This collection of essays explores the ways that memories of African slavery and the slave trade persist into the present, as well as the effect those memories have in shaping political, social, economic, and religious behavior today. The articles take a range of approaches: several examine the stigma that slave origins engender; one pairs lamentations about slave raiders with songs that celebrate a community's victory over a major predator; another looks at the impact of slavery through the lens of tales told by children. One author examines the techniques used by descendants of slave traders and slave owners to overcome their guilt, such as worshiping the spirits of those enslaved by their ancestors, while another shows how democratic politics has made it possible for descendants of slaves to liberate themselves from their inferior social status. The authors use a variety of sources -- interviews, proverbs, songs, religious art, newspaper articles, and children's stories -- to illuminate not only how people remember the past but also how they struggle to liberate themselves from it.

Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of "negro cloth," a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction-that North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.

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.

Bonds of Empire presents an account of slave law that is entirely new: one in which English law imbued plantation slavery with its staying power even as it insulated slave owners from contemplating the moral implications of owning human beings. Emphasizing practice rather than proscription, the book follows South Carolina colonists as they used English law to maximize the value of the people they treated as property. Doing so reveals that most daily legal practices surrounding slave ownership were derived from English law: colonists categorized enslaved people as property using English legal terms, they bought and sold them with printed English legal forms, and they followed English legal procedures as they litigated over enslaved people in court. Bonds of Empire ultimately shows that plantation slavery and the laws that governed it were not beyond the pale of English imperial legal history; they were yet another invidious manifestation of English law's protean potential.

This book provides an historical, critical analysis of the doctrine of 'civilising mission' in Portuguese colonialism in the crucial period from 1870 to 1930. Exploring international contexts and transnational connections, this 'civilising mission' is analysed and assessed by examining the employment and distribution of African manpower.

The lives of six African children, ages nine to sixteen, were forever altered by the revolt aboard the Cuban schooner "La Amistad" in 1839. Like their adult companions, all were captured in Africa and illegally sold as slaves. In this fascinating revisionist history, Benjamin N. Lawrance reconstructs six entwined stories and brings them to the forefront of the" Amistad "conflict. Through eyewitness testimonies, court records, and the children's own letters, Lawrance recounts how their lives were inextricably interwoven by the historic drama, and casts new light on illegal nineteenth-century transatlantic slave smuggling.

How did freed slaves reinvent themselves after the shackles of slavery had been lifted? How were they reintegrated into society, and what was their social position and status? What contributions did they make to the society that had once - sometimes brutally - repressed them? This collection builds on recent dynamic work on Roman freedmen, the contributors drawing upon a rich and varied body of evidence - visual, literary, epigraphic and archaeological - to elucidate the impact of freed slaves on Roman society and culture amid the shadow of their former servitude. The contributions span the period between the first century BC and the early third century AD and survey the territories of the Roman Republic and Empire, while focusing on Italy and Rome.

In "Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America," Kenneth Morgan shows how the institutions of indentured servitude and black slavery interacted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He covers all aspects of the two labor systems, including their impact on the economy, on racial attitudes, social structures and on regional variations within the colonies. Throughout, overriding themes emerge: the labor market in North America, the significance of racial distinctions, supply and demand factors in transatlantic migration and labor, and resistance to bondage.

This is an ideal introduction to an area that is crucial for understanding not just Colonial American society but also the later development of the United States.

In early 1864, as the Confederate Army of Tennessee licked its wounds after being routed at the Battle of Chattanooga, Major-General Patrick Cleburne (the "Stonewall of the West") proposed that "the most courageous of our slaves" be trained as soldiers and that "every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war" be freed. In Confederate Emancipation, Bruce Levine looks closely at such Confederate plans to arm and free slaves. He shows that within a year of Cleburne's proposal, which was initially rejected out of hand, Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin, and Robert E. Lee had all reached the same conclusions. At that point, the idea was debated widely in newspapers and drawing rooms across the South, as more and more slaves fled to Union lines and fought in the ranks of the Union army. Eventually, the soldiers of Lee's army voted on the proposal, and the Confederate government actually enacted a version of it in March. The Army issued the necessary orders just two weeks before Appomattox, too late to affect the course of the war. Throughout the book, Levine captures the voices of blacks and whites, wealthy planters and poor farmers, soldiers and officers, and newspaper editors and politicians from all across the South. In the process, he sheds light on such hot-button topics as what the Confederacy was fighting for, whether black southerners were willing to fight in large numbers in defense of the South, and what this episode foretold about life and politics in the post-war South. Confederate Emancipation offers an engaging and illuminating account of a fascinating and politically charged idea, setting it firmly and vividly in the context of the Civil War and the part played in it by the issue of slavery and the actions of the slaves themselves.

In this study of literature and law from the Constitutional founding through the Civil War, Hoang Gia Phan demonstrates how American citizenship and civic culture were profoundly transformed by the racialized material histories of free, enslaved, and indentured labor. Bonds of Citizenship illuminates the historical tensions between the legal paradigms of citizenship and contract, and in the emergence of free labor ideology in American culture. Phan argues that in the age of Emancipation the cultural attributes of free personhood became identified with the legal rights and privileges of the citizen, and that individual freedom thus became identified with the nation-state. He situates the emergence of American citizenship and the American novel within the context of Atlantic slavery and Anglo-American legal culture, placing early American texts by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Brockden Brown alongside Black Atlantic texts by Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano. Beginning with a revisionary reading of the Constitution's "slavery clauses," Phan recovers indentured servitude as a transitional form of labor bondage that helped define the key terms of modern U.S. citizenship: mobility, volition, and contract. Bonds of Citizenship demonstrates how citizenship and civic culture were transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national Union, while analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville alongside a wide-ranging archive of lesser-known antebellum legal and literary texts in the context of changing conceptions of constitutionalism, property, and contract. Situated at the nexus of literary criticism, legal studies, and labor history, Bonds of Citizenship challenges the founding fiction of a pro-slavery Constitution central to American letters and legal culture.Hoang Gia Phanis Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.In theAmerica and the Long 19th CenturyseriesAn ALI book

"Ty Seidule scorches us with the truth and rivets us with his fierce sense of moral urgency." --Ron Chernow In a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy--and explores why some of this country's oldest wounds have never healed. Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning. In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacy--that its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation and enslavement of Black Americans--and directly challenges the idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it. Through the arc of Seidule's own life, as well as the culture that formed him, he seeks a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War have remained buried beneath layers of myth and even outright lies--and how they embody a cultural gulf that separates millions of Americans to this day. Part history lecture, part meditation on the Civil War and its fallout, and part memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the deeply-held legends and myths of the Confederacy--and provides a surprising interpretation of essential truths that our country still has a difficult time articulating and accepting.

While it is well known that more Africans fought on behalf of the British than with the successful patriots of the American Revolution, Gerald Horne reveals in his latest work of historical recovery that after 1776, Africans and African-Americans continued to collaborate with Great Britain against the United States in battles big and small until the Civil War. Many African Americans viewed Britain, an early advocate of abolitionism and emancipator of its own slaves, as a powerful ally in their resistance to slavery in the Americas. This allegiance was far-reaching, from the Caribbean to outposts in North America to Canada. In turn, the British welcomed and actively recruited both fugitive and free African Americans, arming them and employing them in military engagements throughout the Atlantic World, as the British sought to maintain a foothold in the Americas following the Revolution. In this path-breaking book, Horne rewrites the history of slave resistance by placing it for the first time in the context of military and diplomatic wrangling between Britain and the United States. Painstakingly researched and full of revelations, Negro Comrades of the Crown is among the first book-length studies to highlight the Atlantic origins of the Civil War, and the active role played by African Americans within these external factors that led to it. Listen to a one hour special with Dr. Gerald Horne on the "Sojourner Truth" radio show.

African American fugitive slave narratives are receiving growing amounts of attention for their literary and historical value. This book examines the techniques the slave narrative writers used to authorize and rhetorically create themselves in their writings. By examining such issues as voice and identity formation, the volume demonstrates how identity may be seen as a cultural fabrication. Former slave narrators used a series of masking and doubling techniques to address their experiences as African Americans. This book crosses the boundaries between literary criticism and historical study by examining the tensions between generic conventions and the impulses that created and reinforced them. The introduction and opening chapter offer clear and accessible discussions of the social, political, cultural, and literary conditions influencing the slave narrative genre. Subsequent chapters are built on this theoretical framework and present close analytical readings of The Confessions of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass's Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, by William and Ellen Craft. The volume probingly traces the relationship between rhetorical self-creation and social ideology to show how that relationship was mediated within the fugitive slave narrative genre.

The shocking first-hand account of one man’s remarkable fight for freedom; now an award-winning motion picture.

‘Why had I not died in my young years – before God had given me children to love and live for? What unhappiness and suffering and sorrow it would have prevented. I sighed for liberty; but the bondsman's chain was round me, and could not be shaken off.’

1841: Solomon Northup is a successful violinist when he is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Taken from his family in New York State – with no hope of ever seeing them again – and forced to work on the cotton plantations in the Deep South, he spends the next twelve years in captivity until his eventual escape in 1853.

First published in 1853, this extraordinary true story proved to be a powerful voice in the debate over slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. It is a true-life testament of one man’s courage and conviction in the face of unfathomable injustice and brutality: its influence on the course of American history cannot be overstated.

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.

This is the first reader that goes beyond the fragmentation between Spanish, British, Dutch, and French Caribbean history to explain slavery, emancipation, colonization and decolonization in the region. The contributors to this pan-Caribbean approach are leading scholars in the field, including Franklin Knight and Luis Martinez-Fernandez.

"Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised." So reads the legal definition of slavery agreed by the League of Nations in 1926. Further enshrined in law during international negotiations in 1956 and 1998, this definition has been interpreted in different ways by the international courts in the intervening years. What can be considered slavery? Should forced labour be considered slavery? Debt-bondage? Child soldiering? Or forced marriage? This book explores the limits of how slavery is understood in law. It shows how the definition of slavery in law and the contemporary understanding of slavery has continually evolved and continues to be contentious. It traces the evolution of concepts of slavery, from Roman law through the Middle Ages, the 18th and 19th centuries, up to the modern day manifestations, including manifestations of forced labour and trafficking in persons, and considers how the 1926 definition can distinguish slavery from lesser servitudes. Together the contributors have put together a set of guidelines intended to clarify the law where slavery is concerned. The Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery, reproduced here for the first time, takes their shared understanding of both the past and present to project a consistent interpretation of the legal definition of slavery for the future.

A collection of first hand narratives and oral histories portraying the African American experience from slavery through emancipation and into the 20th century. African American Frontiers concentrates on the period from 1703, the date of the first published narrative of an African slave's attainment of freedom in the American colonies, to 1948, the year in which President Harry S. Truman integrated the United States armed forces through Executive Order 9981. This book is an invaluable historical resource that brings together diverse first-person accounts of individual African Americans through primary source documents, including: Henry "Box" Brown, who escaped the South by express mailing himself to Philadelphia in a wooden crate; Herb Jeffries, who introduced the black cowboy in Westerns; and Eunice Jackson, whose funeral home was destroyed in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Such little known stories, most of them previously unpublished, resonate with the determination, forbearance, moral strength, and imagination of the tellers, and give readers an opportunity to see the world as it once was, as told by the men and women who lived in it. Includes primary source documents

Based on innovative and extensive research, this edited volume examines the complex and unique human, cultural, and religious exchanges that resulted from the enslavement and the trade of Africans in the North and the South Atlantic regions during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. The book shows the connections between multiple Atlantic worlds that contain unique and diverse characteristics. The Atlantic slave trade disrupted African societies, families, and kin groups. Along the paths of the slave trade, men, women and children were imprisoned, separated, raped, and killed by war, famine and disease. The authors investigate some of the different pathways, whether physical and geographical or intellectual and metaphorical, that arose over the centuries in different parts of the Atlantic world in response to the slave trade and slavery. Highlighting unique and similar aspects, this groundbreaking book follows the trajectories of individuals, groups, and images, rethinking their relations with the local, and the Atlantic contexts.Although not neglecting statistic data, the volume focuses on the movement of groups and individuals as well as the cultural, artistic and religious transfers deriving from the Atlantic slave trade. Privileging multidirectional and transnational approaches, the authors investigate regions and groups usually underrepresented in Atlantic scholarship. The various chapters reassess the results of the transatlantic slave trade interactions that gave birth to mixed groups, cultures, and artistic forms on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Some chapters examine the trajectories of North Americans who fought against slavery, as well as those historical actors who benefited from the trade by selling and buying enslaved people. Other chapters study the lives of enslaved Africans and people of African descent, in order to understand how these experiences are brought to the present and reinterpreted by the later generations through visual arts and film. As a number of contributors included in this volume argue, the exchanges that resulted from the movement of peoples, goods, ideas, mentalities, tastes, and images and their legacies did not stop with the end of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, but remain the object of continuous transformation, adaptation, and reinvention.Challenging the prevailing Atlantic world scholarship that usually privileges economic exchanges and demographic data, the book illuminates the multiple experiences of African and African-descended male and female historical actors in the North and the South Atlantic spaces. The various paths of the slave trade explored in the different chapters of this book shed light on the trajectories and representations of African individuals and their descendants in the Atlantic basin and beyond. Although the victims are no longer alive to narrate their experiences, the various authors attempt, even when the sources are scarce, to retrace the slaving paths of the male and female victims, allowing us to figure out the development of multiple Atlantic individual and collective encounters and interactions. Eventually, some contributors show that these individuals and groups who were forced into different pathways, sometimes were able to negotiate, to make choices, and seal various sorts of alliances, facing the challenges imposed by the Atlantic slave trade brutal dynamics.This is an important book for collections in slavery studies, Atlantic history, history of the United States, Latin American and Caribbean history, African studies and African Diaspora.

Full of true stories more dramatic than any fiction, The Underground Railroad: A Reference Guide offers a fresh, revealing look at the efforts of hundreds of dedicated persons-white and black, men and women, from all walks of life-to help slave fugitives find freedom in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The Underground Railroad provides the richest portrayal yet of the first large scale act of interracial collaboration in the United States, mapping out the complex network of routes and safe stations that made escape from slavery in the American South possible. Kerry Walters' stirring account ranges from the earliest acts of slave resistance and the rise of the Abolitionist movement, to the establishment of clandestine "liberty lines" through the eastern and then-western regions of the Union and ultimately to Canada. Separating fact from legend, Walters draws extensively on first-person accounts of those who made the Railroad work, those who tried to stop it, and those who made the treacherous journey to freedom-including Eliza Harris and Josiah Henson, the real-life "Eliza" and "Uncle Tom" from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Original documents, from key legislation like The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to first-person narratives of escaping slaves Biographical sketches of key figures involved in the Underground Railroad, including Levi Coffin, William Lloyd Garrison, Robert Purvis, and Mary Ann Shadd