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Slavery Obscured aims to assess how the slave trade affected the social life and cultural outlook of the citizens of a major English city, and contends that its impact was more profound than has previously been acknowledged. Based on original research in archives in Britain and America, this title builds on scholarship in the economic history of the slave trade to ask questions about the way slave-derived wealth underpinned the city of Bristol's urban development and its growing gentility. How much did Bristol's Georgian renaissance owe to such wealth? Who were the major players and beneficiaries of the African and West Indian trades? How, in an ever-changing historical environment, were enslaved Africans represented in the city's press, theatre and political discourse? What do previously unexplored religious, legal and private records tell us about the black presence in Bristol or about the attitudes of white seamen, colonists and merchants towards slavery and race? What role did white women and artisans play in Bristol's anti-slavery movement? Combining a historical and anthropological approach, Slavery Obscured, seeks to shed new light on the contradictory and complex history of an English slaving port and to prompt new ways of looking at British national identity, race and history.
"An examination of American slavery through the true stories of five enslaved people who were considered the property of some of our best-known presidents"--
Page duBois, a classicist known for her daring and originality, turns in this new book to one of the most troubling subjects in the study of antiquity: the indispensability of slaves in ancient Greece. DuBois argues that every object and text in the world of ancient Greece bears the marks of slavery and the need to reiterate the distinction between slave and free. And yet the ubiquity of slaves in ancient societies has been overlooked by scholars who idealize antiquity, misconstrued by those who view slavery through the lens of race, and obscured by the split between historical and philological approaches to the classics. DuBois begins her study by exploring the material culture of slavery, including how most museum exhibits erase the presence of slaves in the classical world. Shifting her focus to literature, she considers the place of slaves in Plato's Meno, Aristotle's Politics, Aesop's Fables, Aristophanes' Wasps, and Euripides' Orestes. She contends throughout that portraying the difference between slave and free as natural was pivotal to Greek concepts of selfhood and political freedom, and that scholars who idealize such concepts too often fail to recognize the role that slavery played in their articulation. Opening new lines of inquiry into ancient culture, Slaves and Other Objects will enlighten classicists and historians alike.
From the beginning of the colonial period to the recent conflicts in the Middle East, encounters with the Muslim world have helped Americans define national identity and purpose. Focusing on America's encounter with the Barbary states of North Africa from 1776 to 1815, Robert Allison traces the perceptions and mis-perceptions of Islam in the American mind as the new nation constructed its ideology and system of government. "A powerful ending that explains how the experience with the Barbary states compelled many Americans to look inward . . . with increasing doubts about the institution of slavery." —David W. Lesch, Middle East Journal "Allison's incisive and informative account of the fledgling republic's encounter with the Muslim world is a revelation with a special pertinence to today's international scene." —Richard W. Bulliet, Journal of Interdisciplinary History "This book should be widely read. . . . Allison's study provides a context for understanding more recent developments, such as America's tendency to demonize figures like Iran's Khumaini, Libya's Qaddafi, and Iraq's Saddam." —Richard M. Eaton, Eighteenth Century Studies
A Best Book of 2021 by NPR and The Washington Post Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour de force that tells the “powerful” (The New York Times Book Review) story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall’s efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record. Women warriors planned and led revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. Wake tells the “riveting” (Angela Y. Davis) story of Dr. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the “negro burying ground” uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere. Using a “remarkable blend of passion and fact, action and reflection” (NPR), Rebecca constructs the likely pasts of Adono and Alele, women rebels who fought for freedom during the Middle Passage, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. We also follow Rebecca’s own story as the legacy of slavery shapes her life, both during her time as a successful attorney and later as a historian seeking the past that haunts her. Illustrated beautifully in black and white, Wake will take its place alongside classics of the graphic novel genre, like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. This story of a personal and national legacy is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake.
"An historical and imaginative tour-de-force, WAKE brings to light for the first time the existence of enslaved black women warriors, whose stories can be traced by carefully scrutinizing historical records; and where the historical record goes silent, WAKE reconstructs the likely past of two female rebels, Adono and Alele, on the slave ship The Unity. WAKE is a graphic novel that offers invaluable insight into the struggle to survive whole as a black woman in today's America; it is a historiography that illuminates both the challenges and the necessity of uncovering the true stories of slavery; and it is an overdue reckoning with slavery in New York City where two of these armed revolts took place. It is, also, a transformative and transporting work of imaginative fiction, bringing to three-dimensional life Adono and Alele and their pasts as women warriors. In so doing, WAKE illustrates the humanity of the enslaved, the reality of their lived experiences, and the complexity of the history that has been, till now, so thoroughly erased"--
"Obscured from our view of slaves and masters in America is a critical third party: the state, with its coercive power. This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, the nature, and the extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South. Mining a variety of sources, Sally Hadden presents the views of both patrollers and slaves as she depicts the patrols, composed of “respectable” members of society as well as poor whites, often mounted and armed with whips and guns, exerting a brutal and archaic brand of racial control inextricably linked to post–Civil War vigilantism and the Ku Klux Klan. City councils also used patrollers before the war, and police forces afterward, to impose their version of race relations across the South, making the entire region, not just plantations, an armed camp where slave workers were controlled through terror and brutality."
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times “Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective.”—Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.
While the memorialization of slavery has generated an impressive number of publications, relatively few studies deal with this subject from a transnational, transdisciplinary and transracial standpoint. As a historical phenomenon that crossed borders and traversed national communities and ethnic groups producing alliances that did not overlap with received identities, slavery as well as its memory call for comparative investigations that may bring to light aspects obscured by the predominant visibility of US-American and British narratives of the past. This study addresses the memory of slavery from a transnational perspective. It brings into dialogue texts and practices from the transatlantic world, offering comparative analyses which interlace the variety of memories emerging in diverse national contexts and fields of study and shed light on the ways local countermemories have interacted with and responded to hegemonic narratives of slavery. The inclusion of Brazil and the French, English, and Spanish Caribbean alongside the United States and Europe, and the variety of investigative approaches-ranging from cinema, popular culture and visual culture studies to anthropology and literary studies-expand the current understanding of the slave past and how it is reimagined today. This fascinating book brings freshness to the topic by considering objects of investigation which have so far remained marginal in the academic debate, such as heroic memorials, civic landscape, white family sagas, Young Adult literature of slavery, Latin American telenovelas and filmic narrations within and beyond Hollywood. What emerges is a multifarious set of memories, which keep changing according to generation, race, gender, nation and political urgency and indicate the advancing of a dynamic, mobilized memorialization of slavery willing to move beyond mourning towards a more militant stand for justice. This is an important book for those interested in African American, American, and Latin American studies and working across literature, cinema, visual arts, and public culture. It will also be useful to public official and civil servants interested in the question of slavery and its present memory.
In this enlightening personal account, one man tells the story of his groundbreaking project to sleep overnight in former slave dwellings that still stand across the country—revealing the fascinating history behind these sites and shedding light on larger issues of race in America. Joseph McGill Jr., a historic preservationist and Civil War reenactor, founded the Slave Dwelling Project in 2010 based on an idea that was sparked and first developed in 1999. Since founding the project, McGill has been touring the country, spending the night in former slave dwellings—throughout the South, but also the North and the West, where people are often surprised to learn that such structures exist. Events and gatherings are arranged around these overnight stays, and it provides a unique way to understand the often otherwise obscured and distorted history of slavery. The project has inspired difficult conversations about race in communities from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Minnesota to New York, and all over the United States. Sleeping with the Ancestors focuses on all of the key sites McGill has visited in his ongoing project and digs deeper into the actual history of each location, using McGill’s own experience and conversations with the community to enhance those original stories. Altogether, McGill and coauthor Herb Frazier give readers an important unexpected emersion into the history of slavery, and especially the obscured and ignored aspects of that history.