Mississippi in Africa

Mississippi in Africa PDF Author: Alan Huffman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604737549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the will for more than a decade, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross's mansion to the ground. But the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival-style mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed “Mississippi in Africa.” In the late twentieth century, the seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal people exploded, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.

Mississippi in Africa

Mississippi in Africa PDF Author: Alan Huffman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604737549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the will for more than a decade, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross's mansion to the ground. But the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival-style mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed “Mississippi in Africa.” In the late twentieth century, the seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal people exploded, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.

Mississippi to Africa

Mississippi to Africa PDF Author: Melvin J. Collier
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781477486016
Category : Africa, West
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Mississippi to Africa captures Collier's fourteen-year journey in unearthing the buried history of his maternal grandmother's family - a journey that took him back seven generations, from northern Mississippi to the Piedmont hills of South Carolina, and even back to a specific people and region in West Africa where his ancestry undoubtedly began. Trekking the paths of his ancestors and their displaced relatives before Emancipation (1863), this emotion-filled journey traversed down an intricate paper trail of federal, state, and local records, other public records, and oral histories, presented in a narrative style to inspire, entice, and propel readers into the fascinating world of genealogy and historical discoveries. Collier also uncovered the ways in which his ancestors ingeniously retained aspects of their African heritage. DNA technology confirmed his research findings and verified ancestral ties. The reader will gain many research tips and techniques along the journey.

Mississippi to Africa

Mississippi to Africa PDF Author: Melvin J. Collier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780788474538
Category : Africa, West
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description


From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse

From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse PDF Author: Christopher M. Span
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469601338
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In the years immediately following the Civil War--the formative years for an emerging society of freed African Americans in Mississippi--there was much debate over the general purpose of black schools and who would control them. From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse is the first comprehensive examination of Mississippi's politics and policies of postwar racial education. The primary debate centered on whether schools for African Americans (mostly freedpeople) should seek to develop blacks as citizens, train them to be free but subordinate laborers, or produce some other outcome. African Americans envisioned schools established by and for themselves as a primary means of achieving independence, equality, political empowerment, and some degree of social and economic mobility--in essence, full citizenship. Most northerners assisting freedpeople regarded such expectations as unrealistic and expected African Americans to labor under contract for those who had previously enslaved them and their families. Meanwhile, many white Mississippians objected to any educational opportunities for the former slaves. Christopher Span finds that newly freed slaves made heroic efforts to participate in their own education, but too often the schooling was used to control and redirect the aspirations of the newly freed.

The Black Russian

The Black Russian PDF Author: Vladimir Alexandrov
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802193765
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The “altogether astonishing” true story of a black American finding fame and fortune in Moscow and Constantinople at the turn of the 20th century (Booklist, starred review). The Black Russian tells the true story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, a man born in 1872 to former slaves who became prosperous farmers in Mississippi. But when his father was murdered, Frederick left the South to work as a waiter in Chicago and Brooklyn. Seeking greater freedom, he traveled to London, then crisscrossed Europe, and—in a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time—went to Russia. Because he found no color line there, Frederick settled in Moscow, becoming a rich and famous owner of variety theaters and restaurants. When the Bolshevik Revolution ruined him, he barely escaped to Constantinople, where he made another fortune by opening celebrated nightclubs as the “Sultan of Jazz.” Though Frederick reached extraordinary heights, the long arm of American racism, the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic, and Frederick’s own extravagance brought his life to a sad close, landing him in debtor’s prison, where he died a forgotten man in 1928. “In his assiduously researched, prodigiously descriptive, fluently analytical” narrative (Booklist, starred review), Alexandrov delivers “a tale . . . so colourful and improbable that it reads more like a novel than a work of historical biography.” (The Literary Review). “[An] extraordinary story . . . [interpreted] with great sensitivity.” —The New York Review of Books

Mississippi in Africa

Mississippi in Africa PDF Author: Alan Huffman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1628469781
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the will for more than a decade, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross's mansion to the ground. But the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival-style mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed “Mississippi in Africa.” In the late twentieth century, the seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal people exploded, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.

Native Stranger

Native Stranger PDF Author: Eddy L. Harris
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780679742326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
When Eddy Harris went to Africa, he ended up learning a great deal about his own identity as a black American as well as witnessing both the splendor and squalor of the continent. From encounters with beggars and bureaucrats to a visit to Soweto and a hellish night in a Liberian jail, Harris evokes Africa with candor and vividness.

Minn of the Mississippi

Minn of the Mississippi PDF Author:
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395273999
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
Follows the adventures of Minn, a three-legged snapping turtle, as she slowly makes her way from her birthplace at the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the mouth of river on the Gulf of Mexico.

Colonial Mississippi

Colonial Mississippi PDF Author: Christian Pinnen
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496832906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land offers the first composite of histories from the entire colonial period in the land now called Mississippi. Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks reveal stories spanning over three hundred years and featuring a diverse array of individuals and peoples from America, Europe, and Africa. The authors focus on the encounters among these peoples, good and bad, and the lasting impacts on the region. The eighteenth century receives much-deserved attention from Pinnen and Weeks as they focus on the trials and tribulations of Mississippi as a colony, especially along the Gulf Coast and in the Natchez country. The authors tell the story of a land borrowed from its original inhabitants and never returned. They make clear how a remarkable diversity characterized the state throughout its early history. Early encounters and initial contacts involved primarily Native Americans and Spaniards in the first half of the sixteenth century following the expeditions of Columbus and others to the large region of the Gulf of Mexico. More sustained interaction began with the arrival of the French to the region and the establishment of a French post on Biloxi Bay at the end of the seventeenth century. Such exchanges continued through the eighteenth century with the British, and then again the Spanish until the creation of the territory of Mississippi in 1798 and then two states, Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819. Though readers may know the bare bones of this history, the dates, and names, this is the first book to reveal the complexity of the story in full, to dig deep into a varied and complicated tale.

Africa and the Blues

Africa and the Blues PDF Author: Gerhard Kubik
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578061464
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues. Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States, he spent forty years in the field gathering the material for Africa and the Blues. In this book, Kubik relentlessly traces the remote genealogies of African cultural music through eighteen African nations, especially in the Western and Central Sudanic Belt. Included is a comprehensive map of this cradle of the blues, along with 31 photographs gathered in his fieldwork. The author also adds clear musical notations and descriptions of both African and African American traditions and practices and calls into question the many assumptions about which elements of the blues were "European" in origin and about which came from Africa. Unique to this book is Kubik's insight into the ways present-day African musicians have adopted and enlivened the blues with their own traditions. With scholarly care but with an ease for the general reader, Kubik proposes an entirely new theory on blue notes and their origins. Tracing what musical traits came from Africa and what mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, he shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomenon belonging to the African cultural world [Publisher description].