In the Shadow of Dred Scott

In the Shadow of Dred Scott PDF Author: Kelly M. Kennington
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820350850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
The Dred Scott suit for freedom, argues Kelly M. Kennington, was merely the most famous example of a phenomenon that was more widespread in antebellum American jurisprudence than is generally recognized. The author draws on the case files of more than three hundred enslaved individuals who, like Dred Scott and his family, sued for freedom in the local legal arena of St. Louis. Her findings open new perspectives on the legal culture of slavery and the negotiated processes involved in freedom suits. As a gateway to the American West, a major port on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and a focal point in the rancorous national debate over slavery’s expansion, St. Louis was an ideal place for enslaved individuals to challenge the legal systems and, by extension, the social systems that held them in forced servitude. Kennington offers an in-depth look at how daily interactions, webs of relationships, and arguments presented in court shaped and reshaped legal debates and public attitudes over slavery and freedom in St. Louis. Kennington also surveys more than eight hundred state supreme court freedom suits from around the United States to situate the St. Louis example in a broader context. Although white enslavers dominated the antebellum legal system in St. Louis and throughout the slaveholding states, that fact did not mean that the system ignored the concerns of the subordinated groups who made up the bulk of the American population. By looking at a particular example of one group’s encounters with the law—and placing these suits into conversation with similar encounters that arose in appellate cases nationwide—Kennington sheds light on the ways in which the law responded to the demands of a variety of actors.

In the Shadow of Dred Scott

In the Shadow of Dred Scott PDF Author: Kelly M. Kennington
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820350850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
The Dred Scott suit for freedom, argues Kelly M. Kennington, was merely the most famous example of a phenomenon that was more widespread in antebellum American jurisprudence than is generally recognized. The author draws on the case files of more than three hundred enslaved individuals who, like Dred Scott and his family, sued for freedom in the local legal arena of St. Louis. Her findings open new perspectives on the legal culture of slavery and the negotiated processes involved in freedom suits. As a gateway to the American West, a major port on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and a focal point in the rancorous national debate over slavery’s expansion, St. Louis was an ideal place for enslaved individuals to challenge the legal systems and, by extension, the social systems that held them in forced servitude. Kennington offers an in-depth look at how daily interactions, webs of relationships, and arguments presented in court shaped and reshaped legal debates and public attitudes over slavery and freedom in St. Louis. Kennington also surveys more than eight hundred state supreme court freedom suits from around the United States to situate the St. Louis example in a broader context. Although white enslavers dominated the antebellum legal system in St. Louis and throughout the slaveholding states, that fact did not mean that the system ignored the concerns of the subordinated groups who made up the bulk of the American population. By looking at a particular example of one group’s encounters with the law—and placing these suits into conversation with similar encounters that arose in appellate cases nationwide—Kennington sheds light on the ways in which the law responded to the demands of a variety of actors.

Before Dred Scott

Before Dred Scott PDF Author: Anne Twitty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107112060
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
An analysis of slave and slaveholder understanding and manipulation of formal legal systems in the region known as the American Confluence during the antebellum era.

You Are Not American

You Are Not American PDF Author: Amanda Frost
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807051438
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize Citizenship is invaluable, yet our status as citizens is always at risk—even for those born on US soil. Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American”—whether due to their race, ethnicity, marriage partner, or beliefs. Drawing on the narratives of those who have struggled to be treated as full members of “We the People,” law professor Amanda Frost exposes a hidden history of discrimination and xenophobia that continues to this day. The Supreme Court’s rejection of Black citizenship in Dred Scott was among the first and most notorious examples of citizenship stripping, but the phenomenon did not end there. Women who married noncitizens, persecuted racial groups, labor leaders, and political activists were all denied their citizenship, and sometimes deported, by a government that wanted to redefine the meaning of “American.” Today, US citizens living near the southern border are regularly denied passports, thousands are detained and deported by mistake, and the Trump administration is investigating the citizenship of 700,000 naturalized citizens. Even elected leaders such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are not immune from false claims that they are not citizens eligible to hold office. You Are Not American grapples with what it means to be American and the issues surrounding membership, identity, belonging, and exclusion that still occupy and divide the nation in the twenty-first century.

Supreme Injustice

Supreme Injustice PDF Author: Paul Finkelman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674982088
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The three most important Supreme Court Justices before the Civil War—Chief Justices John Marshall and Roger B. Taney and Associate Justice Joseph Story—upheld the institution of slavery in ruling after ruling. These opinions cast a shadow over the Court and the legacies of these men, but historians have rarely delved deeply into the personal and political ideas and motivations they held. In Supreme Injustice, the distinguished legal historian Paul Finkelman establishes an authoritative account of each justice’s proslavery position, the reasoning behind his opposition to black freedom, and the incentives created by circumstances in his private life. Finkelman uses census data and other sources to reveal that Justice Marshall aggressively bought and sold slaves throughout his lifetime—a fact that biographers have ignored. Justice Story never owned slaves and condemned slavery while riding circuit, and yet on the high court he remained silent on slave trade cases and ruled against blacks who sued for freedom. Although Justice Taney freed many of his own slaves, he zealously and consistently opposed black freedom, arguing in Dred Scott that free blacks had no Constitutional rights and that slave owners could move slaves into the Western territories. Finkelman situates this infamous holding within a solid record of support for slavery and hostility to free blacks. Supreme Injustice boldly documents the entanglements that alienated three major justices from America’s founding ideals and embedded racism ever deeper in American civic life.

American Confluence

American Confluence PDF Author: Stephen Aron
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253346919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
A bold new history of Missouri--the region where the American West begins.

The Dred Scott Case

The Dred Scott Case PDF Author: Roger Brooke Taney
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781017251265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Washington University Libraries presents an online exhibit of documents regarding the Dred Scott case. American slave Dred Scott (1795?-1858) and his wife Harriet filed suit for their freedom in the Saint Louis Circuit Court in 1846. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1857 that the Scotts must remain slaves.

Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy

Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy PDF Author: Moon-Kie Jung
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804795223
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Racism has never been simple. It wasn't more obvious in the past, and it isn't less potent now. From the birth of the United States to the contemporary police shooting death of an unarmed Black youth, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy investigates ingrained practices of racism, as well as unquestioned assumptions in the study of racism, to upend and deepen our understanding. In Moon-Kie Jung's unsettling book, Dred Scott v. Sandford, the notorious 1857 Supreme Court case, casts a shadow over current immigration debates and the "war on terror." The story of a 1924 massacre of Filipino sugar workers in Hawai'i pairs with statistical relentlessness of Black economic suffering to shed light on hidden dimensions of mass ignorance and indifference. The histories of Asians, Blacks, Latina/os, and Natives relate in knotty ways. State violence and colonialism come to the fore in taking measure of the United States, past and present, while the undue importance of assimilation and colorblindness recedes. Ultimately, Jung challenges the dominant racial common sense and develops new concepts and theory for radically rethinking and resisting racisms.

The Dred Scott Case

The Dred Scott Case PDF Author: Don Edward Fehrenbacher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, The Dred Scott Case is a masterful examination of the most famous example of judicial failure--the case referred to as "the most frequently overturned decision in history."On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the Supreme Court's decision against Dred Scott, a slave who maintained he had been emancipated as a result of having lived with his master in the free state of Illinois and in federal territory where slavery was forbidden by the Missouri Compromise. The decision did much more than resolve the fate of an elderly black man and his family: Dred Scott v. Sanford was the first instance in which the Supreme Court invalidated a major piece of federal legislation. The decision declared that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the federal territories, thereby striking a severe blow at the the legitimacy of the emerging Republican party and intensifying the sectional conflict over slavery.This book represents a skillful review of the issues before America on the eve of the Civil War. The first third of the book deals directly with the with the case itself and the Court's decision, while the remainder puts the legal and judicial question of slavery into the broadest possible American context. Fehrenbacher discusses the legal bases of slavery, the debate over the Constitution, and the dispute over slavery and continental expansion. He also considers the immediate and long-range consequences of the decision.

The Long, Lingering Shadow

The Long, Lingering Shadow PDF Author: Robert J. Cottrol
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820344761
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Students of American history know of the law’s critical role in systematizing a racial hierarchy in the United States. Showing that this history is best appreciated in a comparative perspective, The Long, Lingering Shadow looks at the parallel legal histories of race relations in the United States, Brazil, and Spanish America. Robert J. Cottrol takes the reader on a journey from the origins of New World slavery in colonial Latin America to current debates and litigation over affirmative action in Brazil and the United States, as well as contemporary struggles against racial discrimination and Afro-Latin invisibility in the Spanish-speaking nations of the hemisphere. Ranging across such topics as slavery, emancipation, scientific racism, immigration policies, racial classifications, and legal processes, Cottrol unravels a complex odyssey. By the eve of the Civil War, the U.S. slave system was rooted in a legal and cultural foundation of racial exclusion unmatched in the Western Hemisphere. That system’s legacy was later echoed in Jim Crow, the practice of legally mandated segregation. Jim Crow in turn caused leading Latin Americans to regard their nations as models of racial equality because their laws did not mandate racial discrimination— a belief that masked very real patterns of racism throughout the Americas. And yet, Cottrol says, if the United States has had a history of more-rigid racial exclusion, since the Second World War it has also had a more thorough civil rights revolution, with significant legal victories over racial discrimination. Cottrol explores this remarkable transformation and shows how it is now inspiring civil rights activists throughout the Americas.

Freedom's Price

Freedom's Price PDF Author: Michaela Maccoll
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
ISBN: 162091624X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Kansas State Reading Circle Recommended Books Paterson Prize for Books for Young People Grateful American Prize – Honorable Mention Missouri State Teachers Association Recommended Books Dred Scott’s daughter learns what it means to pay the price for freedom in this compelling middle-grade historical fiction novel. Eleven year old Eliza Scott has a lot to live for. Eliza and her family will soon be free. She is learning to read and write at a secret school. And she has a new friend she can share her dreams with. But when Eliza is confronted by vicious slave catchers, the spread of cholera, and a devastating fire, she is forced to come to terms with what it really takes to be on her own. Will she ever be able to fulfill her childhood dreams? Michaela MacColl and Rosemary Nichols delve deep into the history of the Dred Scott decision and pre–Civil War America to tell Eliza Scott’s riveting coming-of-age story. Freedom’s Price is the second in the Hidden Histories series about children and little-known events in American history.