes.
Download or read book Front Line of Freedom written by Keith P. Griffler and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Underground Railroad, an often misunderstood antebellum institution, has been viewed as a simple combination of mainly white "conductors" and black "passengers." Keith P. Griffler takes a new, battlefield-level view of the war against American slavery as he reevaluates one of its front lines: the Ohio River, the longest commercial dividing line between slavery and freedom. In shifting the focus from the much discussed white-led "stations" to the primarily black-led frontline struggle along the Ohio, Griffler reveals for the first time the crucial importance of the freedom movement in the river's port cities and towns. Front Line of Freedom fully examines America's first successful interracial freedom movement, which proved to be as much a struggle to transform the states north of the Ohio as those to its south. In a climate of racial proscription, mob violence, and white hostility, the efforts of Ohio Valley African Americans to establish and maintain communities became inextricably linked to the steady stream of fugitives crossing the region. As Griffler traces the efforts of African Americans to free themselves, Griffler provides a window into the process by which this clandestine network took shape and grew into a powerful force in antebellum America.
Download or read book Frederick Douglass in Context written by Michaël Roy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick Douglass in Context provides an in-depth introduction to the multifaceted life and times of Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century's leading black activist and one of the most celebrated American writers. An international team of scholars sheds new light on the environments and communities that shaped Douglass's career. The book challenges the myth of Douglass as a heroic individualist who towered over family, friends, and colleagues, and reveals instead a man who relied on others and drew strength from a variety of personal and professional relations and networks. This volume offers both a comprehensive representation of Douglass and a series of concentrated studies of specific aspects of his work. It will be a key resource for students, scholars, teachers, and general readers interested in Douglass and his tireless fight for freedom, justice, and equality for all.
Download or read book Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture written by Sarah N. Roth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises. In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.
Download or read book Slavery and Sacred Texts written by Jordan T. Watkins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the development of historical consciousness in antebellum America, using the debate over slavery as a case study.
Download or read book Force and Freedom written by Kellie Carter Jackson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-08-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an antislavery war. In Force and Freedom, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through rousing public speeches, the bourgeoning black press, and the formation of militia groups, black abolitionist leaders mobilized their communities, compelled national action, and drew international attention. Drawing on the precedent and pathos of the American and Haitian Revolutions, African American abolitionists used violence as a political language and a means of provoking social change. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, black abolitionist leaders accomplished what white nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War. Force and Freedom takes readers beyond the honorable politics of moral suasion and the romanticism of the Underground Railroad and into an exploration of the agonizing decisions, strategies, and actions of the black abolitionists who, though lacking an official political voice, were nevertheless responsible for instigating monumental social and political change.
Download or read book The Underground Railroad written by Colson Whitehead and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
Download or read book The Captive s Quest for Freedom written by R. J. M. Blackett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the impact fugitive slaves had on the Fugitive Slave Law and the coming of the American Civil War.
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 Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America written by Damian Alan Pargas and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different “spaces of freedom” they inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. North and South, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Using newspapers, advertisements, and new demographic data, contributors show how events like the Revolutionary War and westward expansion shaped the slave experience. Contributors investigate sites of formal freedom, where slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free, to determine the extent to which fugitive slaves experienced freedom in places like Canada while still being subject to racism. In sites of semiformal freedom, as in the northern United States, fugitives’ claims to freedom were precarious because state abolition laws conflicted with federal fugitive slave laws. Contributors show how local committees strategized to interfere with the work of slave catchers to protect refugees. Sites of informal freedom were created within the slaveholding South, where runaways who felt relocating to distant destinations was too risky formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations. These individuals procured false documents or changed their names to avoid detection and pass as free. The essays discuss slaves’ motivations for choosing these destinations, the social networks that supported their plans, what it was like to settle in their new societies, and how slave flight impacted broader debates about slavery. This volume redraws the map of escape and emancipation during this period, emphasizing the importance of place in defining the meaning and extent of freedom. Contributors: Kyle Ainsworth | Mekala Audain | Gordon S. Barker | Sylviane A. Diouf | Roy E. Finkenbine | Graham Russell Gao Hodges | Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie | Viola Franziska Müller | James David Nichols | Damian Alan Pargas | Matthew Pinsker A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller
Download or read book Slavery Capitalism and Politics in the Antebellum Republic Volume 1 Commerce and Compromise 1820 1850 written by John Ashworth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War should be seen as America's 'bourgeois revolution'. So argues Dr John Ashworth in this novel reinterpretation, from a Marxist perspective, of American political and economic development in the forty years before the Civil War. This book, the first of a two-volume treatment of slavery, capitalism and politics, locates the political struggles of the antebellum period in the international context of the dismantling of unfree labor systems. With its sequel, the volume will demonstrate that the conflict resulted from differences between capitalist and slave modes of production. With a careful synthesis of existing scholarship on the economics of slavery, the origins of abolitionism, the proslavery argument and the second party system, Ashworth maintains that the origins of the American Civil War are best understood in terms derived from Marxism.
Download or read book My Brother Slaves written by Sergio Lussana and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trapped in a world of brutal physical punishment and unremitting, back-breaking labor, Frederick Douglass mused that it was the friendships he shared with other enslaved men that carried him through his darkest days. In this pioneering study, Sergio A. Lussana offers the first in-depth investigation of the social dynamics between enslaved men and examines how individuals living under the conditions of bondage negotiated masculine identities. He demonstrates that African American men worked to create their own culture through a range of recreational pursuits similar to those enjoyed by their white counterparts, such as drinking, gambling, fighting, and hunting. Underscoring the enslaved men's relationships, however, were the sex-segregated work gangs on the plantations, which further reinforced their social bonds. Lussana also addresses male resistance to slavery by shifting attention from the visible, organized world of slave rebellion to the private realms of enslaved men's lives. He reveals how these men developed an oppositional community in defiance of the regulations of the slaveholder and shows that their efforts were intrinsically linked to forms of resistance on a larger scale. The trust inherent in these private relationships was essential in driving conversations about revolution. My Brother Slaves fills a vital gap in our contemporary understanding of southern history and of the effects that the South's peculiar institution had on social structures and gender expression. Employing detailed research that draws on autobiographies of and interviews with former slaves, Lussana's work artfully testifies to the importance of social relationships between enslaved men and the degree to which these fraternal bonds encouraged them to resist.
Download or read book Williams Gang written by Jeff Forret and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores a Washington, DC slave trader's legal misadventures associated with transporting convict slaves through New Orleans.
Download or read book Bawdy City written by Katie M. Hemphill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centering the experiences of women, this vivid social history examines Baltimore's prostitution trade and its evolution throughout the nineteenth century.
Download or read book A Fluid Frontier written by Karolyn Smardz Frost and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the major gateway into British North America for travelers on the Underground Railroad, the U.S./Canadian border along the Detroit River was a boundary that determined whether thousands of enslaved people of African descent could reach a place of freedom and opportunity. In A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland, editors Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker explore the experiences of the area’s freedom-seekers and advocates, both black and white, against the backdrop of the social forces—legal, political, social, religious, and economic—that shaped the meaning of race and management of slavery on both sides of the river. In five parts, contributors trace the beginnings of and necessity for transnational abolitionist activism in this unique borderland, and the legal and political pressures, coupled with African Americans’ irrepressible quest for freedom, that led to the growth of the Underground Railroad. A Fluid Frontier details the founding of African Canadian settlements in the Detroit River region in the first decades of the nineteenth century with a focus on the strong and enduring bonds of family, faith, and resistance that formed between communities in Michigan and what is now Ontario. New scholarship offers unique insight into the early history of slavery and resistance in the region and describes individual journeys: the perilous crossing into Canada of sixteen-year-old Caroline Quarlls, who was enslaved by her own aunt and uncle; the escape of the Crosswhite family, who eluded slave catchers in Marshall, Michigan, with the help of others in the town; and the international crisis sparked by the escape of Lucie and Thornton Blackburn and others. With a foreword by David W. Blight, A Fluid Frontier is a truly bi-national collection, with contributors and editors evenly split between specialists in Canadian and American history, representing both community and academic historians. Scholars of the Underground Railroad as well as those in borderland studies will appreciate the interdisciplinary mix and unique contributions of this volume.
