|
Showing 1 - 25 of
53 matches in All Departments
Drawing on his experience as a social scientist, Walter Johnson
outlines some of the challenges posted by the increasing
ethno-cultural diversity of society through an examination of
immigration history, the debate over immigration policy and the
issues of multiculturalism, racism, employment and racial
profiling.
President Abraham Lincoln freed millions of slaves in the South
in 1863, rescuing them, as history tells us, from a brutal and
inhuman existence and making the promise of freedom and equal
rights. This is a moment to celebrate and honor, to be sure, but
what of the darker, more troubling side of this story? "Slavery's
Ghost" explores the dire, debilitating, sometimes crushing effects
of slavery on race relations in American history.
In three conceptually wide-ranging and provocative essays, the
authors assess the meaning of freedom for enslaved and free
Americans in the decades before and after the Civil War. They ask
important and challenging questions: How did slaves and freedpeople
respond to the promise and reality of emancipation? How committed
were white southerners to the principle of racial subjugation? And
in what ways can we best interpret the actions of enslaved and free
Americans during slavery and Reconstruction? Collectively, these
essays offer fresh approaches to questions of local political
power, the determinants of individual choices, and the discourse
that shaped and defined the history of black freedom.
Written by three prominent historians of the period, "Slavery's
Ghost "forces readers to think critically about the way we study
the past, the depth of racial prejudice, and how African Americans
won and lost their freedom in nineteenth-century America.
Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award Winner of the John
Hope Franklin Prize Winner of the Avery O. Craven Award Soul by
Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving
away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself,
the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New
Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men,
women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson
transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human
drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would
alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal
economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies
among the actors involved. Using recently discovered court records,
slaveholders' letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former
slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself,
Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the
market's slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves
by "feeding them up," dressing them well, and oiling their bodies,
but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as
valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and
questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could
get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided
information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a
sale to their own advantage. Johnson depicts the subtle
interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness,
racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand
the centrality of the "peculiar institution" in the lives of slaves
and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small
measure the story of antebellum slavery.
Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven
Award "Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as
powerfully." -Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement "[One] of the
most impressive works of American history in many years." -The
Nation "An important, arguably seminal, book...Always trenchant and
learned." -Wall Street Journal A landmark history, by the author of
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of
America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism. When
Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an
"empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers.
Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by
Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into
a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered
by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves.
River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of
worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across
oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold
reconsideration dramatically alters our understanding of American
slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and
the upcoming Civil War. Walter Johnson deftly traces the
connections between the planters' pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic
commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency.
Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and
personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of
daily life under cotton's dark dominion. We meet the confidence men
and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave
dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the
markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds
and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who
threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a
global scale. But at the center of the story are the enslaved
people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the
cotton-who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of
the American dream. "Shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the
19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of
feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on
enslaved labor." -A. O. Scott, New York Times "River of Dark Dreams
delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write
'history from the bottom up.'" -Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of
Books
|
You may like...
Contraband
Kate Beckinsale, Mark Wahlberg, …
Blu-ray disc
(1)
R62
Discovery Miles 620
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|