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A stereotypical image of manumission is that of a benign plantation owner freeing his slaves on his deathbed. But as Stephen Whitman demonstrates, the truth was far more complex, especially in border states where manumission was much more common. Whitman analyzes the economic and social history of Baltimore to show how the vigorous growth of the city required the exploitation of rural slaves. To prevent them from escaping and to spur higher production, owners entered into arrangements with their slaves, promising eventual freedom in return for many years' hard work. The Price of Freedom reveals how blacks played a critical role in freeing themselves from slavery. Yet it was an imperfect victory. Once Baltimore's economic growth began to slow, freed blacks were virtually excluded from craft apprenticeships, and European immigrants supplanted them as a trained labor force.
The contributors investigate the cultural consequences of manumission as well as the changing economic conditions that limited the practice by the eighteenth century to understand better the social implications of this multifaceted aspect of the system of slavery.
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman presents a comprehensive resource complied by over 200 internationally recognized contributors, including such leading Whitman scholars as James E. Miller, Jr., Roger Asselineau, Betsy Erkkila, and Joel Myerson. Now available for the first time in paperback, this volume comprises more than 750 entries arranged in convenient alphabetical format. Coverage includes: biographical information: all names, dates, places, and events important to understanding Whitman's life and careerWhitman's works: essays on all eight editions of Leaves of Grass, major poems and poem clusters, principal essays and prose works, as well as his more than two dozen short stor...
Wilbur H. Siebert published his landmark study of the Underground Railroad in 1898, revealing a secret system of assisted slave escapes. Siebert's research relied on the accounts of northern white male abolitionists, and while useful in understanding the northern boundaries of the journey, his work omits the complicated narrative of assistance below the Mason-Dixon Line. In The Gospel of Freedom: Black Evangelicals and the Underground Railroad, author Alicestyne Turley positions Kentucky as a crucial "pass through" territory and addresses the important contributions of antislavery southerners who formed organized networks to assist those who were enslaved in the Deep South. Drawing on family...
Between 1700 and 1775 no colony in British America experienced more impressive growth than North Carolina, and no region within the colony developed as rapidly as the Lower Cape Fear. In his study of this eighteenth-century settlement, Bradford J. Wood challenges many commonly held beliefs, presenting the Lower Cape Fear as a prime example for understanding North Carolina - and the entirety of colonial America - as a patchwork of regional cultures.
Beyond Slavery traces the enduring impact and legacy of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean in the modern era. In a rich set of essays, the volume explores the multiple ways that Africans have affected political, economic, and cultural life throughout the region. The contributors engage readers interested in the African diaspora in a series of vigorous debates ranging from agency and resistance to transculturation, displacement, cross-national dialogue, and popular culture. Documenting the array of diverse voices of Afro-Latin Americans throughout the region, this interdisciplinary book brings to life both their histories and contemporary experiences.
This new book by Andrew Fede considers the law of freedom suits and manumission from the point-of-view of legal procedure, evidence rules, damage awards, and trial practicein addition to the abstract principles stated in the appellate decisions. The author shows that procedural and evidentiary roadblocks made it increasingly impossible for many slaves, or free blacks who were wrongfully held as slaves, to litigate their freedom. Even some of the most celebrated cases in which the courts freed slaves must be read as tempered by the legal realities the actors faced or the courts actually recognized in the process. Slave owners in almost all slave societies had the right to manumit or free all ...