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"This work is a history of slavery, capitalism, and the law that not only reframes how we understand the commodification of enslaved people, but also makes a significant methodological and moral argument for how historians should seek to make sense of the lived experiences of enslaved people in the antebellum United States"--
There is clear overlap in interests and influences for the fields of Atlantic, environmental, and southern history, but scholarship in them has often advanced on parallel tracks. This anthology places itself at the intersection, pushing for a new confluence. Editors Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson provide a lucid introduction to this collection of essays that brings these disciplines together. With this volume, historians explore crucial insights into a self-consciously Atlantic environmental history of the American South, touching on such topics as ideas about slavery, gender, climate, “colonial ecological revolution,” manipulation of the landscape, infrastructure, resources, a...
The author focuses on the experience of Henrietta Wood, a freed slave who was sold back into slavery, eventually freed again, and who then sued the man who had sold her back into bondage-and won.
The history of capitalist development in the United States is long, uneven, and overwhelmingly focused on the North. Macroeconomic studies of the South have primarily emphasized the role of the cotton economy in global trading networks. Until now, few in-depth scholarly works have attempted to explain how capitalism in the South took root and functioned in all of its diverse—and duplicitous—forms. Southern Scoundrels explores the lesser-known aspects of the emergence of capitalism in the region: the shady and unscrupulous peddlers, preachers, slave traders, war profiteers, thieves, and marginal men who seized available opportunities to get ahead and, in doing so, left their mark on the s...
Weaving national narratives from stories of the daily lives and familiar places of local residents, Francoise Hamlin chronicles the slow struggle for black freedom through the history of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Hamlin paints a full picture of the town ov
An intimate look inside Plymouth Plantation that goes beyond familiar founding myths to portray real life in the settlement—the hard work, small joys, and deep connections to others beyond the shores of Cape Cod Bay. The English settlement at Plymouth has usually been seen in isolation. Indeed, the colonists gain our admiration in part because we envision them arriving on a desolate, frozen shore, far from assistance and forced to endure a deadly first winter alone. Yet Plymouth was, from its first year, a place connected to other places. Going beyond the tales we learned from schoolbooks, Carla Gardina Pestana offers an illuminating account of life in Plymouth Plantation. The colony was e...
A rich, pathbreaking study on nineteenth-century rural Cuba, and how Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom through litigation and land occupation.
Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize Benjamin L. Hooks Award Finalist “An insightful, powerful, and moving book.” —Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice “Sturkey’s clear-eyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement.” —New York Times If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. Th...