From the sixteenth to early-nineteenth century, four times more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. While this forced migration stripped slaves of their liberty, it failed to destroy many of their cultural practices, which came with Africans to the New World. In Working the Diaspora, Frederick Knight examines work cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, from West and West Central Africa to British North America and the Caribbean.

Knight demonstrates that the knowledge that Africans carried across the Atlantic shaped Anglo-American agricultural development and made particularly important contributions to cotton, indigo, tobacco, and staple food cultivation. The book also compellingly argues that the work experience of slaves shaped their views of the natural world. Broad in scope, clearly written, and at the center of current scholarly debates, Working the Diaspora challenges readers to alter their conceptual frameworks about Africans by looking at them as workers who, through the course of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation labor, shaped the development of the Americas in significant ways.

When thousands of African Americans freed themselves from slavery during the American Civil War and launched the larger process of emancipation, hundreds of northern antislavery reformers traveled to the federally occupied South to assist them. The two groups brought views and practices from their backgrounds that both helped and hampered the transition out of slavery. While enslaved, many Blacks assumed a certain guarded demeanor when dealing with whites. In freedom, they resented northerners' paternalistic attitudes and preconceptions about race, leading some to oppose aid programs-included those related to education, vocational training, and religious and social activities-initiated by whites. Some interactions resulted in constructive cooperation and adjustments to curriculum, but the frequent disputes more often compelled Blacks to seek additional autonomy. In an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between the formerly enslaved and northern reformers, John Cimprich shows how the unusual circumstances of emancipation in wartime presented new opportunities and spawned social movements for change yet produced intractable challenges and limited results. Navigating Liberty serves as the first comprehensive study of the two groups' collaboration and conflict, adding an essential chapter to the history of slavery's end in the United States.

Mende Nazer's happy childhood was cruelly cut short at the age of twelve when the Mujahidin rode into her village in the remote Nuba mountains of Sudan. They hacked down terrified villagers, raped the women and abducted the children. Mende was them. She was taken and sold to an Arab woman in Khartoum. She was stripped of her name and her freedom. For seven long years she was kept as a domestic slave, an 'abid', without any pay or a single day off. Her food was the leftover scraps and her bed was the floor of the locked-up garden shed. She endured this harsh and lonely existence without knowing whether her family was alive or dead, for seven long years. Passed on by her master, like a parcel, to a relative in London, Mende eventually managed to escape to freedom. Slave is a shocking first-person insight into the modern day slave trade. It is also a fascinating memoir of an African childhood and a moving testimony to a young girl's indomitable spirit in the face of adversity.

Pennsylvania contained the largest concentration of early America's abolitionist leaders and organizations, making it a necessary and illustrative stage from which to understand how national conversations about the place of free blacks in early America originated and evolved, and, importantly, the role that colonization-supporting the emigration of free and emancipated blacks to Africa-played in national and international antislavery movements. Beverly C. Tomek's meticulous exploration of the archives of the American Colonization Society, Pennsylvania's abolitionist societies, and colonizationist leaders (both black and white) enables her to boldly and innovatively demonstrate that, in Philadelphia at least, the American Colonization Society often worked closely with other antislavery groups to further the goals of the abolitionist movement. In Colonization and Its Discontents, Tomek brings a much-needed examination of the complexity of the colonization movement by describing in depth the difference between those who supported colonization for political and social reasons and those who supported it for religious and humanitarian reasons. Finally, she puts the black perspective on emigration into the broader picture instead of treating black nationalism as an isolated phenomenon and examines its role in influencing the black abolitionist agenda.

Despite the inherent brutality of slavery, some slaves could find small but important opportunities to act decisively. The Hierarchies of Slavery in Santos, Brazil, 1822-1888 explores such moments of opportunity and resistance in Santos, a Southeastern township in Imperial Brazil. It argues that slavery in Brazil was hierarchical: slaves' fleeting chances to form families, work jobs that would not kill or maim, avoid debilitating diseases, or find a (legal or illegal) pathway out of slavery were highly influenced by their demographic background and their owners' social position. By tracing the lives of slaves and owners through multiple records, the author is able to show that the cruelties that slaves faced were not equally shared. One important implication is that internal stratification likely helped perpetuate slavery because there was the belief, however illusionary, that escaping captivity was not necessary for social mobility.

A gripping and deeply revealing history of an infamous slave rebellion that nearly toppled New Orleans and changed the course of American history

In January 1811, five hundred slaves, dressed in military uniforms and armed with guns, cane knives, and axes, rose up from the plantations around New Orleans and set out to conquer the city. Ethnically diverse, politically astute, and highly organized, this self-made army challenged not only the economic system of plantation agriculture but also American expansion. Their march represented the largest act of armed resistance against slavery in the history of the United States.

American Uprising is the riveting and long-neglected story of this elaborate plot, the rebel army's dramatic march on the city, and its shocking conclusion. No North American slave uprising--not Gabriel Prosser's, not Denmark Vesey's, not Nat Turner's--has rivaled the scale of this rebellion either in terms of the number of the slaves involved or the number who were killed. More than one hundred slaves were slaughtered by federal troops and French planters, who then sought to write the event out of history and prevent the spread of the slaves' revolutionary philosophy. With the Haitian revolution a recent memory and the War of 1812 looming on the horizon, the revolt had epic consequences for America.

Through groundbreaking original research, Daniel Rasmussen offers a window into the young, expansionist country, illuminating the early history of New Orleans and providing new insight into the path to the Civil War and the slave revolutionaries who fought and died for justice and the hope of freedom.

Some works have examined the first and temporary abolition of French colonial slavery during the French Revolutionary era, but relatively little is known about the second French abolitionist movement that culminated in the freeing of a quarter of a million slaves in 1848. This book fills the huge gap in existing historiography by providing a detailed study of French anti-slavery forces during this period, explaining why France abolished colonial slavery fifteen years later than Britain but fifteen years before emancipation in the United States. It traces the largely political struggle of a cautious, elitist group of humanitarians against a well-organized colonial lobby and a largely indifferent July Monarchy government. The few radical, determined abolitionists, like the black Cyrille Bissette, were too marginal to move French public opinion and bring about abolition until the Revolution of 1848 brought the Second Republic to power.

Among the most infamous U.S. Supreme Court decisions is Dred Scott v. Sandford . Despite the case's signal importance as a turning point in America's history, the lives of the slave litigants have receded to the margins of the record, as conventional accounts have focused on the case's judges and lawyers. In telling the life of Harriet, Dred's wife and co-litigant in the case, this book provides a compensatory history to the generations of work that missed key sources only recently brought to light. Moreover, it gives insight into the reasons and ways that slaves used the courts to establish their freedom.
A remarkable piece of historical detective work, Mrs. Dred Scott chronicles Harriet's life from her adolescence on the 1830s Minnesota-Wisconsin frontier, to slavery-era St. Louis, through the eleven years of legal wrangling that ended with the high court's notorious decision. The book not only recovers her story, but also reveals that Harriet may well have been the lynchpin in this pivotal episode in American legal history.
Reconstructing Harriet Scott's life through innovative readings of journals, military records, court dockets, and even frontier store ledgers, VanderVelde offers a stunningly detailed account that is at once a rich portrait of slave life, an engrossing legal drama, and a provocative reassessment of a central event in U.S. constitutional history. More than a biography, the book is a deep social history that freshly illuminates some of the major issues confronting antebellum America, including the status of women, slaves, Free Blacks, and Native Americans.

Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil , first published in 2006, concerns what is entailed by pledging allegiance to a constitutional text and tradition saturated with concessions to evil. The Constitution of the United States was originally understood as an effort to mediate controversies between persons who disputed fundamental values, and did not offer a vision of the good society. In order to form a 'more perfect union' with slaveholders, late-eighteenth-century citizens fashioned a constitution that plainly compelled some injustices and was silent or ambiguous on other questions of fundamental right. This constitutional relationship could survive only as long as a bisectional consensus was required to resolve all constitutional questions not settled in 1787. Dred Scott challenges persons committed to human freedom to determine whether antislavery northerners should have provided more accommodations for slavery than were constitutionally strictly necessary or risked the enormous destruction of life and property that preceded Lincoln's new birth of freedom.

In an incisive analysis of over two dozen clauses as well as several 'unwritten' rules and practices, The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War shows how the Constitution aggravated the sectional conflict over slavery to the point of civil war. Going beyond the fugitive slave clause, the three-fifths clause, and the international slave trade clause, Michael F. Conlin demonstrates that many more constitutional provisions and practices played a crucial role in the bloody conflict that claimed the lives of over 750,000 Americans. He also reveals that ordinary Americans in the mid-nineteenth century had a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of the provisions and the methods of interpretation of the Constitution. Lastly, Conlin reminds us that many of the debates that divide Americans today were present in the 1850s: minority rights vs. majority rule, original intent vs. a living Constitution, state's rights vs. federal supremacy, judicial activism vs. legislative prerogative, secession vs. union, and counter-majoritarianism vs. democracy.

Most Americans, both black and white, believe that slavery was a system exclusively maintained by whites to exploit blacks, but Larry Koger's authoritative study reveals the extent to which African Americans played a significant role as slave masters in the peculiar institution. By examining South Carolina's diverse population of African-American slaveowners, Koger demonstrates that free African Americans widely embraced slavery as a viable economic system and that they--like their white counterparts--exploited the labor of slaves on their farms and in their businesses. Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, Koger sheds light on the nature of African-American slaveholding, its complexity, and its rationales. He describes how some African-American masters earned their freedom but how many others--primarily mulattoes--were unfamiliar with slavery's dehumanization because they were born of free parents. Koger reveals the caste system that existed within the antebellum African-American community--one in which prosperous mulattoes and African Americans of lighter skin sought to separate themselves from those held in bondage. Koger challenges the notion that most African-American slaveholders were benevolent owners who purchased the freedom of relatives. Instead he shows that while some did buy family members and other slaves for humanitarian reasons, African Americans in South Carolina acquired slaves primarily because they had little access to other sources of labor and because they viewed slaveowning as a means of elevating themselves above the masses.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This book details how France's most profitable plantation colony became Haiti, Latin America's first independent nation, through an uprising by slaves and the largest and wealthiest free population of people of African descent in the New World. Garrigus explains the origins of this free colored class, exposes the ways its members supported and challenged slavery, and examines how they shaped a new 'American' identity.

Despite the vast literature on the transatlantic slave trade, the role of sailors aboard slave ships has remained unexplored. This book fills that gap by examining every aspect of their working lives, from their reasons for signing on a slaving vessel, to their experiences in the Caribbean and the American South after their human cargoes had been sold. It explores how they interacted with men and women of African origin at their ports of call, from the Africans they traded with, to the free black seamen who were their crewmates, to the slaves and ex-slaves they mingled with in the port cities of the Americas. Most importantly, it questions their interactions with the captive Africans they were transporting during the dread middle passage, arguing that their work encompassed the commoditisation of these people ready for sale.

Abolitionism is not only a strategy or a set of demands, aimed at the reduction (or suppression) of custody, it is also a perspective, a philosophy, an approach which challenges conventional definitions of crime. This book examines the origin, philosophy and achievements of abolitionism and reviews the literature on penal abolitionism from the 1960s to the 1980s.
By collecting and discussing the key abolitionist arguments, the author critically analyzes the views expressed by its leading proponents; Nils Christie, Louk Hulsman, Thomas Mathiesen and Herman Bianchi, examining in particular how their views took shape, their philosophical foundations, and the social and political context of abolitionist ideas and perspectives. Policies, such as the virtual abolition of custody for young offenders in Italy, are presented and the area of informal justice is also addressed, with an overview of mediation and compensation practices, and an assessment of the degree of their effectiveness and desirability.
Through assessment of these achievements and experiments of specific abolitionist ideas, the author attempts to identify the legacy of abolitionism from a European perspective, while bringing into focus more recent contributions concerning the study of terrorism and war.

The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. It presents the slaveholders as men and women, a great many of whom were intelligent, honorable, and pious. It asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in transatlantic debates and boldly challenged an ascendant capitalist ('free-labor') society. Blending classical and Christian traditions, they forged a moral and political philosophy designed to sustain conservative principles in history, political economy, social theory, and theology, while translating them into political action. Even those who judge their way of life most harshly have much to learn from their probing moral and political reflections on their times - and ours - beginning with the virtues and failings of their own society and culture.

"If I know my own heart, I can truly say, that I have not a selfish wish in placing myself under the patronage of the American Colonization] Society; usefulness in my day and generation, is what I principally court."

"Sensible then, as all are of the disadvantages under which we at present labour, can any consider it a mark of folly, for us to cast our eyes upon some other portion of the globe where all these inconveniences are removed where the Man of Colour freed from the fetters and prejudice, and degradation, under which he labours in this land, may walk forth in all the majesty of his creation--a new born creature--a "Free Man" "
--John Brown Russwurm, 1829.

John Brown Russwurm (1799-1851) is almost completely missing from the annals of the Pan-African movement, despite the pioneering role he played as an educator, abolitionist, editor, government official, emigrationist and colonizationist. Russwurm's life is one of "firsts" first African American graduate of Maine's Bowdoin College; co-founder of "Freedom's Journal," America's first newspaper to be owned, operated, and edited by African Americans; and, following his emigration to Africa, first black governor of the Maryland section of Liberia. Despite his accomplishments, Russwurm struggled internally with the perennial Pan-Africanist dilemma of whether to go to Africa or stay and fight in the United States, and his ordeal was the first of its kind to be experienced and resolved before the public eye.

With this slim, accessible biography of Russwurm, Winston James makes a major contribution to the history of black uplift and protest in the Early American Republic and the larger Pan-African world. James supplements the biography with a carefully edited and annotated selection of Russwurm's writings, which vividly demonstrate the trajectory of his political thinking and contribution to Pan-Africanist thought and highlight the challenges confronting the peoples of the African Diaspora. Though enormously rich and powerfully analytical, Russwurm's writings have never been previously anthologized.

The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm is a unique and unparalleled reflection on the Early American Republic, the African Diaspora and the wider history of the times. An unblinking observer of and commentator on the condition of African Americans as well as a courageous fighter against white supremacy and for black emancipation, Russwurm's life and writings provide a distinct and articulate voice on race that is as relevant to the present as it was to his own lifetime.

Enmeshed in the exploitative world of racial slavery, overseers were central figures in the management of early American plantation enterprises. All too frequently dismissed as brutal and incompetent, they defy easy categorisation. Some were rogues, yet others were highly skilled professionals, farmers, and artisans. Some were themselves enslaved. They and their wives, with whom they often formed supervisory partnerships, were caught between disdainful planters and defiant enslaved labourers, as they sought to advance their ambitions. Their history, revealed here in unprecedented detail, illuminates the complex power struggles and interplay of class and race in a volatile slave society.

Why was Massachusetts one of the few Northern states to grant African-American males the right to vote? Why did it pass personal liberty laws, which helped protect fugitive slaves from federal authorities in the two decades immediately preceding the Civil War? Beyond Garrison finds answers to these important questions in unfamiliar and surprising places. Its protagonists are not the noble supporters of American abolitionism grouped around William Lloyd Garrison, but, rather, ordinary men and women in country towns and villages, encouraged by African-American activists throughout the state. Bruce Laurie's approach focuses on the politics of such antislavery advocates and demonstrates their leanings toward third-party politics. Bruce Laurie is currently Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a member of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous collections of essays and in Labor History, Journal of Social History and Journal of American History. He is co-editor, with Milton Cantor, of Class, Sex and the Woman Worker (Greenwood Press, 1979) and co-editor with Eric Arnesen and Julie Greene of Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (University of Illinois Press, 1998). He is also the author of Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Temple University Press, 1980), and Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth Century America (Hill & Wang, 1989).

David Lambert explores the political and cultural articulation of white creole identity in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados during the age of abolitionism (c.1780-1833), the period in which the British antislavery movement emerged, first to attack the slave trade and then the institution of chattel slavery itself. Supporters of slavery in Barbados and beyond responded with their own campaigning, resulting in a series of debates and moments of controversy, both localised and transatlantic in significance. They exposed tensions between Britain and its West Indian colonies, and raised questions about whether white slaveholders could be classed as fully 'British' and if slavery was compatible with 'English' conceptions of liberty and morality. David Lambert considers what it meant to be a white colonial subject in a place viewed as a vital and loyal part of the empire but subject to increasing metropolitan attack because of the existence of slavery.

Why was Massachusetts one of the few Northern states to grant African-American males the right to vote? Why did it pass personal liberty laws, which helped protect fugitive slaves from federal authorities in the two decades immediately preceding the Civil War? Beyond Garrison finds answers to these important questions in unfamiliar and surprising places. Its protagonists are not the noble supporters of American abolitionism grouped around William Lloyd Garrison, but, rather, ordinary men and women in country towns and villages, encouraged by African-American activists throughout the state. Bruce Laurie's approach focuses on the politics of such antislavery advocates and demonstrates their leanings toward third-party politics. Bruce Laurie is currently Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a member of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous collections of essays and in Labor History, Journal of Social History and Journal of American History. He is co-editor, with Milton Cantor, of Class, Sex and the Woman Worker (Greenwood Press, 1979) and co-editor with Eric Arnesen and Julie Greene of Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (University of Illinois Press, 1998). He is also the author of Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Temple University Press, 1980), and Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth Century America (Hill & Wang, 1989).

This book appeal to readers of history - both nonfiction and historical fiction. The readers interested in civil/human rights issues. It is great for those who enjoy tales of sea-dogs, pirates and adventure on the high seas e.g. fans of the novels of Patrick O'Brian. It reviews in pb round-ups in national newspapers. A gripping, meticulously researched and artfully written account of the life, exploits and character of notorious sea-dog John Hawkyns, England's first slave trader. In a starred review, "Publishers Weekly" has called "The Queen's Slave Trader" "a tour de force." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries England became the greatest slave trading nation in the world, her merchants and businessmen grew fat, and her ports and cities boomed, on the suffering of millions of Africans captives. And, the pattern her slave traders followed had been pioneered in the sixteenth century by John Hawkyns, England's first, and Queen Elizabeth's personal, slave trader. "The Queen's Slave Trader" by Nick Hazlewood tells the story of England's first incursions into the trade she would come to dominate, the way they were used to attack the Portuguese and Spanish super-powers, and the involvement for the first, but not the last, time of the English crown in the shameful traffic of human beings. This is a story of survival, revenge, and the destruction of a race.

They baked New England's Thanksgiving pies, preached their faith to crowds of worshippers, spied for the patriots during the Revolution, wrote that human bondage was a sin, and demanded reparations for slavery. Black women in colonial and revolutionary New England sought not only legal emancipation from slavery but defined freedom more broadly to include spiritual, familial, and economic dimensions.
Hidden behind the banner of achieving freedom was the assumption that freedom meant affirming black manhood The struggle for freedom in New England was different for men than for women. Black men in colonial and revolutionary New England were struggling for freedom from slavery and for the right to patriarchal control of their own families. Women had more complicated desires, seeking protection and support in a male headed household while also wanting personal liberty. Eventually women who were former slaves began to fight for dignity and respect for womanhood and access to schooling for black children.

When the passage of the Abolition of Slavery Act, effective August 1, 1834, ushered in the end of slavery throughout the British Empire, people of the African descent celebrated their newfound freedom. Now African-American fugitive slaves, free black immigrants, and the few remaining enslaved Africans could live unfettered live in Canada -- a reality worthy of celebration.

This new, well-researched book provides insight into the creation, development, and evolution of a distinct African-Canadian tradition through descriptive historical accounts and appealing images. The social, cultural, political, and educational practices of Emanipation Day festivities across Canada are explored, with emphasis on Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and British Columbia.

"Emancipation is not only a word in the dictionary, but an action to liberate one's destiny. This outstanding book is superb in the interpretation of "the power of freedom" in one's heart and mind -- moving from 1834 to present." -- Dr. Henry Bishop, Black Cultural Centre, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

Modern scholarship on the relationship between British capitalism and Caribbean slavery has been profoundly influenced by Eric Williams’s 1944 classic, Capitalism and Slavery. The present volume represents the proceedings of a conference on Caribbean Slavery and British Capitalism convened in his honour in 1984, and includes essays on Dr Williams’s scholarly work and influence. These essays, by thirteen scholars from the United States, England, Africa, Canada and the Caribbean, explore the relationship between Great Britain and her plantation slave colonies in the Caribbean.

Winner of the Conference on Latin American History's 2010 Mexican History Book Prize.
"The Black Middle" is the first full-length study of black African slaves and other people of African descent in the Spanish colonial province of Yucatan. Matthew Restall makes expert use of Spanish and Maya language documents from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, found in a dozen different archives. His goal is to discover what life was like for a people hitherto ignored by historians. He explores such topics as slavery and freedom, militia service and family life, bigamy and witchcraft, and the ways in which Afro-Yucatecans (as he dubs them) interacted with Mayas and Spaniards. Restall concludes that, in numerous ways, Afro-Yucatecans lived and worked in a middle space between--but closely connected to--Mayas and Spaniards. The book's "black middle" thesis has profound implications for the study of Africans throughout the Americas.