Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history-that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freedpeople. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than 500,000 freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.

Crossing the Line examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain's Caribbean colonies. Colonial subjects residing in the West Indian colonies "beyond the line," these writers were perceived by their metropolitan contemporaries as far removed-geographically and morally-from Britain and "true" Britons. Routinely portrayed as single-minded in their pursuit of money and irredeemably corrupted by their investment in slavery, white creoles faced a considerable challenge in showing they were driven by more than a desire for power and profit. Crossing the Line explores the integral role early creole novels played in this cultural labor. The emancipation-era novels that anchor the study question categories of genre, historiography, politics, class, race, and identity. Revealing the contradictions embedded in the texts' constructions of the Caribbean "realities" they seek to dramatize, Candace Ward shows how these authors gave birth to characters and enlivened settings and situations in ways that shed light on the many sociopolitical fictions that shaped life in the anglophone Atlantic.

This book explores areas of human experience that are highly complex and which evoke powerful and contradictory feelings among those attempting to understand them. The institution of slavery has a long and terrible history, and many view it as a purely historical phenomenon. Yet slavery remains widespread today, taking many forms, often clandestine. One aspect of modern slavery that elicits particular revulsion is the trafficking of women and young girls and boys into the sex industry, and this is the focus of many of the authors in this book."Gender, Trafficking, and Slavery " examines the operations of trafficking and other kinds of "modern-day" slavery, from a gender perspective. It explores the relationships between gender relations, poverty, conflict, and globalization that are driving today's slave trade. The authors provide an overview of what trafficking and slavery are, their magnitude, and their complexity. They introduce the key debates, competing definitions, and conceptual divides within this controversial subject. The search for solutions exposes the weaknesses in national and international legal frameworks intended to protect bonded workers and trafficked persons, and analyzes the attempts of development and human rights organizations to support those at risk, to create alternative livelihood options for them, and to help those who escape to rebuild their lives. The book includes case studies drawn from the Baltic States, West and Central Africa, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Middle East, North Africa, and Western Europe.

"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.

William H. Williams fills a gap in the literature on slavery in America. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the 'peculiar institution' in the First State. An excellent text for courses in colonial and antebellum history, Slavery and Freedom in Delaware provides valuable insight into this unfortunate, unforgettable period in the nation's history.

"The Dutch Atlantic" investigates the Dutch involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and assesses the historical consequences of this for contemporary European society. Kwame Nimako and Glenn Willemsen show how the slave trade and slavery intertwined economic, social and cultural elements, including nation-state formation in the Netherlands and across Europe. They explore the mobilization of European populations in the implementation of policies that facilitated the slave trade and examine how European countries created and expanded laws that perpetuated colonization. Addressing key themes such as the incorporation of former slaves into post-slavery states and contemporary collective efforts to forget and/or remember slavery and its legacy in the Netherlands, this is an essential text for students of European history and postcolonial studies.

A contemporary critic described Ignatius Sancho as "what is very uncommon for men of his complexion, A man of letters." A London shopkeeper, former butler, and descendant of slaves, Sancho was the first author of African descent to have his correspondence published. He was also a critic of literature, music, and art; a composer; and an advocate for the abolition of slavery. Sancho's letters reveal an avid reader and prolific author, and his epistolary style shows a sophisticated understanding of both private and public audiences. Even after the abolition of the slave trade, proponents of equal rights on both sides of the Atlantic continued to use Sancho as an exemplar of the intellectual and moral capacity of people of African descent. In addition to the annotated letters by Sancho, this edition includes Laurence Sterne's letters to Sancho, Sancho's surviving autograph writings, and a selection of the many eighteenth-century responses to Sancho and his letters.

How should we as Britons remember transatlantic slavery? How has slavery been remembered in the past? 'Chords of freedom' sets out to answer these questions and, in doing so, traces the way in which British transatlantic slavery has been absorbed into the nation's collective memory. By combining two current historiographical preoccupations - the construction of public memory and British transatlantic slavery - this fascinating book focuses on the way in which the British traditionally have been taught to view transatlantic slavery through the moral triumph of abolition. The author traces the construction of this national history through a number of case studies, including visual images, literary memorials (the competing accounts of the anti-slavery movement produced by Thomas Clarkson and Robert and Samuel Wilberforce), monument-memorials, galleries and museums, and commemorative rituals from the nineteenth century to the present day. A separate chapter also considers how Britain's example in abolishing first the slave trade (1807) and then colonial slavery (1833-34) impacted on the rituals of the American anti-slavery movement, and served as a convenient symbol of the potential of freedom in the British West Indies. 'Chords of freedom' offers valuable new insights into the way in which a 'culture of abolition' took root in Britain, and how our views of transatlantic slavery and figures like William Wilberforce have been revised and amended to reflect the changing demands of a series of 'present days'. Its cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to a broad spectrum of specialists, as well as to undergraduates and postgraduates. -- .

"We've railed against injustice for decade upon decade, a lifetime of struggle and progress and enlightenment that we see etched in Fredrick Douglass's mighty, leonine gaze." -Barack Obama "My Bondage and my Freedom, besides giving a fresh impulse to antislavery literature, shows upon its pages the untiring industry of the ripe scholar."-William Wells Brown My Bondage and my Freedom (1845), a classic of American History writing and one of the most influential and ennobling autobiographies ever written, was composed while Fredrick Douglas was at his heights as an orator and writer. At the time of writing, Douglass had also reached the pinnacle of his work as a leader in the abolitionist movement and as an influential newspaper publisher. This incisive and eloquent book is at once an extraordinary story of resilience and a meditation on power, education, and freedom. The depictions of Fredrick Douglass's early life on a Maryland slave plantation, the series of relocations and abuses under various overseers, and his eventual freedom are an extraordinarily vivid portrait of the United States leading up to the beginning of the Civil War. My Bondage and my Freedom is a brilliant account of a singular life and as well as a scathing reproach to one of the darkest episodes of American history. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of My Bondage and my Freedom is both modern and readable.

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History and Nation-Making in the Americas explores how a collection of contemporary novels calls attention to the impact of ethnicity on national identities in the Americas. These historical narratives portray the cultural encounters-the conflicts and alliances, peaceful borrowings and violent seizures-that have characterized the history of the American continents since the colonial period. In the second half of the twentieth century, North and South American readers have witnessed a steady output of novels that revisit moments of cultural confluence as a means of revising national histories. Confluence Narratives proposes that these historical novels, published in such places as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, make up a key literary genre in the Americas. The genre links the various parts of the hemisphere together through three common historical experiences: colonization, slavery, and immigration. Luciano Tosta demonstrates how numerous texts from the United States, Canada, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil fall into the genre. The book focuses on four case studies from ethnic groups in the Americas: Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Jewish Americans, and Japanese Americans. Tosta uses the experience of the American nations as a springboard to problematize the concept of the contemporary nation, an identity marked by border-crossings and other experiences of deterritorialization. Based on the exploration of "confluence narratives," Tosta argues that the "contemporary" nation is not as contemporary as one may think. Informed by postcolonial theory and transnational and ethnic studies, this book offers an important comparative study for and of inter-American literature. Its analysis of the representation of cultural encounters within distinctive national histories underscores the complex nature of 'otherness' in the Americas, as well as the inherently transcultural aspect of a trans-continental American identity.

Although slavery was legally abolished in 1981 in Mauritania, its legacy lives on in the political, economic, and social discrimination against ex-slaves and their descendants. Katherine Ann Wiley examines the shifting roles of Muslim arain (ex-slaves and their descendants) women, who provide financial support for their families. Wiley uses economic activity as a lens to examine what makes suitable work for women, their trade practices, and how they understand and assert their social positions, social worth, and personal value in their everyday lives. She finds that while genealogy and social hierarchy contributed to status in the past, women today believe that attributes such as wealth, respect, and distance from slavery help to establish social capital. Wiley shows how the legacy of slavery continues to constrain some women even while many of them draw on neoliberal values to connect through kinship, friendship, and professional associations. This powerful ethnography challenges stereotypical views of Muslim women and demonstrates how they work together to navigate social inequality and bring about social change.

Following the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, nineteenth-century liberal economic thinkers insisted that a globally hegemonic Britain would profit only by abandoning the formal empire. British West Indians across the divides of race and class understood that, far from signaling an invitation to nationalist independence, this liberal economic discourse inaugurated a policy of imperial "neglect"-a way of ignoring the ties that obligated Britain to sustain the worlds of the empire's distant fellow subjects. In Empire of Neglect Christopher Taylor examines this neglect's cultural and literary ramifications, tracing how nineteenth-century British West Indians reoriented their affective, cultural, and political worlds toward the Americas as a response to the liberalization of the British Empire. Analyzing a wide array of sources, from plantation correspondence, political economy treatises, and novels to newspapers, socialist programs, and memoirs, Taylor shows how the Americas came to serve as a real and figurative site at which abandoned West Indians sought to imagine and invent postliberal forms of political subjecthood.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Haiti became the first and only modern country born from a slave revolt. During the first decades of Haitian independence, a wealth of original poetry was created by the inhabitants of the former French Caribbean island colony and published in Haitian newspapers. These deeply felt poems celebrated the legitimacy of the new nation and the value of the authors' African origins while revealing a common mission shared by all Haitians in the young republic: freedom from oppressors and equality for all. This powerfully moving collection of Haitian verse written between 1804 and the late 1840s sheds a much-needed light on an important and often neglected period in Haiti's literary history. Editors Doris Kadish and Deborah Jenson have gathered together poetry that has remained largely unknown and difficult to access since its original publication two centuries ago. Featuring superb translations from the original French by Norman Shapiro and a foreword by the Haitian-born novelist Edwidge Danticat, this essential volume stands as a monument to a turning point in Haitian and world history and makes a significant corpus of poetry accessible to a wide audience for the first time.

Slavery is a word heavy with emotional and political overtones - to be owned by another person and treated as a commodity is the ultimate injustice. But this was the fate of a substantial percentage of the population of the ancient world. Slavery was essential to their societies; thus slavery is necessarily a core topic in the study of classical civilisation. Most previous studies of ancient slavery have grown out of historical and literary research. In the flood of books and papers on the subject, the archaeological evidence has often been ignored. This book fills the gap by confronting, for the first time, the archaeological evidence for slavery.This evidence is used to build up a picture of rich complexity, drawing both on historical sources or inscriptions and on archaeological studies of the development of technology and the economy. The book covers topics as diverse as the source of slaves, the nature of the slave trade, and the use of slave-labour in agriculture, mines and quarries, corn and weaving mills, and water-lifting. It concludes with chapters on restraint and slave revolts. This comprehensive and masterful book will be used both as a source of evidence and as a starting point for future research but by anyone studying the topic of slavery in any age.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish attitudes towards slavery in Hellenistic and Roman times. Against the traditional opinion that after the Babylonian Exile Jews refrained from employing slaves, Catherine Hezser shows that slavery remained a significant phenomenon of ancient Jewish everyday life and generated a discourse which resembled Graeco-Roman and early Christian views while at the same time preserving specifically Jewish nuances. Hezser examines the impact of domestic slavery on the ancient Jewish household and on family relationships. She discusses the perceived advantages of slaves over other types of labor and evaluates their role within the ancient Jewish economy. The ancient Jewish experience of slavery seems to have been so pervasive that slave images also entered theological discourse. Like their Graeco-Roman and Christian counterparts, ancient Jewish intellectuals did not advocate the abolition of slavery, but they used the biblical tradition and their own judgements to ameliorate the status quo.

"C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain" chronicles the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and writer C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James's intellectual and political trajectory. During this time, James turned from liberal humanism to revolutionary socialism. Rejecting the "imperial Britishness" he had absorbed growing up in a crown colony in the British West Indies, he became a leading anticolonial activist and Pan-Africanist thinker. Christian Hogsbjerg reconstructs the circumstances and milieus in which James wrote works including his magisterial study The Black Jacobins. First published in 1938, James's examination of the dynamics of anticolonial revolution in Haiti continues to influence scholarship on Atlantic slavery and abolition. Hogsbjerg contends that during the Depression C. L. R. James advanced public understanding of the African diaspora and emerged as one of the most significant and creative revolutionary Marxists in Britain.

The orthodox view of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean holds that Greece and Rome were its only 'genuine slave societies', that is, societies in which slave labour contributed significantly to the economy and underpinned the wealth of elites. Other societies, traditionally labelled 'societies with slaves', are thought to have made little use of slave labour and therefore have been largely ignored in recent scholarship. This volume presents a radically different view of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world, showing that elite exploitation of slave labour in Greece and the Near East shared some fundamental similarities, although the degree of elite dependence on slaves varied from region to region. Whilst slavery was indeed particularly highly developed in Greece and Rome, it was also economically entrenched in Carthage, and played a not insignificant role in the affairs of elites in Israel, Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia. The differing degrees to which Eastern Mediterranean elites exploited slave labour represents the outcome of a complex interplay between cultural, economic, political, geographical, and demographic factors. Proceeding on a regional basis, this book tracks the ways in which local conditions shaped a wide variety of Greek and Near Eastern slave systems, and how the legal architecture of slavery in individual regions was altered and adapted to accommodate these needs. The result is a nuanced exploration of the economic underpinnings of Greek elite culture that sets its reliance on slavery within a broader historical context and sheds light on the complex circumstances from which it emerged.

It has long been acknowledged that the death penalty in the United States of America has been shaped by the country's history of slavery and racial violence, but this book considers the lesser-explored relationship between the two practices' respective abolitionist movements. The book explains how the historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. The comparative study also sheds light on the nature of such efforts, and offers lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Using the history of slavery and abolition, it is argued that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists.

Today, a century and a half after the abolition of slavery across most of the Americas, the idea of monetary reparations for former slaves and their descendants continues to be a controversial one. Lost among these debates, however, is the fact that such payments were widespread in the nineteenth century-except the "victims" were not slaves, but the slaveholders deprived of their labor. This landmark comparative study analyzes the debates over compensation within France and Great Britain. It lays out in unprecedented detail the philosophical, legal-political, and economic factors at play, establishing a powerful new model for understanding the aftermath of slavery in the Americas.

The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. "Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic" expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived. Abolitionism was a theater in which a variety of actors--slaves, African rulers, Caribbean planters, working-class radicals, British evangelicals, African political entrepreneurs--played a part. The Atlantic was an echo chamber, in which abolitionist symbols, ideas, and evidence were generated from a variety of vantage points. These
essays highlight the range of political and moral projects in which the advocates of abolitionism were engaged, and in so doing it joins together geographies that are normally studied in isolation. Where empires are often understood to involve the government of one people over another, "Abolitionism and Imperialism" shows that British values were formed, debated, and remade in the space of empire. Africans were not simply objects of British liberals' benevolence. They played an active role in shaping, and extending, the values that Britain now regards as part of its national character. This book is therefore a contribution to the larger scholarship about the nature of modern empires.

This title, first published in 1995, explores the history of the American Missionary Association (AMA) - an abolitionist group founded in New York in 1846, whose primary focus was to abolish slavery, to promote racial equality and Christian values and to educate African Americans. This title will be of interest to students of history and education.

Erik Root's book, Sons of the Fathers explores the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831 1832, conducted in the House of Delegates. This is possibly the greatest debate to have occurred in any southern state before the Civil War. The speeches in this book provide, for the first time ever, an unedited version of that debate where many of the sons of America's Founders deliberated over the necessity of emancipating the slaves in Old Dominion. In August 1831, Nat Turner led the most successful slave rebellion in America's history, killing some 60 men, women, and children. This insurrection provided the historical backdrop to the proposal for a gradual emancipation plan. The forces for emancipation, led by Thomas Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, were defeated in the course of the debate as the members of the House of Delegates rejected that it was a necessity to free the slaves. As a result, rift between what is now Virginia and Western Virginia developed, never to heal. Some in the debates believed slaves had the same rights as every human being. Those who balked at emancipation diminished slavery as an "evil" and came closer to the view that the slaves were mere property. They affirmed that the slave was property and rejected the natural rights grounding of the Founding. In this collection of primary source material-which consists of the speeches made public to the press and the people-the reader will be able to decide just how close the emancipation forces attached themselves to the "laws of Nature and Nature's God." The reader will also be able to decipher how far many Virginians departed from not only the Declaration of Independence, but the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

The dramatic story of the slave ship Neirsee springs vividly to life in Rafe Blaufarb's graphic mircohistory, Inhuman Traffic. The story, set in the early nineteenth century, moves from the slave port of Old Calabar to the Caribbean and to the courts of Britain and France where the history of the illegal slave trade, slavery in the Caribbean, and diplomatic history all come into focus as Blaufarb follows the ship, its crew, and its captives. Students will be taken in by the vivid drawings and the rich narrative, but they will also find themselves immersed in an unusual learning experience. Blaufarb not only presents the history of the ship and captives, he takes the reader inside the project itself. He explains how he came upon the story, how he and his editor envisioned the project, and how he worked with the illustrator Liz Clarke to craft the 350 "cells" that compose the book. He and Clarke even take the reader inside archives in Britain and France which are themselves illustrated and their histories explained. Like all the best examples of the genre, Inhuman Traffic tells a compelling story through a complex interplay of image and text - it will keep students reading, and learning, to the very end.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, non-slave black Americans existed in the no-man's land between slavery and freedom. The two generations defined by these two titanic struggles for national survival saw black Bostonians struggle to make real the quintessential values of individual freedom and equality promised by the Revolution. Levesque's richly detailed study fills a significant void in our understanding of the formative years of black life in urban America. Black culture Levesque argues was both more and less than separation and integration. Poised between an occasionally benevolent, sometimes hostile, frequently indifferent white world and their own community, black Americans were, in effect, suspended between two cultures.

People in the Middle Ages and the early modern age more often suffered from imprisonment and enslavement than we might have assumed. Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age approaches these topics from a wide variety of perspectives and demonstrates collectively the great relevance of the issues involved. Both incarceration and slavery were (and continue to be) most painful experiences, and no one was guaranteed exemption from it. High-ranking nobles and royalties were often the victims of imprisonment and, at times, had to wait many years until their ransom was paid. Similarly, slavery existed throughout Christian Europe and in the Arab world. However, while imprisonment occasionally proved to be the catalyst for major writings and creativity, slaves in the Ottoman empire and in Egypt succeeded in rising to the highest position in society (Janissaries, Mamluks, and others).