From the Dalai Lama to Harvey Milk, Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Martin Luther King Jr., Liberty Legends Alphabet marches through history in search of those who fought for their freedoms and others', and changed the world for good. Boldly illustrated, this book is sure to inspire your little legend to stand up and make a difference.

Transatlantic slavery, just like the abolition movements, affected every space and community in Britain, from Cornwall to the Clyde, from dockyard alehouses to country estates. Today, its financial, architectural and societal legacies remain, scattered across the country in museums and memorials, philanthropic institutions and civic buildings, empty spaces and unmarked graves. Just as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British people continue to make sense of this 'national sin' by looking close to home, drawing on local histories and myths to negotiate their relationship to the distant horrors of the 'Middle Passage', and the Caribbean plantation. For the first time, this collection brings together localised case studies of Britain's history and memory of its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and slavery. These essays, ranging in focus from eighteenth-century Liverpool to twenty-first-century rural Cambridgeshire, from racist ideologues to Methodist preachers, examine how transatlantic slavery impacted on, and continues to impact, people and places across Britain.

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748733 Dominica, a place once described as "Nature's Island," was rich in biodiversity and seemingly abundant water, but in the eighteenth century a brief, failed attempt by colonial administrators to replace cultivation of varied plant species with sugarcane caused widespread ecological and social disruption. Illustrating how deeply intertwined plantation slavery was with the environmental devastation it caused, Mapping Water in Dominica situates the social lives of eighteenth-century enslaved laborers in the natural history of two Dominican enclaves. Mark Hauser draws on archaeological and archival history from Dominica to reconstruct the changing ways that enslaved people interacted with water and exposes crucial pieces of Dominica's colonial history that have been omitted from official documents. The archaeological record-which preserves traces of slave households, waterways, boiling houses, mills, and vessels for storing water-reveals changes in political authority and in how social relations were mediated through the environment. Plantation monoculture, which depended on both slavery and an abundant supply of water, worked through the environment to create predicaments around scarcity, mobility, and belonging whose resolution was a matter of life and death. In following the vestiges of these struggles, this investigation documents a valuable example of an environmental challenge centered around insufficient water. Mapping Water in Dominica is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Northwestern University Libraries.

Beyond the Rope is an interdisciplinary study that draws on narrative theory and cultural studies methodologies to trace African Americans' changing attitudes and relationships to lynching over the twentieth century. Whereas African Americans are typically framed as victims of white lynch mob violence in both scholarly and public discourses, Karlos K. Hill reveals that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African Americans lynched other African Americans in response to alleged criminality, and that twentieth-century black writers envisaged African American lynch victims as exemplars of heroic manhood. By illuminating the submerged histories of black vigilantism and consolidating narratives of lynching in African American literature that framed black victims of white lynch mob violence as heroic, Hill argues that rather than being static and one dimensional, African American attitudes towards lynching and the lynched black evolved in response to changing social and political contexts.

The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature brings together leading scholars to examine the significance of slavery in American literature from the eighteenth century to the present day. In addition to stressing how central slavery has been to the study of American culture, this Companion provides students with a broad introduction to an impressive range of authors including Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Toni Morrison. Accessible to students and academics alike, this Companion surveys the critical landscape of a major field and lays the foundations for future studies.

In De instauranda Aethiopum salute (1627)--the earliest known book-length study of African slavery in the colonial Americas--Jesuit priest Alonso de Sandoval described dozens of African ethnicities, their languages, and their beliefs, and provided an exposA (c) of the abuse of slaves in the Americas. This collection of previously untranslated selections from Sandoval's book is an invaluable resource for understanding the history of the African diaspora, slavery in colonial Latin America, and the role of Christianity in the formation of the Spanish Empire; it also provides insights into early modern European concepts of race. A general Introduction and headnotes to each selection provide cultural, historical, and religious context; copious footnotes identify terms and references that may be unfamiliar to modern readers. A map and an index are also provided.

In this ground-breaking work, Paul Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American, Carribean or British alone, but can only be understand as a Black Atlantic culture that transcends ethnicity or nationality. This culture is thorough modern and, often, overlooked but can deeply enriches our understanding of what it means to be modern. This condition comes out of historical transoceanic experience, established first with the slave trade but later seen in the development of a transatlantic culture. And Gilroy takes us on a tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison. As a consequence, Black Atlantic charts the formation of a nationalism, if not a nation, within this shared, disasporic culture.

Focusing on the agency of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the South, this work argues for the systematic unveiling and recovery of subjugated knowledge, histories, and cultural practices of those traditionally silenced and overlooked by national heritage projects and national public memories. Jackson uses both ethnographic and ethnohistorical data to show the various ways African Americans actively created and maintained their own heritage and cultural formations. Viewed through the lens of four distinctive plantation sites--including the one on which that the ancestors of First Lady Michelle Obama lived--everyday acts of living, learning, and surviving profoundly challenge the way American heritage has been constructed and represented. A fascinating, critical view of the ways culture, history, social policy, and identity influence heritage sites and the business of heritage research management in public spaces.

Newly available in paperback, this edition is an important volume of international significance, drawing together contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field and edited by a team headed by the acclaimed historian David Richardson. The book sets Liverpool in the wider context of transatlantic slavery and addresses issues in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery, including African agency and trade experience. Emphasis is placed on the human characteristics and impacts of transatlantic slavery. It also opens up new areas of debate on Liverpool's participation in the slave trade and helps to frame the research agenda for the future.

The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse adds new knowledge to the ongoing discussion of slavery in early Christian discourse. Kartzow argues that the complex tension between metaphor and social reality in early Christian discourse is undertheorized. A metaphor can be so much more than an innocent thought figure; it involves bodies, relationships, life stories, and memory in complex ways. The slavery metaphor is troubling since it makes theology of a social institution that is profoundly troubling. This study rethinks the potential meaning of the slavery metaphor in early Christian discourse by use of a variety of texts, read with a whole set of theoretical tools taken from metaphor theory and intersectional gender studies, in particular. It also takes seriously the contemporary context of modern slavery, where slavery has re-appeared as a term to name trafficking, gendered violence, and inhuman power systems.

On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler urgently pleading for a private "interview" with the President, promising to disclose "a matter of momentous importance". By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the President in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in Arabic. Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives reveals the untold story of two escaped West Africans in the American heartland whose Arabic writings reached a sitting U.S. President, prompting him to intervene on their behalf. Recounting a quest for emancipation that crosses borders of race, region and religion, Jeffrey Einboden unearths Arabic manuscripts that circulated among Jefferson and his prominent peers, including a document from 1780s Georgia which Einboden identifies as the earliest surviving example of Muslim slave authorship in the newly-formed United States. Revealing Jefferson's lifelong entanglements with slavery and Islam, Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives tracks the ascent of Arabic slave writings to the highest halls of U.S. power, while questioning why such vital legacies from the American past have been entirely forgotten.

Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution offers a fresh exploration of anti-slavery debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It challenges traditional perceptions of early anti-slavery activity as an entirely parochial British, European or American affair, and instead reframes the abolition movement as a broad international network of activists across a range of metropolitan centres and remote outposts. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book explores the dynamics of transatlantic abolitionism, along with its structure, mechanisms and business methods, and in doing so, highlights the delicate balance that existed between national and international interests in an age of massive political upheaval throughout the Atlantic world. By setting slave trade debates within a wider international context, Professor Oldfield reveals how popular abolitionism emerged as a political force in the 1780s, and how it adapted itself to the tumultuous events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Examining the process of abolition on the island of Pemba off the East African coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book demonstrates the links between emancipation and the redefinition of honour among all classes of people on the island. By examining the social vulnerability of ex-slaves and the former slave-owning elite caused by the abolition order of 1897, this study argues that moments of resistance on Pemba reflected an effort to mitigate vulnerability rather than resist the hegemonic power of elites or the colonial state. As the meaning of the Swahili word heshima shifted from honour to respectability, individuals' reputations came under scrutiny and the Islamic kadhi and colonial courts became an integral location for interrogating reputations in the community. This study illustrates the ways in which former slaves used piety, reputation, gossip, education, kinship and witchcraft to negotiate the gap between emancipation and local notions of belonging.

What were the lives of Africans in provincial England like during the early modern period? How, where, and when did they arrive in rural counties? How were they perceived by their contemporaries? This book examines the population of Africans in Norfolk and Suffolk from 1467, the date of the first documented reference to an African in the region, to 1833, when Parliament voted to abolish slavery in the British Empire. It uncovers the complexity of these Africans' historical experience, considering the interaction of local custom, class structure, tradition, memory, and the gradual impact of the Atlantic slaving economy. Richard C. Maguire proposes that the initial regional response to arriving Africans during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not defined exclusively by ideas relating to skin colour, but rather by local understandings of religious status, class position, ideas about freedom and bondage, and immediate local circumstances. Arriving Africans were able to join the region's working population through baptism, marriage, parenthood, and work. This manner of response to Africans was challenged as local merchants and gentry begin doing business with the slaving economy from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Although the racialised ideas underpinning Atlantic slavery changed the social circumstances of Africans in the region, the book suggests that they did not completely displace older, more inclusive, ideas in working communities.

During the course of more than four centuries, merchants in Liverpool were responsible for forcibly transporting over a million and a half Africans across the Atlantic to work as enslaved labourers on the plantations of the Caribbean as their ships carried a larger number of Africans than those of any other European port. White colonial owners used the enslaved Africans to produce sugar and other valuable tropical goods which were consumed at home in Britain. Liverpool and the slave trade is the first comprehensive account of the city's participation in the trade. It tells the story of the merchants and ships' captains who organised the trade and shows how they bought and sold Africans, how they treated the enslaved during the Atlantic voyage and how they and the wider community benefitted from the slave trade. It concludes with the efforts to end the trade and the legacy it has left in Liverpool and beyond. Drawing on the most recent research as well as extensive use of contemporary documents and personal testimonies and experiences to explore this history, Liverpool and the slave trade highlights an important part of the city's history which has for too long been rejected, forgotten or ignored.

Peter Wood argues against the flawed interpretation of history found in the New York Times' 1619 Project and asserts that the true origins of American self-government were enshrined in the Mayflower Compact in 1620. "1620 is a dispassionate, clear reminder that the best in America's past is still America's best future." --Amity Shlaes, chair, Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation "Peter Wood's pushback against the 1619 Project is at once sharp, illuminating, entertaining, and profound." --Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center When and where was America founded? Was it in Virginia in 1619, when a pirate ship landed a group of captive Africans at Jamestown? So asserted the New York Times in August 2019 when it announced its 1619 Project. The Times set out to transform history by tracing American institutions, culture, and prosperity to that pirate ship and the exploitation of African Americans that followed. A controversy erupted, with historians pushing back against what they say is a false narrative conjured out of racial grievance. This book sums up what the critics have said and argues that the proper starting point for the American story is 1620, with the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot in the Massachusetts wilderness. A nation as complex as ours, of course, has many starting points, most notably the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But the quintessential ideas of American self-government and ordered liberty grew from the deliberate actions of the Mayflower immigrants in 1620. Schools across the country have already adopted the Times' radical revision of history as part of their curricula. The stakes are high. Should children be taught that our nation is a four-hundred-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should they learn that what has always made America exceptional is our pursuit of liberty and justice for all?

In 1812 a number of slave traders were prosecuted in Sierra Leone, the focus of Britain's efforts to eradicate the trade. First published in 1813, this report is believed to have been written by the presiding judge, Robert Thorpe. The trials provoked debate as Thorpe found one trader guilty, but commuted his sentence on the condition that other traders were persuaded to cease their business. Another was dealt with severely as he displayed complicity in evading the laws. Thorpe's judgments relied upon not only the application of the anti-slavery laws, but also the notion of natural laws transcending those of nations, a notion which came under consideration in the landmark Somerset v. Stewart case of 1772, concerning an escaped slave. Published in 1876, a report on this case is also reissued here. Taken together, these two texts provide valuable source material on the history of the slave trade's abolition.

This book explores the prejudice against slave descendants in highland Madagascar and its persistence more than a century after the official abolition of slavery. 'Unclean people' is a widespread expression in the southern highlands of Madagascar, and refers to people of alleged slave descent who are discriminated against on a daily basis and in a variety of ways. Denis Regnier shows that prejudice is rooted in a strong case of psychological essentialism: free descendants think that 'slaves' have a 'dirty' essence that is impossible to cleanse. Regnier's field experiments question the widely accepted idea that the social stigma against slavery is a legacy of pre-colonial society. He argues, to the contrary, that the essentialist construal of 'slaves' is the outcome of the historical process triggered by the colonial abolition of slavery: whereas in pre-abolition times slaves could be cleansed through ritual means, the abolition of slavery meant that slaves were transformed only superficially into free persons, while their inner essence remained unchanged and became progressively constructed as 'forever unchangeable'. Based on detailed fieldwork, this volume will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, African studies, development studies, cultural psychology, and those looking at the legacy of slavery.

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain, Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive book - based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson's papers - opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money. So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek's Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the "silent profits" gained from his slaves - and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?

William Wells Brown (1814? 84) was uncertain of his own birthday because he was born a slave, near Lexington, Kentucky. He managed to escape to Ohio, a free state, in 1834. Obtaining work on steamboats, he assisted many other slaves to escape across Lake Erie to Canada. In 1849, having achieved prominence in the American anti-slavery movement, he left for Europe, both to lecture against slavery and also to gain an education for his daughters. He stayed in Europe until 1854, since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had made it possible that he could be taken back into slavery if he returned. Meanwhile, he had begun to write both fiction and non-fiction, and this account of his travels in Europe, prefaced by a short biography, was published in 1852. Brown was able to return to the United States in 1854, when British friends paid for his freedom."

Before the Civil War, most Southern white people were as strongly committed to freedom for their kind as to slavery for African Americans. This study views that tragic reality through the lens of eight authors representatives of a South that seemed, to them, destined for greatness but was, we know, on the brink of destruction. Exceptionally able and ambitious, these men and women won repute among the educated middle classes in the Southwest, South, and the nation, even amid sectional tensions. Although they sometimes described liberty in the abstract, more often these authors discussed its practical significance: what it meant for people to make life's important choices freely and to be responsible for the results. They publically insisted that freedom caused progress, but hidden doubts clouded this optimistic vision. Ultimately, their association with the oppression of slavery dimmed their hopes for human improvement, and fear distorted their responses to the sectional crisis."

How slave emancipation transformed capitalism in the United States and Brazil In the nineteenth century, the United States and Brazil were the largest slave societies in the Western world. The former enslaved approximately four million people, the latter nearly two million. Slavery was integral to the production of agricultural commodities for the global market, and governing elites feared the system's demise would ruin their countries. Yet, when slavery ended in the United States and Brazil, in 1865 and 1888 respectively, what resulted was immediate and continuous economic progress. In American Mirror, Roberto Saba investigates how American and Brazilian reformers worked together to ensure that slave emancipation would advance the interests of capital. Saba explores the methods through which antislavery reformers fostered capitalist development in a transnational context. From the 1850s to the 1880s, this coalition of Americans and Brazilians-which included diplomats, engineers, entrepreneurs, journalists, merchants, missionaries, planters, politicians, scientists, and students, among others-consolidated wage labor as the dominant production system in their countries. These reformers were not romantic humanitarians, but cosmopolitan modernizers who worked together to promote labor-saving machinery, new transportation technology, scientific management, and technical education. They successfully used such innovations to improve production and increase trade. Challenging commonly held ideas about slavery and its demise in the Western Hemisphere, American Mirror illustrates the crucial role of slave emancipation in the making of capitalism.

This collection of thirteen case studies by international scholars examines the strategies whole societies adopted in opposition to slavery over a period of five centuries. This is the first book to explore in a systematic manner the strategies used by Africans to protect and defend themselves and their communities from the onslaught of the Atlantic slave trade and how they assaulted it. It concludes with a reflective epilogue on the memory of slavery. North America: Ohio U Press

A wealthy planter in the West Indies, Bryan Edwards (1743-1800) lived in Jamaica during the peak of its sugar wealth. Upon his return to England in 1792, he wrote several books on the West Indies, including a multi-volume history of the British colonies. The present work, first published in 1796, relates to the recent conflict between the British and Jamaicans descended from runaway slaves, known as Maroons. Living mostly in isolated mountain communities, the Maroons had been granted certain rights under a 1739 treaty. However, by 1795, with a new governor ruling the island, tensions re-emerged and resulted in another war. Prefaced by Edwards' extended discussion of the Maroons and the origins of the conflict, this collection of documents and letters represents a valuable source in the study of Jamaican history and that of British colonialism in the Caribbean.

Manhood Enslaved reconstructs the lives of three male captives to bring intellectual and historical clarity to our understanding of enslaved peoples in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century central New Jersey. Manhood Enslaved reconstructs the lives of three male captives to bring greater intellectual and historical clarity to the muted lives of enslaved peoples in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century central New Jersey, where blacks were held in bondage for nearly two centuries. The book contributes to an evolving body of historical scholarship arguing that the lives of bondpeople in America were shaped not only by the powerful forces of racial oppression, but also by their own notions of gender. The volume uses previously understudied, white-authored, nineteenth-century literature about central New Jersey slaves as a point of departure. Reading beyond the racist assumptionsof the authors, it contends that the precarious day-to-day existence of the three protagonists -- Yombo Melick, Dick Melick, and Quamino Buccau (Smock) -- provides revealing evidence about the various elements of "slave manhood" that gave real meaning to their oppressed lives. Kenneth E. Marshall is Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York at Oswego.