Climbing Up to Glory

Climbing Up to Glory PDF Author: Wilbert L. Jenkins
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780842028172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The Civil War was undeniably an integral event in American history, but for African Americans, whose personal liberties were dependent upon its outcome, it was an especially critical juncture. In Climbing Up to Glory, Wilbert L. Jenkins explores this defining period in a story that documents the journey of average African Americans as they struggled to reinvent their lives following the abolition of slavery. In this highly readable book, Jenkins examines the unflagging determination and inner strength of African Americans as they sought to construct a solid economic base for themselves and their families by establishing their own businesses and banks and strove to own their own land. He portrays the racial violence and other obstacles blacks endured as they pooled meager resources to institute and maintain their own schools and attempted to participate in the political process. Compelling and informative, Climbing Up to Glory is an unforgettable tribute to a glowing period in African-American history sure to enrich and inspire American and African-American history enthusiasts.

Climbing Up to Glory

Climbing Up to Glory PDF Author: Wilbert L. Jenkins
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780842028172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Civil War was undeniably an integral event in American history, but for African Americans, whose personal liberties were dependent upon its outcome, it was an especially critical juncture. In Climbing Up to Glory, Wilbert L. Jenkins explores this defining period in a story that documents the journey of average African Americans as they struggled to reinvent their lives following the abolition of slavery. In this highly readable book, Jenkins examines the unflagging determination and inner strength of African Americans as they sought to construct a solid economic base for themselves and their families by establishing their own businesses and banks and strove to own their own land. He portrays the racial violence and other obstacles blacks endured as they pooled meager resources to institute and maintain their own schools and attempted to participate in the political process. Compelling and informative, Climbing Up to Glory is an unforgettable tribute to a glowing period in African-American history sure to enrich and inspire American and African-American history enthusiasts.

"Those who Labor for My Happiness"

Author: Lucia C. Stanton
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813932238
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Our perception of life at Monticello has changed dramatically over the past quarter century. The image of an estate presided over by a benevolent Thomas Jefferson has given way to a more complex view of Monticello as a working plantation, the success of which was made possible by the work of slaves. At the center of this transition has been the work of Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, recognized as the leading interpreter of Jefferson's life as a planter and master and of the lives of his slaves and their descendants. This volume represents the first attempt to pull together Stanton's most important writings on slavery at Monticello and beyond. Stanton's pioneering work deepened our understanding of Jefferson without demonizing him. But perhaps even more important is the light her writings have shed on the lives of the slaves at Monticello. Her detailed reconstruction for modern readers of slaves' lives vividly reveals their active roles in the creation of Monticello and a dynamic community previously unimagined. The essays collected here address a rich variety of topics, from family histories (including the Hemingses) to the temporary slave community at Jefferson's White House to stories of former slaves' lives after Monticello. Each piece is characterized by Stanton's deep knowledge of her subject and by her determination to do justice to both Jefferson and his slaves. Published in association with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Contested Loyalty

Contested Loyalty PDF Author: Robert M. Sandow
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823279766
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Embroiled in the Civil War, northerners wrote and spoke with frequency about the subject of loyalty. The word was common in newspaper articles, political pamphlets, and speeches, appeared on flags, broadsides, and prints, was written into diaries and letters and the stationary they appeared on, and even found its way into sermons. Its ubiquity suggests that loyalty was an important concept...but what did it mean to those who used it? Contested Loyalty examines the significance of loyalty across fault lines of gender, social class, and education, race and ethnicity, and political or religious affiliation. These differing vantage points reveal the complicated ways in which loyalties were defined, prioritized, acted upon, and related. While most of the scholarly work on Civil War Era nationalism has focused on southern identity and Confederate nationhood, the essays in Contested Loyalty examine the variable, fluid constructions of these concepts in the north. Essays explore the limitations and incomplete nature of national loyalty and how disparate groups struggled to control its meaning. The authors move beyond the narrow partisan debate over Democratic dissent to examine other challenges to and competing interpretations of national loyalty. Today’s leading and emerging scholars examine loyalty through: the frame of politics at the state and national level; the viewpoints of college educated men as well as the women they courted; the attitudes of northern Protestant churches on issues of patriotism and loyalty; working class men and women in military industries; how employers could use the language of loyalty to take away the rights of workers; and the meaning of loyalty in contexts of race and ethnicity. The Union cause was a powerful ideology committing millions of citizens, in the ranks and at home, to a long and bloody war. But loyalty to the Union cause imperfectly explains how citizens reacted to the traumas of war or the ways in which conflicting loyalties played out in everyday life. The essays in this collection point us down the path of greater understanding.

Growing Up Abolitionist

Growing Up Abolitionist PDF Author: Harriet Hyman Alonso
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 9781558493810
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
William Lloyd Garrison was one of the major abolitionist leaders, well known for his operation of the newspaper The Liberator. When he died in 1879, his five children carried on his and his wife's values in the civil rights, peace, and woman suffrage movements, argues Alonso (history, City U. of New York). She draws a portrait of the activities of the five, including editing The Nation, being involved in the women's colleges Barnard and Radcliffe, campaigning for the single tax, working in antiwar movements, and working on ensuring their father's place in history. Equal attention is paid to the youth and education of the children. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Stephen A. Swails

Stephen A. Swails PDF Author: Gordon C. Rhea
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807176575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Stephen Atkins Swails is a forgotten American hero. A free Black in the North before the Civil War began, Swails exhibited such exemplary service in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry that he became the first African American commissioned as a combat officer in the United States military. After the war, Swails remained in South Carolina, where he held important positions in the Freedmen’s Bureau, helped draft a progressive state constitution, served in the state senate, and secured legislation benefiting newly liberated Black citizens. Swails remained active in South Carolina politics after Reconstruction until violent Redeemers drove him from the state. After Swails died in 1900, state and local leaders erased him from the historical narrative. Gordon C. Rhea’s biography, one of only a handful for any of the nearly 200,000 African Americans who fought in the Civil War or figured prominently in Reconstruction, restores Swails’s remarkable legacy. Swails’s life story is a saga of an indomitable human being who confronted deep-seated racial prejudice in various institutions but nevertheless reached significant milestones in the fight for racial equality, especially within the military. His is an inspiring story that is especially timely today.

African American Faces of the Civil War

African American Faces of the Civil War PDF Author: Ronald S. Coddington
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN: 142140723X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Discover the men of color who fought for their freedom during the Civil War through profiles illustrated with original wartime photographs. A renowned collector of Civil War photographs and a prodigious researcher, Ronald S. Coddington combines compelling archival images with biographical stories that reveal the human side of the war. This third volume in his series on Civil War soldiers contains previously unpublished photographs of African American Civil War participants?many of whom fought to secure their freedom. During the Civil War, 200,000African American men enlisted in the Union army or navy. Some of them were free men and some escaped from slavery; others were released by sympathetic owners to serve the war effort. African American Faces of the Civil War tells the story of the Civil War through the images of men of color who served in roles that ranged from servants and laborers to enlisted men and junior officers. Coddington discovers these portraits?cartes de visite, ambrotypes, and tintypes?in museums, archives, and private collections. He has pieced together each individual’s life and fate based upon personal documents, military records, and pension files. These stories tell of ordinary men who became fighters, of the prejudice they faced, and of the challenges they endured. African American Faces of the Civil War makes an important contribution to a comparatively understudied aspect of the war and provides a fascinating look into lives that helped shape America. “It does nothing to diminish the depth and precision of Coddington’s research to say that each compelling vignette prompts the reader to hurriedly flip to the next one.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Edward A. Wild and the African Brigade in the Civil War

Edward A. Wild and the African Brigade in the Civil War PDF Author: Frances H. Casstevens
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476607044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Edward Wild, the controversial Union general who headed the all-black African Brigade in the Civil War, was one of the most loved and most hated figures of the 19th century. The man was neither understood nor appreciated by military or civilian, black or white, Northerner or Southerner. After enlisting at the outbreak of the war, Wild was promoted to Brigadier General and placed in charge of the United States Colored Troops. In fulfilling his assignment to free slaves and gain recruits, he took three women as hostages and ordered a great deal of property destruction. He freed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves and settled them safely on Roanoke Island. Wild then not only recruited the newly freed blacks but trained them and gave them the opportunity to prove their worth in battle. Nobody, it seems, was happy about serving with them, but the African Brigade performed courageously in several battles. Wild did some inexplicable things. Were his actions typical of the 19th century or did he act outside the norm? Was the criticism he suffered from his fellow Union officers valid--or was it due to personality conflicts? Did he deserve to be arrested, court-martialed, and even wiped from the history books--or was he the victim of discrimination? This work draws its answers from extensive research and includes many rare letters to and from Wild, including one from one of the North Carolinian hostages.

Thunder at the Gates

Thunder at the Gates PDF Author: Douglas Egerton
Publisher:
ISBN: 0465096646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Almost immediately after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, abolitionists began to call for the raising of black regiments. The South and most of the North responded with outrage. Southerners vowed to enslave black soldiers captured in battle, while many northerners claimed that blacks lacked the courage to fight. Yet Boston's Brahmins, always eager for a moral crusade, launched one of the greatest experiments in American history. In Thunder at the gates, Douglas R. Egerton chronicles the formation and exploits of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry and the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry -- regiments led by whites but composed of black men born free or into slavery.

Make Way for Liberty

Make Way for Liberty PDF Author: Jeff Kannel
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society
ISBN: 0870209477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Hundreds of African American soldiers and regimental employees represented Wisconsin in the Civil War, and many of them lived in the state either before or after the conflict. And yet, if these individuals are mentioned at all in histories of the state, it is with a sentence or two about their small numbers, or the belief that they all were from slaveholding states and served as substitutes for Wisconsin draftees. Relative to the total number of Badgers who served in the Civil War, African Americans soldiers were few, but they constituted a significant number in at least five regiments of the United States Colored Infantry and several other companies. Their lives before and after the war in rural communities, small towns, and cities form an enlightening story of acceptance and respect for their service but rejection and discrimination based on their race. Make Way for Liberty will bring clarity to the questions of how many African Americans represented Wisconsin during the conflict, who among them lived in the state before and after the war, and their impact on their communities

A Dreadful Deceit

A Dreadful Deceit PDF Author: Jacqueline Jones
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465036708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
In 1656, a Maryland planter tortured and killed an enslaved man named Antonio, an Angolan who refused to work in the fields. Three hundred years later, Simon P. Owens battled soul-deadening technologies as well as the fiction of “race” that divided him from his co-workers in a Detroit auto-assembly plant. Separated by time and space, Antonio and Owens nevertheless shared a distinct kind of political vulnerability; they lacked rights and opportunities in societies that accorded marked privileges to people labeled “white.” An American creation myth posits that these two black men were the victims of “racial” discrimination, a primal prejudice that the United States has haltingly but gradually repudiated over the course of many generations. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of Antonio, Owens, and four other African Americans to illustrate the strange history of “race” in America. In truth, Jones shows, race does not exist, and the very factors that we think of as determining it— a person’s heritage or skin color—are mere pretexts for the brutalization of powerless people by the powerful. Jones shows that for decades, southern planters did not even bother to justify slavery by invoking the concept of race; only in the late eighteenth century did whites begin to rationalize the exploitation and marginalization of blacks through notions of “racial” difference. Indeed, race amounted to a political strategy calculated to defend overt forms of discrimination, as revealed in the stories of Boston King, a fugitive in Revolutionary South Carolina; Elleanor Eldridge, a savvy but ill-starred businesswoman in antebellum Providence, Rhode Island; Richard W. White, a Union veteran and Republican politician in post-Civil War Savannah; and William Holtzclaw, founder of an industrial school for blacks in Mississippi, where many whites opposed black schooling of any kind. These stories expose the fluid, contingent, and contradictory idea of race, and the disastrous effects it has had, both in the past and in our own supposedly post-racial society. Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the pernicious fiction that has shaped four centuries of American history.