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Starting with a photograph and some writings left by her grandmother, Thulani Davis goes looking for the "white folk" in her family-a Scots-Irish family of cotton planters unknown to her-and uncovers a history far richer and stranger than she had ever imagined. When Davis's grandmother died in 1971, she was writing a novel about her parents, Mississippi cotton farmers who met after the Civil War: Chloe Curry, a former slave from Alabama, married with several children, and Will Campbell, a white planter from Missouri who had never marriedIn this compelling intersection of genealogy, memoir, and Reconstruction history, Davis picks up where her grandmother left off. Her journey takes her from Missouri to Mississippi to Alabama, back to her home town in Virginia, and even to Sierra Leone. The Campbells lead her to locate not only their pioneer history but to find the previously unknown roots of her mother's family; to Civil War archives, where she discovers the records of the Campbells who fought with Confederate troops; to the Silver Creek plantation in Yazoo, Mississippi, where the two branches of her family history became one; and to a county near her Virginia hometown where both families started their American journey, completely unknown to each other. My Confederate Kinfolk examines the origins of some of our most deeply ingrained notions about what makes a family black or white and offers an immensely compelling, intellectually challenging alternative.
"In this compelling intersection of genealogy, memoir, and history. Davis picks up where her grandmother left off. Inspired by an 1890s photograph of a black teenager dressed in Campbell family tartan, Davis finds herself on a journey to places from Missouri to Mississippi to Alabama, and even back to her home town in Virginia."--Jacket.
For Kentuckians, the Civil War was truly a conflict of brother against brother. As a slave state bordering the United States and the Confederate States, Kentucky had ties to both the North and South. Although its state government remained in the Union, the people of Kentucky were divided in sentiment, prompting some 40,000 Kentuckians to leave their homes to fight for Southern independence. When Confederate soldiers eventually returned from the country's bloodiest war, they were held in high regard by their fellow Kentuckians. To be counted among the state's Confederate veterans was an honor, and when the number of living Confederate veterans began to dwindle, groups across Kentucky raised monuments to their memory. Remembering Kentucky's Confederates presents an overview of the state's Confederate soldiers and units who fought bravely in the War Between the States.
This interdisciplinary investigation argues that since the 1990s, discourses about mixed-race heritage in the United States have taken the shape of a veritable literary genre, here termed “memoir of the search.” The study uses four different texts to explore this non-fictional genre, including Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice. All feature a protagonist using methods from archival investigation to DNA-testing to explore an intergenerational family secret; photographs and family trees; and the trip to the American South, which is identified as the site of the secret’s origin and of the family’s past. As a genre, these texts negotiate the memory of slavery and segregation in the present. In taking up central narratives of Americanness, such as the American Dream and the Immigrant story, as well as discourses generating the American family, the texts help inscribe themselves and the mixed-race heritage they address into the American mainstream. In its outlook, this book highlights the importance of the memoirs’ negotiations of the past when finding ways to remember after the last witnesses have passed away. and contributes to the discussion over political justice and reparations for slavery.
In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.
Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.
The masterful and poignant story of three African-American families who journeyed west after emancipation, by an award-winning scholar and descendant of the migrants Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field's epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom's first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements. When statehood, oil speculation, and Jim Crow segregation imperiled their lives and livelihoods, these formerly enslaved men and women again chose emigration. Some migrants launched a powerful back-to-Africa movement, while others moved on to Canada and Mexico. Their lives and choices deepen and widen the roots of the Great Migration. Interweaving black, white, and Indian histories, Field's beautifully wrought narrative explores how ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.
The Civil War was a flashpoint in the history of America. This volume is a collection of three stories that show the commitment and valor of those young people who fought and died experiencing the horrors of war. The Forgotten Confederate Sentry is a story told by the ghost of a rebel soldier to a cadre of Union soldiers buried alongside him in a small rural Pennsylvania cemetery. As he has stood sentry duty for almost 140 years, he tells them of his love for his retarded younger brother and the promises he made to him as they fought valiantly along side of one another at the battle of Antietam. Mattie Anderson tells the story of a young girl from Illinois who joins up with a local Union regiment, hiding her femininity in the guise of a young man, in order to seek her older brother whom she believes joined the rebel army. She ultimately carries a secret message back to her commanding officer that contributes to the end of the war. The third story is a true story of a young Pennsylvanian Union officer, Andrew Gregg Tucker, a graduate of what is now Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, who brings glory and honor to his name through his heroic death at the battle of Gettysburg.
Mississippi. The 1950s and ’60s. Two friends, one white and the other black. Sue Ann spends her pre-adolescent years protecting her best friend, Liz Bess, from prejudice and mistreatment, but she can’t protect her from the untimely death of her mother and their resulting separation as Liz Bess is sent north to school. As a young adult, Sue Ann falls in love with Tate Douglas, a civil rights worker from the North, during the violent summer of 1964. Liz Bess, now Elizabeth, returns to Mississippi to become a freedom fighter for her people and comes face to face with racist violence and death. Through the turmoil, Sue Ann is reminded of the words of Elizabeth’s grandmother: “Love ain’t black, and love ain’t white; it jes’ is.”