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A thought-provoking history of slaveholders' fear of the people they enslaved and its consequences From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, slave insurrections have been understood as emblematic rejections of enslavement, the most powerful and, perhaps, the only way for slaves to successfully challenge the brutal system they endured. In The World That Fear Made, Jason T. Sharples orients the mirror to those in power who were preoccupied with their exposure to insurrection. Because enslavers in British North America and the Caribbean methodically terrorized slaves and anticipated just vengeance, colonial officials consolidated their...
THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BERBICE SLAVE REBELLION Winner of the 2021 Cundill History Prize Winner of the 2021 Frederick Douglass Prize 'A gripping tale about the human need for freedom ... spellbinding' NPR 'Impressively detailed ... Kars provokes the reader into seeing the many sides involved in this bloody and desperate struggle with empathy and pity ... excellent' Paterson Joseph, actor and author of The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho 'A masterpiece ... a story for the ages' Elizabeth Fenn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World In February 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice - in present-day Guyana - launched a massive rebellio...
A pioneering work that demolished the widespread claims that African Americans accepted slavery and were passive. Exposed the true nature of slavery.
'A must-read graphic history. . . an inspired and inspiring defence of heroic women whose struggles could be fuel for a more just future' Guardian 'Not only a riveting tale of Black women's leadership of slave revolts but an equally dramatic story of the engaged scholarship that enabled its discovery' Angela Y. Davis Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the passage across the Atlantic. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. In Wake Rebecca Hall, a historian, a granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery, tells their story. With in-depth archival research and a measured use of histori...
“A chilling and suspenseful account [of] the culmination of a signal episode in the history of American race relations.” —Adam Goodheart, The New York Times Book Review In January 1811, five hundred slaves, dressed in military uniforms and armed with guns, cane knives, and axes, rose up from the plantations around New Orleans and set out to conquer the city. Ethnically diverse, politically astute, and highly organized, this self-made army challenged not only the economic system of plantation agriculture but also American expansion. Their march represented the largest act of armed resistance against slavery in the history of the United States. American Uprising is the riveting, long-neg...
Envisioning La Escalera--an underground rebel movement largely composed of Africans living on farms and plantations in rural western Cuba--in the larger context of the long emancipation struggle in Cuba, Aisha Finch demonstrates how organized slave resistance became critical to the unraveling not only of slavery but also of colonial systems of power during the nineteenth century. While the discovery of La Escalera unleashed a reign of terror by the Spanish colonial powers in which hundreds of enslaved people were tortured, tried, and executed, Finch revises historiographical conceptions of the movement as a fiction conveniently invented by the Spanish government in order to target anticoloni...
In 1812 a series of revolts known collectively as the Aponte Rebellion erupted across the island of Cuba, comprising one of the largest and most important slave insurrections in Caribbean history. Matt Childs provides the first in-depth analysis of the rebellion, situating it in local, colonial, imperial, and Atlantic World contexts. Childs explains how slaves and free people of color responded to the nineteenth-century "sugar boom" in the Spanish colony by planning a rebellion against racial slavery and plantation agriculture. Striking alliances among free people of color and slaves, blacks and mulattoes, Africans and Creoles, and rural and urban populations, rebels were prompted to act by ...
Although much has been written on Greek and Roman slavery, slave resistance has typically been dismissed as historically insignificant and those revolts that are documented are portrayed as wholly exceptional and resulting from peculiar historical circumstances that had little to do with the intrinsic views or organizational capabilities of the slaves themselves.In this book Theresa Urbainczyk challenges the current orthodoxy and argues that there were many more slave revolts than is usually assumed and they were far from insignificant historically. She carefully dissects ancient and modern interpretations to show that there was every reason for the writers who recorded and re-recorded the slave rebellions and wars to repress or to reconfigure any larger-scale slave resistance as something other than what it was. Further, she shows that we often have the accounts that we do because of the happenstance of certain ancient authors having been particularly interested in creating accounts of them for their own interests. Urbainczyk argues that we need to look beyond the canonical sources and episodes to see a bigger history of long-term resistance of slaves to their enslavement.
On the night of January 24, 1835, hundreds of African Muslim slaves poured into the streets of Salvador, capital of the Brazilian province of Bahia, to confront soldiers and armed civilians. Nearly 70 slaves were killed. More than 500 were sentenced to death, prison, whipping or deportation. Although the rebel slaves failed to win their freedom, the repercussions of their actions were felt throughout the nation, making this the most important urban slave rebellion in the Americas, and the only one in which Islam played a major role. In this history of the 1835 uprising, Joao Jose Reis draws on hundreds of police and trial records in which Africans, despite obvious intimidation, spoke out about their cultural, social, economic, religious and domestic lives in Salvador. Now available in this revised and expanded English edition, "Slave Rebellion in Brazil" is a portrait of the conditions of urban slavery and an absorbing account of conspiracy, uprising and punishment. --
"Focusing on slave revolts that took place in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, and in Jamaica in 1831-32, Matthews identifies four key aspects in British abolitionist propaganda regarding Caribbean slavery: the denial that antislavery activism prompted slave revolts, the attempt to understand and recount slave uprisings from the slaves' perspectives, the portrayal of slave rebels as victims of armed suppressors and as agents of the antislavery movement, and the presentation of revolts as a rationale against the continuance of slavery. She makes use of previously overlooked publications of British abolitionists to prove that their language changed over time in response to slave uprisings.".