Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery nationwide. Rael immerses readers in the mix of social, geographic, economic, and political factors that shaped this unique American experience. He not only takes a far longer view of slavery's demise than do those who date it to the rise of abolitionism in 1831, he also places it in a broader Atlantic context. We see how slavery ended variously by consent or force across time and place and how views on slavery evolved differently between the centers of European power and their colonial peripheries-some of which would become power centers themselves. Rael shows how African Americans played the central role in ending slavery in the United States. Fuelled by new Revolutionary ideals of self-rule and universal equality-and on their own or alongside abolitionists-both slaves and free blacks slowly turned American opinion against the slave interests in the South. Secession followed, and then began the national bloodbath that would demand slavery's complete destruction.

In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America's most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation. Dew re-creates the midcentury American South of his childhood--in many respects a boy's paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow. Through entertainments and ""educational"" books that belittled African Americans, as well as the living examples of his own family, Dew was indoctrinated in a white supremacy that, at best, was condescendingly paternalistic and, at worst, brutally intolerant. The fear that southern culture, and the ""hallowed white male brotherhood,"" could come undone through the slightest flexibility in the color line gave the Jim Crow mindset its distinctly unyielding quality. Dew recalls his father, in most regards a decent man, becoming livid over a black tradesman daring to use the front, and not the back, door. The second half of the book shows how this former Confederate youth and descendant of Thomas Roderick Dew, one of slavery's most passionate apologists, went on to reject his racist upbringing and become a scholar of the South and its deeply conflicted history. The centerpiece of Dew's story is his sobering discovery of a price circular from 1860--an itemized list of humans up for sale. Contemplating this document becomes Dew's first step in an exploration of antebellum Richmond's slave trade that investigates the terrible--but, to its white participants, unremarkable--inhumanity inherent in the institution. Dew's wish with this book is to show how the South of his childhood came into being, poisoning the minds even of honorable people, and to answer the question put to him by Illinois Browning Culver, the African American woman who devoted decades of her life to serving his family: ""Charles, why do the grown-ups put so much hate in the children?

In 1822, thirty-four slaves and their leader, a free black man named Denmark Vesey, were tried and executed for their alleged plot to murder the white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina. Presenting a vast collection of contemporary documents that support or contradict the "official" story, the editors of this volume annotate the texts and interpret the evidence. This is the definitive account of a landmark event that spurred the South to secession and holds symbolic meaning today-as evidenced by the 2015 shooting that took place in Emanuel AME Church, a church Vesey had attended. This volume argues that the Vesey plot was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States.

The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo presents the history of the nation's forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey. It also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America's most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. Jeroen Dewulf rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a ""slave king"" as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, Dewulf identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and he traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa. Dewulf's focus on the social capital of slaves follows the mutual aid to seventeenth-century Manhattan. He suggests a much stronger impact of Manhattan's first slave community on the development of African American identity in New York and New Jersey than hitherto assumed. While the earliest works on slave culture in a North American context concentrated on an assumed process of assimilation according to European standards, later studies pointed out the need to look for indigenous African continuities. The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo suggests the necessity for an increased focus on the substantial contact that many Africans had with European - primarily Portuguese - cultures before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas. The book has already garnered honors as the winner of the Richard O. Collins Award in African Studies, the New Netherland Institute Hendricks Award, and the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Prize.

The 1839 Amistad revolt and the fate of the African slaves on board are well documented in books and in a blockbuster film. Michael Zeuske adds a new dimension to this history: the story of the people behind the Amistad. Based on his discovery-in previously unknown collections in Cuba and Spain-of the captain's logbook, the cook's notes, and the merchants' ledgers and correspondence, he paints an eye-opening portrait of the slave trade between Africa and the Spanish Caribbean. After the British Empire abolished the slave trade in 1808 and enforced the ban with warships, slave traders in Africa, Spanish and Cuban ship captains and financiers, and international merchants created a hidden network based on forged documents and well-placed bribes. It lasted until 1886 and ensnared hundred of thousands of slaves smuggled from Africa to the Caribbean, mostly to Cuba, and tens of thousands of slaves who were smuggled from Cuba to the United States. Zeuske reveals these secrets for the first time and offers a new historical framework for our understanding of the Amistad story.

For every gallon of ink that has been spilt on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its consequences, only one very small drop has been spent on the study of the forced migration of black Africans into the Mediterranean world of Islam. From the ninth to the early twentieth century, probably as many black Africans were forcibly taken across the Sahara, up the Nile valley, and across the Red Sea, as were transported across the Atlantic in a much shorter period. Yet their story has not yet been told. This book provides an introduction to this ""other"" slave trade, and to the Islamic cultural context within which it took place, as well as the effect this context had on those who were its victims. After an introductory essay, there are sections on Basic Texts (Qur'an and Hadith), Some Muslim Views on Slavery, Slavery and the Law, Perceptions of Africans in Some Arabic and Turkish Writings, Slave Capture, the Middle Passage, Slave Markets, Eunuchs and Concubines, Domestic Service, Military Service, Religion and Community, Freedom and Post-Slavery, and the Abolition of Slavery. A concluding segment provides a first-person account of the capture, transportation, and service in a Saharan oasis by a West African male, as related to a French official in the 1930s.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

A New York Times bestseller, A Slave in the White House received glowing reviewsthatpraised its narrative and original research. It is the story of Paul Jennings, who was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia and moved with the Madison household staff to the White House. Jennings was a self-taught and self-made man who purchased his own freedom and penned the first ever White House memoir. Nearly two centuries later, Montpelier scholar Elizabeth Dowling Taylor uncovered the memoir. In this amazing narrative she reconstructs his lifeand hisunusual portraits of James and Dolley Madison andSenator Daniel Websterin early nineteenth century Washington, as well as the 1812 assault on British troops and Jennings' heroic saving of George Washington's portrait. Fascinating and original, this is an important contribution to American history.

Exploring notions of history, collective memory, cultural memory, public memory, official memory, and public history, Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past explains how ordinary citizens, social groups, governments and institutions engage with the past of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. It illuminates how and why over the last five decades the debates about slavery have become so relevant in the societies where slavery existed and which participated in the Atlantic slave trade. The book draws on a variety of case studies to investigate its central questions. How have social actors and groups in Europe, Africa and the Americas engaged with the slave past of their societies? Are there are any relations between the demands to rename streets of Liverpool in England and the protests to take down Confederate monuments in the United States? How have black and white social actors and scholars influenced the ways slavery is represented in George Washington's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in the United States?How do slave cemeteries in Brazil and the United States and the walls of names of Whitney Plantation speak to other initiatives honoring enslaved people in England and South Africa? What shared problems and goals have led to the creation of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC? Why have artists used their works to confront the debates about slavery and its legacies? The important debates addressed in this book resonate in the present day. Arguing that memory of slavery is racialized and gendered, the book shows that more than just attempts to come to terms with the past, debates about slavery are associated with the persistent racial inequalities, racism, and white supremacy which still shape societies where slavery existed. Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past is thus a vital resource for students and scholars of the Atlantic world, the history of slavery and public history.

This book offers a first-person perspective on the institution of slavery in America, providing powerful, engaging interviews from the WPA slave narrative collection that enable readers to gain a true sense of the experience of enslavement. Today's students understandably have a hard time imagining what life for slaves more than 150 years ago was like. The best way to communicate what slaves experienced is to hear their words directly. The material in this concise single-volume work illuminates the lives of the last living generation of enslaved people in the United States-former slaves who were interviewed about their experiences in the 1930s. Based on more than 2,000 interviews, the transcriptions of these priceless interviews offer primary sources that tell a diverse and powerful picture of life under slavery. The book explores seven key topics-childhood, marriage, women, work, emancipation, runaways, and family. Through the examination of these subject areas, the interviews reveal the harsh realities of being a slave, such as how slave women were at the complete mercy of the men who operated the places where they lived, how nearly every enslaved person suffered a beating at some point in their lives, how enslaved families commonly lost relatives through sale, and how enslaved children were taken from their parents to care for the children of slaveholders. The thematic organizational format allows readers to easily access numerous excerpts about a specific topic quickly and enables comparisons between individuals in different locations or with different slaveholders to identify the commonalities and unique characteristics within the system of slavery. Provides a historical overview of the scholarship on slavery via first-person perspectives into the institution of slavery Supplies an introductory essay for each theme as well as brief contextual explanations for each excerpt with the text of the oral narrative Supplies primary source documents in the form of interviews with actual slaves from the WPA slave narratives that allow readers to better understand the experiences of those who lived in slavery Presents a history of the slave narratives project under the New Deal Gives eye-opening insights into the plight of women within the institution of slavery

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing of slaves. He considers the impact of European abolition and assesses slavery's role in African history. The book corrects the accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in the slaves' assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production, although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas, developed from its position on the periphery of capitalist Europe. This new edition revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography and incorporates recent research and an updated bibliography.

C. Vann Woodward is one of the most significant historians of the post-Reconstruction South. Over his career of nearly seven decades, he wrote nine books; won the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes; penned hundreds of book reviews, opinion pieces, and scholarly essays; and gained national and international recognition as a public intellectual. Even today historians must contend with Woodward's sweeping interpretations about southern history. What is less known about Woodward is his scholarly interest in the history of white antebellum southern dissenters, the immediate consequences of emancipation, and the history of Reconstruction in the years prior to the Compromise of 1877. Woodward addressed these topics in three mid-century lecture series that have never before been published. The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward presents for the first time lectures that showcase his life-long interest in exploring the contours and limits of nineteenth-century liberalism during key moments of social upheaval in the South. Historians Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner analyze these works, drawing on correspondence, published and unpublished material, and Woodward's personal notes. They also chronicle his failed attempts to finish a much-awaited comprehensive history of Reconstruction and reflect on the challenges of writing about the failures of post-Civil War American society during the civil rights era, dubbed the Second Reconstruction. With an insightful foreword by eminent Southern historian Edward L. Ayers, The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward offers new perspectives on this towering authority on nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern history and his attempts to make sense of the past amidst the tumultuous times in which he lived.

The ordeals of two famous African Americans
This special Leonaur edition combines the account of Harriet Ann Jacobs with that of Frederick Douglass. They were contemporaries and African Americans of note who shared a common background of slavery and, after their liberation, knew each other and worked for a common cause. The first account, a justifiably well known and highly regarded work, is that of Harriet Jacobs since this volume belongs in the Leonaur Women & Conflict series. Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813. Sold on as a child she suffered years of sexual abuse from her owner until in 1835 she escaped-leaving two children she'd had by a lover behind her. After hiding in a swamp she returned to her grandmother's shack where she occupied the crawl-space under its eaves. There she lived for seven years before escaping to Pennsylvania in 1842 and then moving on to New York, where she worked as a nursemaid. Jacobs published her book under the pseudonym of Linda Brent. She became a famous abolitionist, reformer and speaker on human rights. Frederick Douglass was just five years Jacobs' junior. He was born a slave in Maryland and he too suffered physical cruelty at the hands of his owners. In 1838 he escaped, boarding a train wearing a sailors uniform. Douglass became a social reformer of international fame principally because of his skill as an orator which propelled him to the status of statesman and diplomat as driven by his convictions regarding the fundamental equality of all human beings, he continued his campaigns for the rights of women generally, suffrage and emancipation.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

Jesse Olsavsky's The Most Absolute Abolition tells the dramatic story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground Railroad and revolutionized the abolitionist movement. These groups, based primarily in northeastern cities, defended Black neighborhoods from police and slave catchers. As the urban wing of the Underground Railroad, they helped as many as ten thousand refugees, building an elaborate network of like-minded sympathizers across boundaries of nation, gender, race, and class. Olsavsky reveals how the committees cultivated a movement of ideas animated by a motley assortment of agitators and intellectuals, including famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Henry David Thoreau, who shared critical information with one another. Formerly enslaved runaways-who grasped the economy of slavery, developed their own political imaginations, and communicated strategies of resistance to abolitionists-serve as the book's central focus. The dialogues between fugitives and abolitionists further radicalized the latter's tactics and inspired novel forms of feminism, prison reform, and utopian constructs. These notions transformed abolitionism into a revolutionary movement, one at the heart of the crises that culminated in the Civil War.

Because of its clandestine nature, much of the history of the Underground Railroad remains shrouded in secrecy--so much so that some historians have even doubted its importance. After decades of research, Tom Calarco recounts his experiences compiling evidence to give credence to the legend's oral history in upstate New York. As the Civil War loomed and politicians from the North and South debated the fate of slavery, brave New Yorkers risked their lives to help fugitive slaves escape bondage. Whites and blacks alike worked together on the Underground Railroad, using ingenious methods of communication and tactics to stay ahead of the slave master and bounty hunter. Especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, conscientious residents doubled their efforts to help runaways reach Canada. Join Calarco on this journey of discovery of one of the noblest endeavors in American history.

This book investigates the phenomenon of slavery and other forms of servitude experienced by people of African or indigenous origin who were taken captive and then subjected to forced labor in Charcas (Bolivia) in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Contributions by Tim Armstrong, Edward A. Chappell, W. Ralph Eubanks, Amy A. Foley, Michael Gorra, Sherita L. Johnson, Andrew B. Leiter, John T. Matthews, Julie Beth Napolin, Erin Penner, Stephanie Rountree, Julia Stern, Jay Watson, and Randall Wilhelm In 1930, the same year he moved into Rowan Oak, a slave-built former plantation home in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner published his first work of fiction that gave serious attention to the experience and perspective of an enslaved individual. For the next two decades, Faulkner repeatedly returned to the theme of slavery and to the figures of enslaved people in his fiction, probing the racial, economic, and political contours of his region, nation, and hemisphere in work such as The Sound and the Fury; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner and Slavery is the first collection to address the myriad legacies of African chattel slavery in the writings and personal history of one of the twentieth century's most incisive authors on US slavery and the long ordeal of race in the Americas. Contributors to the volume examine the constitutive links among slavery, capitalism, and modernity across Faulkner's oeuvre. They study how the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi informs writings like Absalom, Absalom! and trace how slavery's topologies of the rectilinear grid or square run up against the more reparative geography of the oval in Faulkner's narratives. Contributors explore how the legacies of slavery literally sound and resound across centuries of history, and across multiple novels and stories in Faulkner's fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, and they reveal how the author's remodeling work on his own residence brought him into an uncomfortable engagement with the spatial and architectural legacies of chattel slavery in north Mississippi. Faulkner and Slavery offers a timely intervention not only in the critical study of the writer's work but in ongoing national and global conversations about the afterlives of slavery and the necessary work of antiracism.