Author: John W. BlassingamePublisher:
ISBN: 9780195015799
Category : Plantation life
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
The Slave Community
Author: John W. BlassingamePublisher:
ISBN: 9780195015799
Category : Plantation life
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
The Slave Community
Author: John W. BlassingamePublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Book Description
Taking into account the major recent studies, this volume presents an updated analysis of the life of the black slave--his African heritage, culture, family, acculturation, behavior, religion, and personality.
Down by the Riverside
Author: Charles JoynerPublisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053907
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
Charles Joyner takes readers on a journey back in time, up the Waccamaw River through the Lowcountry of South Carolina, past abandoned rice fields once made productive by the labor of enslaved Africans, past rice mills and forest clearings into the antebellum world of All Saints Parish. In this community, and many others like it, enslaved people created a new language, a new religion--indeed, a new culture--from African traditions and American circumstances. Joyner recovers an entire lost society and way of life from the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the plantation whites and their guests, from quantitative analysis of census and probate records, and above all from the folklore and oral history of the enslaved Americans. His classic reconstruction of daily life in All Saints Parish is an inspiring testimony to the ingenuity and solidarity of a people. This anniversary edition of Joyner's landmark study includes a new introduction in which the author recounts his process of writing the book, reflects on its critical and popular reception, and surveys the past three decades of scholarship on the history of enslaved people in the United States.
Revisiting Blassingame's The Slave Community
Author: Al-Tony GilmorePublisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
Original essays critiquing John W. Blassingame's pioneering 1972 work, 'The slave community : plantation life in the antebellum South,' which broke with historical tradition by basing itself largely on the autobiographies and other personal records of enslaved persons themselves. Blassingame's book was controversial both for what it did and what it failed to do. In 'Revisiting Blassingame's The slave community,' nine scholars go over the approach, conclusions, and reception of 'The slave community,' and discuss the historiography of enslavement in America before and after its publication.
Joining Places
Author: Anthony E. KayePublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807877609
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. In the course of cultivating family ties, forging alliances, working, socializing, and storytelling, slaves fashioned their neighborhoods into the locus of slave society. Joining Places is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves. From these detailed accounts, Kaye tells the stories of men and women in love, "sweethearting," "taking up," "living together," and marrying across plantation lines; striving to get right with God; carving out neighborhoods as a terrain of struggle; and working to overthrow the slaveholders' regime. Kaye's depiction of slaves' sense of place in the Natchez District of Mississippi reveals a slave society that comprised not a single, monolithic community but an archipelago of many neighborhoods. Demonstrating that such neighborhoods prevailed across the South, he reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship.
Life in Black and White
Author: Brenda E. StevensonPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199923647
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Book Description
Life in the old South has always fascinated Americans--whether in the mythical portrayals of the planter elite from fiction such as Gone With the Wind or in historical studies that look inside the slave cabin. Now Brenda E. Stevenson presents a reality far more gripping than popular legend, even as she challenges the conventional wisdom of academic historians. Life in Black and White provides a panoramic portrait of family and community life in and around Loudoun County, Virginia--weaving the fascinating personal stories of planters and slaves, of free blacks and poor-to-middling whites, into a powerful portrait of southern society from the mid-eighteenth century to the Civil War. Loudoun County and its vicinity encapsulated the full sweep of southern life. Here the region's most illustrious families--the Lees, Masons, Carters, Monroes, and Peytons--helped forge southern traditions and attitudes that became characteristic of the entire region while mingling with yeoman farmers of German, Scotch-Irish, and Irish descent, and free black families who lived alongside abolitionist Quakers and thousands of slaves. Stevenson brilliantly recounts their stories as she builds the complex picture of their intertwined lives, revealing how their combined histories guaranteed Loudon's role in important state, regional, and national events and controversies. Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, for example, were hidden at a local plantation during the War of 1812. James Monroe wrote his famous "Doctrine" at his Loudon estate. The area also was the birthplace of celebrated fugitive slave Daniel Dangerfield, the home of John Janney, chairman of the Virginia secession convention, a center for Underground Railroad activities, and the location of John Brown's infamous 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry. In exploring the central role of the family, Brenda Stevenson offers a wealth of insight: we look into the lives of upper class women, who bore the oppressive weight of marriage and motherhood as practiced in the South and the equally burdensome roles of their husbands whose honor was tied to their ability to support and lead regardless of their personal preference; the yeoman farm family's struggle for respectability; and the marginal economic existence of free blacks and its undermining influence on their family life. Most important, Stevenson breaks new ground in her depiction of slave family life. Following the lead of historian Herbert Gutman, most scholars have accepted the idea that, like white, slaves embraced the nuclear family, both as a living reality and an ideal. Stevenson destroys this notion, showing that the harsh realities of slavery, even for those who belonged to such attentive masters as George Washington, allowed little possibility of a nuclear family. Far more important were extended kin networks and female headed households. Meticulously researched, insightful, and moving, Life in Black and White offers our most detailed portrait yet of the reality of southern life. It forever changes our understanding of family and race relations during the reign of the peculiar institution in the American South.
The Battle of Negro Fort
Author: Matthew J. ClavinPublisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479837334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Book Description
The dramatic story of the United States’ destruction of a free and independent community of fugitive slaves in Spanish Florida In the aftermath of the War of 1812, Major General Andrew Jackson ordered a joint United States army-navy expedition into Spanish Florida to destroy a free and independent community of fugitive slaves. The result was the Battle of Negro Fort, a brutal conflict among hundreds of American troops, Indian warriors, and black rebels that culminated in the death or re-enslavement of nearly all of the fort’s inhabitants. By eliminating this refuge for fugitive slaves, the United States government closed an escape valve that African Americans had utilized for generations. At the same time, it intensified the subjugation of southern Native Americans, including the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles. Still, the battle was significant for another reason as well. During its existence, Negro Fort was a powerful symbol of black freedom that subverted the racist foundations of an expanding American slave society. Its destruction reinforced the nation’s growing commitment to slavery, while illuminating the extent to which ambivalence over the institution had disappeared since the nation’s founding. Indeed, four decades after declaring that all men were created equal, the United States destroyed a fugitive slave community in a foreign territory for the first and only time in its history, which accelerated America’s transformation into a white republic. The Battle of Negro Fort places the violent expansion of slavery where it belongs, at the center of the history of the early American republic.
Slave Against Slave
Author: Jeff ForretPublisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807161128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545
Book Description
In the first-ever comprehensive analysis of violence between slaves in the antebellum South, Jeff Forret challenges persistent notions of slave communities as sites of unwavering harmony and solidarity. Though existing scholarship shows that intraracial black violence did not reach high levels until after Reconstruction, contemporary records bear witness to its regular presence among enslaved populations. Slave against Slave explores the roots of and motivations for such violence and the ways in which slaves, masters, churches, and civil and criminal laws worked to hold it in check. Far from focusing on violence alone, Forret’s work also adds depth to our understanding of morality among the enslaved, revealing how slaves sought to prevent violence and punish those who engaged in it. Forret mines a vast array of slave narratives, slaveholders’ journals, travelers’ accounts, and church and court records from across the South to approximate the prevalence of slave-against-slave violence prior to the Civil War. A diverse range of motives for these conflicts emerges, from tensions over status differences, to disagreements originating at work and in private, to discord relating to the slave economy and the web of debts that slaves owed one another, to courtship rivalries, marital disputes, and adulterous affairs. Forret also uncovers the role of explicitly gendered violence in bondpeople’s constructions of masculinity and femininity, suggesting a system of honor among slaves that would have been familiar to southern white men and women, had they cared to acknowledge it. Though many generations of scholars have examined violence in the South as perpetrated by and against whites, the internal clashes within the slave quarters have remained largely unexplored. Forret’s analysis of intraracial slave conflicts in the Old South examines narratives of violence in slave communities, opening a new line of inquiry into the study of American slavery.
Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Libra R. HildePublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660687
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411
Book Description
Analyzing published and archival oral histories of formerly enslaved African Americans, Libra R. Hilde explores the meanings of manhood and fatherhood during and after the era of slavery, demonstrating that black men and women articulated a surprisingly broad and consistent vision of paternal duty across more than a century. Complicating the tendency among historians to conflate masculinity within slavery with heroic resistance, Hilde emphasizes that, while some enslaved men openly rebelled, many chose subtle forms of resistance in the context of family and local community. She explains how a significant number of enslaved men served as caretakers to their children and shaped their lives and identities. From the standpoint of enslavers, this was particularly threatening--a man who fed his children built up the master's property, but a man who fed them notions of autonomy put cracks in the edifice of slavery. Fatherhood highlighted the agonizing contradictions of the condition of enslavement, and to be an involved father was to face intractable dilemmas, yet many men tried. By telling the story of the often quietly heroic efforts that enslaved men undertook to be fathers, Hilde reveals how formerly enslaved African Americans evaluated their fathers (including white fathers) and envisioned an honorable manhood.
Working Cures
Author: Sharla M. FettPublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807853788
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Book Description
Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.