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For generations, historians believed that the study of the African-American experience centered on the questions about the processes and consequences of enslavement. Even after this phase passed, the modern Civil Rights Movement took center stage and filled hundreds of pages, creating a new framework for understanding both the history of the United States and of the world. Suburban Erasure by Walter David Greason contributes to the most recent developments in historical writing by recovering dozens of previously undiscovered works about the African-American experience in New Jersey. More importantly, his interpretation of these documents complicates the traditional understandings about the G...
Slavery and the University is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post-Civil War era to the present day. The collection feat...
This title examines how the American Revolution changed the nature of patriarchal rule by shattering old ways of penalizing and publishing illicit sexual behaviour and more people embarked on policing the sexual morality of society.
Early American Children’s Clothing and Textiles: Clothing a Child 1600–1800 explores the life experiences of Indigenous, Anglo-European, African, and mixed-race children in colonial America, their connections to textile production, the process of textile production, the textiles created, and the clothing they wore. The book examines the communities and social structure of early America, the progression of the colonial textile industry, and the politics surrounding textile production beginning in the 1600's, with particular focus on the tasks children were given in the development of the American textile industry. The book discusses the concept of childhood in society during this time, to...
An analysis of slave and slaveholder understanding and manipulation of formal legal systems in the region known as the American Confluence during the antebellum era.
“Wilentz brings a lifetime of learning and a mastery of political history to this brilliant book.” —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. In this essential reconsideration of the creation and legacy of our nation’s founding document, Sean Wilentz reveals the tortured compromises that led the Founders to abide slavery without legitimizing it, a deliberate ambiguity that fractured the nation seventy years later. Contesting the Southern proslavery version of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln ...
They baked New England's Thanksgiving pies, preached their faith to crowds of worshippers, spied for the patriots during the Revolution, wrote that human bondage was a sin, and demanded reparations for slavery. Black women in colonial and revolutionary New England sought not only legal emancipation from slavery but defined freedom more broadly to include spiritual, familial, and economic dimensions. Hidden behind the banner of achieving freedom was the assumption that freedom meant affirming black manhood The struggle for freedom in New England was different for men than for women. Black men in colonial and revolutionary New England were struggling for freedom from slavery and for the right to patriarchal control of their own families. Women had more complicated desires, seeking protection and support in a male headed household while also wanting personal liberty. Eventually women who were former slaves began to fight for dignity and respect for womanhood and access to schooling for black children.
In the secular, contemporary world, many people question the relevance of religion. Many also wonder whether religiously-informed speech and beliefs should be tolerated in the public square, and whether religions hinder freedom. In this volume, Wendell Bird reminds us that our basic freedoms are the important legacies of religious speech arising from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Bird demonstrates that religious speech, rather than secular or irreligious speech based on other belief systems, historically made the demands and justifications for at least six critical freedoms: speech and press, rights for the criminally accused, higher education, emancipation from slavery, and freedom from discrimination. Bringing an historically-informed approach to the development of some of the most important freedoms in the Anglo-American world, this volume provides a new framework for our understanding of the origins of crucial freedoms. It also serves as a powerful reminder of an aspect of history that is steadily being forgotten or overlooked-that many of our basic freedoms are the historical legacies of religious speech arising from Judeo-Christian faiths.
The narratives of slaves, wives, and servants who resisted social and domestic violence in the nineteenth century In the early nineteenth century, Peter Wheeler, a slave to Gideon Morehouse in New York, protested, “Master, I won’t stand this,” after Morehouse beat Wheeler’s hands with a whip. Wheeler ran for safety, but Morehouse followed him with a shotgun and fired several times. Wheeler sought help from people in the town, but his eventual escape from slavery was the only way to fully secure his safety. Everyday Crimes tells the story of legally and socially dependent people like Wheeler—free and enslaved African Americans, married white women, and servants—who resisted violen...
Mob violence in the United States is usually associated with the southern lynch mobs who terrorized African Americans during the Jim Crow era. In Forgotten Dead, William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb uncover a comparatively neglected chapter in the story of American racial violence, the lynching of persons of Mexican origin or descent. Over eight decades lynch mobs murdered hundreds of Mexicans, mostly in the American Southwest. Racial prejudice, a lack of respect for local courts, and economic competition all fueled the actions of the mob. Sometimes ordinary citizens committed these acts because of the alleged failure of the criminal justice system; other times the culprits were law enforcemen...