The Bondsman's Burden

The Bondsman's Burden PDF Author: Jenny Bourne (Professor of Economics)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521521383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Were slaves property or human beings under the law? In crafting answers to this question, Southern judges designed efficient laws that protected property rights and helped slavery remain economically viable. But, by preserving property rights, they sheltered the persons embodied by that property - the slaves themselves. Slave law therefore had unintended consequences: it generated rules that judges could apply to free persons, precedents that became the foundation for laws designed to protect ordinary Americans. The Bondsman's Burden, first published in 1998, provides a rigorous and compelling economic analysis of the common law of Southern slavery, inspecting thousands of legal disputes heard in Southern antebellum courts, disputes involving servants, employees, accident victims, animals, and other chattel property, as well as slaves. The common law, although it supported the institution of slavery, did not favor every individual slave owner who brought a grievance to court.

The Bondsman's Burden

The Bondsman's Burden PDF Author: Jenny Bourne (Professor of Economics)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521521383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Were slaves property or human beings under the law? In crafting answers to this question, Southern judges designed efficient laws that protected property rights and helped slavery remain economically viable. But, by preserving property rights, they sheltered the persons embodied by that property - the slaves themselves. Slave law therefore had unintended consequences: it generated rules that judges could apply to free persons, precedents that became the foundation for laws designed to protect ordinary Americans. The Bondsman's Burden, first published in 1998, provides a rigorous and compelling economic analysis of the common law of Southern slavery, inspecting thousands of legal disputes heard in Southern antebellum courts, disputes involving servants, employees, accident victims, animals, and other chattel property, as well as slaves. The common law, although it supported the institution of slavery, did not favor every individual slave owner who brought a grievance to court.

Disability Histories

Disability Histories PDF Author: Susan Burch
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025209669X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
The field of disability history continues to evolve rapidly. In this collection, Susan Burch and Michael Rembis present essays that integrate critical analysis of gender, race, historical context, and other factors to enrich and challenge the traditional modes of interpretation still dominating the field. Contributors delve into four critical areas of study within disability history: family, community, and daily life; cultural histories; the relationship between disabled people and the medical field; and issues of citizenship, belonging, and normalcy. As the first collection of its kind in over a decade, Disability Histories not only brings readers up to date on scholarship within the field but fosters the process of moving it beyond the U.S. and Western Europe by offering work on Africa, South America, and Asia. The result is a broad range of readings that open new vistas for investigation and study while encouraging scholars at all levels to redraw the boundaries that delineate who and what is considered of historical value. Informed and accessible, Disability Histories is essential for classrooms engaged in all facets of disability studies within and across disciplines.

African American Slavery and Disability

African American Slavery and Disability PDF Author: Dea H. Boster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136275312
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Disability is often mentioned in discussions of slave health, mistreatment and abuse, but constructs of how "able" and "disabled" bodies influenced the institution of slavery has gone largely overlooked. This volume uncovers a history of disability in African American slavery from the primary record, analyzing how concepts of race, disability, and power converged in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Slaves with physical and mental impairments often faced unique limitations and conditions in their diagnosis, treatment, and evaluation as property. Slaves with disabilities proved a significant challenge to white authority figures, torn between the desire to categorize them as different or defective and the practical need to incorporate their "disorderly" bodies into daily life. Being physically "unfit" could sometimes allow slaves to escape the limitations of bondage and oppression, and establish a measure of self-control. Furthermore, ideas about and reactions to disability—appearing as social construction, legal definition, medical phenomenon, metaphor, or masquerade—highlighted deep struggles over bodies in bondage in antebellum America.

Double Character

Double Character PDF Author: Ariela J. Gross
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400823846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In a groundbreaking study of the day-to-day law and culture of slavery, Ariela Gross investigates the local courtrooms of the Deep South where ordinary people settled their disputes over slaves. Buyers sued sellers for breach of warranty when they considered slaves to be physically or morally defective; owners sued supervisors who whipped or neglected slaves under their care. Double Character seeks to explain how communities dealt with an important dilemma raised by these trials: how could slaves who acted as moral agents be treated as commodities? Because these cases made the character of slaves a central legal question, slaves' moral agency intruded into the courtroom, often challenging the character of slaveholders who saw themselves as honorable masters. Gross looks at the stories about white and black character that witnesses and litigants put forth in court. She not only reveals the role of law in constructing "race" but also offers a portrait of the culture of slavery, one that addresses historical debates about law, honor, and commerce in the American South. Gross maintains that witnesses and litigants drew on narratives available in the culture at large to explain the nature and origins of slaves' character, such as why slaves became runaways. But the legal process also shaped their expressions of racial ideology by favoring certain explanations over others. Double Character brings to life the law as a dramatic ritual in people's daily lives, looking at trials from the perspective of litigants, lawyers, doctors, and the slaves themselves. The author's approach combines the methods of cultural anthropology, quantitative social history, and critical race theory.

Economic Analysis of Tort and Products Liability Law

Economic Analysis of Tort and Products Liability Law PDF Author: Jenny Bourne Wahl
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815330875
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Historical Dictionary of the Old South

Historical Dictionary of the Old South PDF Author: William L. Richter
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810879158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
The South played a prominent role in early American history, and its position was certainly strong and proud except for the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Thus, it drew away from the rest of an expanding nation, and in 1861 declared secession and developed a Confederacy… that ultimately lost the war. Indeed, for some time it was occupied. Thus, the South has a very mixed legacy, with good and bad aspects, and sometimes the two of them mixed. Which only enhances the need for a careful and balanced approach. This can be found in the Historical Dictionary of the Old South, which first traces its history from colonial times to the end of the Civil War in a substantial chronology. Particularly interesting is the introduction, which analyzes the rise and the fall, the good and the bad, as well as the middling and indifferent, over nigh on two centuries. The details are filled in very amply in over 600 dictionary entries on the politics, economy, society and culture of the Old South. An ample bibliography directs students and researchers toward other sources of information.

Racism in Contemporary America

Racism in Contemporary America PDF Author: Meyer Weinberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313064555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 854

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Book Description
Racism in Contemporary America is the largest and most up-to-date bibliography available on current research on the topic. It has been compiled by award-winning researcher Meyer Weinberg, who has spent many years writing and researching contemporary and historical aspects of racism. Almost 15,000 entries to books, articles, dissertations, and other materials are organized under 87 subject-headings. In addition, there are author and ethnic-racial indexes. Several aids help the researcher access the materials included. In addition to the subject organization of the bibliography, entries are annotated whenever the title is not self-explanatory. An author index is followed by an ethnic-racial index which makes it convenient to follow a single group through any or all the subject headings. This is a source book for the serious study of America's most enduring problem; as such it will be of value to students and researchers at all levels and in most disciplines.

Roadblocks to Freedom

Roadblocks to Freedom PDF Author: Andrew Fede
Publisher: Quid Pro Books
ISBN: 1610271092
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description
This new book by Andrew Fede considers the law of freedom suits and manumission from the point-of-view of legal procedure, evidence rules, damage awards, and trial practicein addition to the abstract principles stated in the appellate decisions. The author shows that procedural and evidentiary roadblocks made it increasingly impossible for many slaves, or free blacks who were wrongfully held as slaves, to litigate their freedom. Even some of the most celebrated cases in which the courts freed slaves must be read as tempered by the legal realities the actors faced or the courts actually recognized in the process. Slave owners in almost all slave societies had the right to manumit or free all or some of their slaves. Slavery law also permitted people to win their freedom if they were held as slaves contrary to law. In this book, Fede provides a comprehensive view of how some enslaved litigants won their freedom in the courtand how many others, like Dred and Harriet Scott, did not because of the substantive and procedural barriers that both judges and legislators placed in the way of people held in slavery who sought their freedom in court. From the 17th century to the Civil War, Southern governments built roadblock after roadblock to the freedom sought by deserving enslaved people, even if this restricted the masters' rights to free their slaves or defied settled law. They increasingly prohibited all manumissions and added layers of procedure to those seeking freedomwhile eventually providing a streamlined process by which free blacks "voluntarily" enslaved themselves and their children. Drawing on his three decades of legal experience to take seriously the trial process and rules under which slave freedom cases were decided, Fede considers how slave owners, slaves, and lawyers caused legal change from the bottom up.

Slave Against Slave

Slave Against Slave PDF Author: Jeff Forret
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807161128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
In the first-ever comprehensive analysis of violence between slaves in the antebellum South, Jeff Forret challenges persistent notions of slave communities as sites of unwavering harmony and solidarity. Though existing scholarship shows that intraracial black violence did not reach high levels until after Reconstruction, contemporary records bear witness to its regular presence among enslaved populations. Slave against Slave explores the roots of and motivations for such violence and the ways in which slaves, masters, churches, and civil and criminal laws worked to hold it in check. Far from focusing on violence alone, Forret’s work also adds depth to our understanding of morality among the enslaved, revealing how slaves sought to prevent violence and punish those who engaged in it. Forret mines a vast array of slave narratives, slaveholders’ journals, travelers’ accounts, and church and court records from across the South to approximate the prevalence of slave-against-slave violence prior to the Civil War. A diverse range of motives for these conflicts emerges, from tensions over status differences, to disagreements originating at work and in private, to discord relating to the slave economy and the web of debts that slaves owed one another, to courtship rivalries, marital disputes, and adulterous affairs. Forret also uncovers the role of explicitly gendered violence in bondpeople’s constructions of masculinity and femininity, suggesting a system of honor among slaves that would have been familiar to southern white men and women, had they cared to acknowledge it. Though many generations of scholars have examined violence in the South as perpetrated by and against whites, the internal clashes within the slave quarters have remained largely unexplored. Forret’s analysis of intraracial slave conflicts in the Old South examines narratives of violence in slave communities, opening a new line of inquiry into the study of American slavery.

Divided Mastery

Divided Mastery PDF Author: Jonathan D. Martin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674011496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Divided Mastery explores a curiously neglected aspect of the history of American slavery: the rental of slaves. Though few slaves escaped being rented out at some point in their lives, this is the first book to describe the practice, and its effects on both slaves and the peculiar institution. Martin reveals how the unique triangularity of slave hiring created slaves with two masters, thus transforming the customary polarity of master-slave relationships. Drawing upon slaveholders' letters, slave narratives, interviews with former slaves, legislative petitions, and court records, Divided Mastery ultimately reveals that slave hiring's significance was paradoxical. The practice bolstered the system of slavery by facilitating its spread into the western territories, by democratizing access to slave labor, and by promoting both production and speculation with slave capital. But at the same time, slaves used hiring to their advantage, finding in it crucial opportunities to shape their work and family lives, to bring owners and hirers into conflict with each other, and to destabilize the system of bondage. Martin illuminates the importance of the capitalist market as a tool for analyzing slavery and its extended relationships. Through its fresh and complex perspective, Divided Mastery demonstrates that slave hiring is critical to understanding the fundamental nature of American slavery, and its social, political, and economic place in the Old South.