Americans wrote fiercely during the Civil War. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans' words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary-wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day-was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have become one of the best-known, most-used sources for exploring the life of the mind in a war-torn place and time. Delving into several familiar wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. Whether the diarists recorded thoughts about themselves, their opinions about men, or their observations about slavery, race, and warfare, Stowe shows how these women, by writing the immediate moment, found meaning in a changing world. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance-and the limits-of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past, demonstrating how these plain, first-draft texts can offer new ways to make sense of the world in which these Confederate women lived.

In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to post-revolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.

What would it mean to ""get over slavery""? Is such a thing possible? Is it even desirable? Should we perceive the psychic hold of slavery as a set of mental manacles that hold us back from imagining a postracist America? Or could the psychic hold of slavery be understood as a tool, helping us get a grip on the systemic racial inequalities and restricted liberties that persist in the present day? Featuring original essays from an array of established and emerging scholars in the interdisciplinary field of African American studies, The Psychic Hold of Slavery offers a nuanced dialogue upon these questions. With a painful awareness that our understanding of the past informs our understanding of the present - and vice versa - the contributors place slavery's historical legacies in conversation with twenty-first-century manifestations of antiblack violence, dehumanization, and social death. Through an exploration of film, drama, fiction, performance art, graphic novels, and philosophical discourse, this volume considers how artists grapple with questions of representation, as they ask whether slavery can ever be accurately depicted, trace the scars that slavery has left on a traumatized body politic, or debate how to best convey that black lives matter. The Psychic Hold of Slavery thus raises provocative questions about how we behold the historically distinct event of African diasporic enslavement and how we might hold off the transhistorical force of antiblack domination.

In Liberty and Slavery, Niels Eichhorn examines the language of slavery, which he considers central to revolutionary struggles, especially those waged in Europe in the nineteenth century. Eichhorn begins in 1830 with separatist movements in Greece, Belgium, and Poland, which laid the foundation for rebellions undertaken later in the century, and then shifts focus to the 1848 uprisings in Ireland, Hungary, and Schleswig-Holstein. He argues that revolutionaries embraced or rejected the language of slavery as they saw fit, using it to justify their rebellions and larger goals. The failure of these insurgencies propelled a wave of revolutionary migrants across the Atlantic world. Those who journeyed to the United States felt the need to adjust to the political and sectional divisions in their new home. Eichhorn shows that separatism was widespread during this period; the secessionist aims of the American Confederacy were by no means unique. Additionally, Eichhorn explores these migrants' motivations for shunning the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Having been steeped in the language of slavery and separatism, they naturally sided with the Union when the sectional crisis culminated in civil war in 1861.

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

This historical account of the transatlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States is filled with a wealth of records, details and analyses of its attempted suppression. The various moral, economic and religious arguments against slavery were clear from the outset of the practice in the early 16th century. The ownership of a human life as an economic commodity was decried from religious circles from the earliest days as an immoral affront to basic human dignity. However the practice of gaining lifelong labor in exchange only for a basic degree of care meant slavery persisted for centuries across the New World as a lucrative endeavor. The colonial United States would, from the early 17th century, receive many thousands of slaves from Africa. Many of the slaves transported were sent to work on plantations and farms which steadily spread across the warmer southern states of the nation. Others would do manual work on the docks, for instance moving goods in the fledgling trading colonies.

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

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

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

The wealth generated both directly and indirectly by Caribbean slavery had a major impact on Glasgow and Scotland. Glasgow's Sugar Aristocracy is the first book to directly assess the size, nature and effects of this. West India merchants and plantation owners based in Glasgow made nationally significant fortunes, some of which boosted Scottish capitalism, as well as the temporary Scottish economic migrants who travelled to some of the wealthiest of the Caribbean islands. This book adds much needed nuance to the argument in a Scottish context; revealing methods of repatriating wealth from the Caribbean as well as mercantile investments in industry, banking and land and philanthropic initiatives.