Author: Nik Ribianszky Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820368075 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 287
Book Description
In Generations of Freedom Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865. Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America's system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one's status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual's continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system. Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together—by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies—these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property—including that most precious, themselves.
Author: Ira Berlin Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674020832 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later. Most Americans, black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one fixed in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Here, however, Berlin offers a dynamic vision, a major reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war, and ultimately, emancipation. Berlin's understanding of the processes that continually transformed the lives of slaves makes Generations of Captivity essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of antebellum America. Connecting the Charter Generation to the development of Atlantic society in the seventeenth century, the Plantation Generation to the reconstruction of colonial society in the eighteenth century, the Revolutionary Generation to the Age of Revolutions, and the Migration Generation to American expansionism in the nineteenth century, Berlin integrates the history of slavery into the larger story of American life. He demonstrates how enslaved black people, by adapting to changing circumstances, prepared for the moment when they could seize liberty and declare themselves the Freedom Generation. This epic story, told by a master historian, provides a rich understanding of the experience of African-American slaves, an experience that continues to mobilize American thought and passions today.
Author: Dorothy Spruill Redford Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 1439612943 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
When the institution of slavery ended in 1865, Somerset Place was the third largest plantation in North Carolina. Located in the rural northeastern part of the state, Somerset was cumulatively home to more than 800 enslaved blacks and four generations of a planter family. During the 80 years that Somerset was an active plantation, hundreds of acres were farmed for rice, corn, oats, wheat, peas, beans, and flax. Today, Somerset Place is preserved as a state historic site offering a realistic view of what it was like for the slaves and freemen who once lived and worked on the plantation, once one of the Upper South's most prosperous enterprises.
Author: Margaret Wilkerson Sexton Publisher: John Murray ISBN: 9781473679597 Category : African American families Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of Black society, and when she falls for no-account Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves. In 1982, Evelyn's daughter, Jackie, is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband's drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life. Jackie's son, T.C., loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself. He was a square before Hurricane Katrina, but the New Orleans he knew didn't survive the storm. Fresh out of a four-month stint for drug charges, T.C. decides to start over-until an old friend convinces him to stake his new beginning on one last deal.
Author: William G. Thomas Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300256272 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.
Author: David S. Cecelski Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807835668 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 350
Book Description
Examines the life of a former slave who became a radical abolitionist and Union spy, recruiting black soldiers for the North, fighting racism within the Union Army and much more.
Author: Rashid Rashad Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1479761966 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
Remember me? I am your idea, your opinion, your imagination, produced by thinking. I am to be or not to be. Con-tem-plate me. I am neural activity especially—mostly in the more modern outer layer of your brain or, should I say, cortex, reminiscent of that caused by various experiences and sensations but which you can manipulate to your liking, your aims, your desires. Remember me? I come from the simplest reactions to stimuli and instincts; I have evolved the capacity of learning. The more you use me for righteousness, the more sophisticated your ability to anticipate and estimate outcomes. The more you use me for righteousness, the more you will be able to figure solutions to problems. I am of great value to you. I am your psychoanalysis; explore me for if you explore me, I will introduce you to biology, psychology, and even philosophy. Who put this thing together? Me. Who built this? Me. Who do I trust, who do I trust? Me. That is who I trust—who am I? I am a thought! Why not get to know me better?
Author: Ira Berlin Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674020825 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 516
Book Description
Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil. As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.
Author: Cristie Jo Johnston Publisher: ISBN: 9781952257001 Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Book 1 in the epic trilogy Generations Strong, Escape To Freedom is an extraordinary post-World War II adventure of a man and a woman who struggle to survive and the sacrifices they make to find freedom, love, hope, and redemption in a new world.
Author: Nik Ribianszky
Author: Ira Berlin
Author: Dorothy Spruill Redford
Author: Kevin Swanson
Author: Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Author: William G. Thomas
Author: David S. Cecelski
Author: Rashid Rashad
Author: Ira Berlin
Author: Cristie Jo Johnston