Murder at Montpelier

Murder at Montpelier PDF Author: Douglas B. Chambers
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578067060
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
In 1732 Ambrose Madison, grandfather of the future president, languished for weeks in a sickbed then died. The death, soon after his arrival on the plantation, bore hallmarks of what planters assumed to be traditional African medicine. African slaves were suspected of poisoning their master. For Montpelier, his estate, and for Virginia, this was a watershed moment. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia examines the consequences of Madison's death and the ways in which this event shaped both white slaveholding society and the surrounding slave culture. At Montpelier, now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and open to the public, Igbo slaves under the directions of white overseers had been felling trees, clearing land, and planting tobacco and other crops for five years before Madison arrived. This deadly initial encounter between American colonial master and African slave community irrevocably changed both whites and blacks. This book explores the many broader meanings of this suspected murder and its aftermath. It weaves together a series of transformations that followed, such as the negotiation of master-slave relations, the transformation of Igbo culture in the New World, and the social memory of a particular slave community. For the first time, the book presents the larger history of the slave community at James Madison's Montpelier-over the five generations from the 1720s through the 1850s and beyond. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia revises many assumptions about how Africans survived enslavement, the middle passage, and grueling labor as chattel in North America. The importance of Igbo among the colonial slave population makes this work a controversial reappraisal of how Africans made themselves "African Americans" in Virginia. Douglas B. Chambers is a professor in the history department at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Murder at Montpelier

Murder at Montpelier PDF Author: Douglas B. Chambers
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578067060
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
In 1732 Ambrose Madison, grandfather of the future president, languished for weeks in a sickbed then died. The death, soon after his arrival on the plantation, bore hallmarks of what planters assumed to be traditional African medicine. African slaves were suspected of poisoning their master. For Montpelier, his estate, and for Virginia, this was a watershed moment. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia examines the consequences of Madison's death and the ways in which this event shaped both white slaveholding society and the surrounding slave culture. At Montpelier, now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and open to the public, Igbo slaves under the directions of white overseers had been felling trees, clearing land, and planting tobacco and other crops for five years before Madison arrived. This deadly initial encounter between American colonial master and African slave community irrevocably changed both whites and blacks. This book explores the many broader meanings of this suspected murder and its aftermath. It weaves together a series of transformations that followed, such as the negotiation of master-slave relations, the transformation of Igbo culture in the New World, and the social memory of a particular slave community. For the first time, the book presents the larger history of the slave community at James Madison's Montpelier-over the five generations from the 1720s through the 1850s and beyond. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia revises many assumptions about how Africans survived enslavement, the middle passage, and grueling labor as chattel in North America. The importance of Igbo among the colonial slave population makes this work a controversial reappraisal of how Africans made themselves "African Americans" in Virginia. Douglas B. Chambers is a professor in the history department at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Murder at Montpelier

Murder at Montpelier PDF Author: Douglas Brent Chambers
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617034374
Category : Culture conflict
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description


One Less Woman

One Less Woman PDF Author: Patricia Wyman Belding
Publisher: Potash Brook Pub.
ISBN:
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description


The Killing of Reverend Kay

The Killing of Reverend Kay PDF Author: Cynthia Mattson
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 1457555875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
It is the early fall of 1755 in the backcountry of Virginia. The British army has suffered a stunning defeat at the hands of the French and their Indian allies in the opening battle of the French and Indian War, leaving the frontier in flames and open to attacks from the enemy. William Kay, a young minister well-known to the colonial establishment for his years long stand against a powerful planter and vestryman bent on revenge, is murdered. Three of Kay’s slaves are accused and swiftly condemned to the brutal form of justice reserved for the enslaved, while another man who had threatened Kay’s life disappears from the scene. When the colonial governor and officials aligned with him suppress the news of the unprecedented crime and the court record of the slave trial, the killing of Reverend Kay becomes lost to history––until now.

Poisoned Relations

Poisoned Relations PDF Author: Chelsea Berry
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512826502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events. In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one’s relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved—they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities. Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts—British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas—bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.

American Homicide

American Homicide PDF Author: Randolph Roth
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674266862
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
In American Homicide, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth argues that the United States is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults—friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century, but it became relatively non-homicidal by the mid-eighteenth century, even in the slave South; and by the early nineteenth century, rates in the North and the mountain South were extremely low. But the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.

The Northeastern Reporter

The Northeastern Reporter PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 942

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Book Description
Includes the decisions of the Supreme Courts of Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and Court of Appeals of New York; May/July 1891-Mar./Apr. 1936, Appellate Court of Indiana; Dec. 1926/Feb. 1927-Mar./Apr. 1936, Courts of Appeals of Ohio.

The Book of Night Women

The Book of Night Women PDF Author: Marlon James
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101011319
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
From the author of the National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf and the WINNER of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings "An undeniable success.” — The New York Times Book Review A true triumph of voice and storytelling, The Book of Night Women rings with both profound authenticity and a distinctly contemporary energy. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they- and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings, desires, and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link. But the real revelation of the book-the secret to the stirring imagery and insistent prose-is Marlon James himself, a young writer at once breath­takingly daring and wholly in command of his craft.

This Is Our Home

This Is Our Home PDF Author: Whitney Nell Stewart
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our scholarly and public narratives. Yet even this reckoning obscures what these sites meant to so many forced to live and labor on them: plantations were Black homes as much as white. Insightfully reading the built environment of plantations, considering artifact fragments found in excavations of slave dwellings, and drawing on legal records and plantation owners' papers, Whitney Nell Stewart illuminates how enslaved people struggled to make home amid innumerable constraints and obstacles imposed by white southerners. By exploring the material remnants of the past, Stewart demonstrates how homemaking was a crucial part of the battle over slavery and freedom, a fight that continues today in consequential confrontations over who has the right to call this nation home.

Murder and Mayhem

Murder and Mayhem PDF Author: Milli Knudsen
Publisher: Peter E. Randall Publisher
ISBN: 1942155840
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
In Murder and Mayhem, veteran author and genealogist Milli Knudsen looks at true crime in New Hampshire. In the rapidly changing world of 1883-1915, criminals and good citizens learned to cope with new ways to commit crimes and how to protect themselves. Emerging forensic science became a valuable tool. In those pre-internet days, newspapers widely covered the crimes and trials and created an audience of true crime readers, much like what we have today. Murders, robberies, the rise of insurance coverage and therefore arson, the reaction to the 1915 influenza outbreak (including resistance to mask wearing), sex crimes and the advent of financial crimes are all included in case studies averaging 300 to 800 words. Sometimes the lives of the investigators—the judges, doctors, and journalists who covered crime stories—are every bit as fascinating as the crimes themselves. Murder and Mayhem tells the stories behind the headlines and gives you a glimpse into life in New England in the years leading up to World War I. Illustrated with historical images of victims and criminals alike, and fully indexed, this volume is perfect for true crime buffs, and historians. Based on primary sources, including the second prison registry of the New Hampshire State Prison, at the New Hampshire State Archives, and NH court records of the time period, this volume is important for genealogists and a good choice for library acquisition. The world changed in dramatic ways between 1883 to 1915. The ways to commit crimes and the ways to investigate crime changed as well. Knudsen has captured these fascinating stories, among many others, from those years in her newest volume. Two immigrant lumberman have a fiddling contest. What could go wrong? Fifty years after a brutal knife attack, what Christmas miracle happened to a woman in North Adams, MA? How should a $1,000 reward be split between those who help apprehend a murderer who fled to Canada? If you had an old alarm clock, wire and an explosive, could you rig up a device which could burn your house down when you were hundreds of miles away? "Murder and Mayhem is both riveting reading and an agonizing reminder that the villains and monsters of our troubled time didn’t invent dishonesty and rage and hatred. The booty may have been smaller in the early days of our complicated history—a $6.00 payday instead of several billion in crypto crimes—but the intent was not dissimilar. Milli Knudsen, in her deceptively simple, Just the Facts, Ma’am compendium, has done an extraordinary job detailing ample proof of the duality of the human psyche and providing enough fascinating stories to fill a dozen seasons of a Netflix streamer." — Ernest Thompson, novelist, playwright, actor, director, Academy Award-winner for adapted screenplay of “On Golden Pond”