Beating Against the Barriers

Beating Against the Barriers PDF Author: R. J. M. Blackett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807112816
Category : Abolitionists
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description

Beating Against the Barriers

Beating Against the Barriers PDF Author: R. J. M. Blackett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807112816
Category : Abolitionists
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description


Understanding 19th-Century Slave Narratives

Understanding 19th-Century Slave Narratives PDF Author: Sterling Lecater Bland Jr.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
African American slave narratives of the 19th century recorded the grim realities of the antebellum South; they also provide the foundation for this compelling and revealing work on African American history and experiences. Naturally, it is not possible to really know what being a slave during the antebellum period in America was like without living the experience. But students CAN get eye-opening insight into what it was like through the gripping stories of bravery, courage, persistence, and resiliency in this collection of annotated slave narratives from the period. Each of the collected narratives includes an introduction that provides readers with key historical context on the particular life examined. Moreover, each narrative is accompanied by annotations that broaden the reader's comprehension of that primary document. The primary source documents in this volume tell enthralling stories, such as how slave woman Ellen Craft utilized her particularly pale complexion to pose as a free white man overseeing his slaves to free herself and her husband, and how Henry Brown successfully shipped himself to freedom in a box measuring scarcely 3 feet by two feet by six inches deep-despite being more than six feet tall.

Elusive Utopia

Elusive Utopia PDF Author: Gary Kornblith
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170151
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Before the Civil War, Oberlin, Ohio, stood in the vanguard of the abolition and black freedom movements. The community, including co-founded Oberlin College, strove to end slavery and establish full equality for all. Yet, in the half-century after the Union victory, Oberlin’s resolute stand for racial justice eroded as race-based discrimination pressed down on its African American citizens. In Elusive Utopia, noted historians Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser tell the story of how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Oberlin residents, black and white, understood and acted upon their changing perceptions of race, ultimately resulting in the imposition of a color line. Founded as a utopian experiment in 1833, Oberlin embraced radical racial egalitarianism in its formative years. By the eve of the Civil War, when 20 percent of its local population was black, the community modeled progressive racial relations that, while imperfect, shone as strikingly more advanced than in either the American South or North. Emancipation and the passage of the Civil War amendments seemed to confirm Oberlin's egalitarian values. Yet, contrary to the expectations of its idealistic founders, Oberlin’s residents of color fell increasingly behind their white peers economically in the years after the war. Moreover, leaders of the white-dominated temperance movement conflated class, color, and respectability, resulting in stigmatization of black residents. Over time, many white Oberlinians came to view black poverty as the result of personal failings, practiced residential segregation, endorsed racially differentiated education in public schools, and excluded people of color from local government. By 1920, Oberlin’s racial utopian vision had dissipated, leaving the community to join the racist mainstream of American society. Drawing from newspapers, pamphlets, organizational records, memoirs, census materials and tax lists, Elusive Utopia traces the rise and fall of Oberlin's idealistic vision and commitment to racial equality in a pivotal era in American history.

The Promised Land

The Promised Land PDF Author: Boulou Ebanda de B’béri
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442615338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Eschewing the often romanticized Underground Railroad narrative that portrays southern Ontario as the welcoming destination of Blacks fleeing from slavery, The Promised Land reveals the Chatham-Kent area as a crucial settlement site for an early Black presence in Canada. The contributors present the everyday lives and professional activities of individuals and families in these communities and highlight early cross-border activism to end slavery in the United States and to promote civil rights in the United States and Canada. Essays also reflect on the frequent intermingling of local Black, White, and First Nations people. Using a cultural studies framework for their collective investigations, the authors trace physical and intellectual trajectories of Blackness that have radiated from southern Ontario to other parts of Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. The result is a collection that represents the presence and diffusion of Blackness and inventively challenges the grand narrative of history.

Recaptured Africans

Recaptured Africans PDF Author: Sharla M. Fett
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469630036
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
In the years just before the Civil War, during the most intensive phase of American slave-trade suppression, the U.S. Navy seized roughly 2,000 enslaved Africans from illegal slave ships and brought them into temporary camps at Key West and Charleston. In this study, Sharla Fett reconstructs the social world of these "recaptives" and recounts the relationships they built to survive the holds of slave ships, American detention camps, and, ultimately, a second transatlantic voyage to Liberia. Fett also demonstrates how the presence of slave-trade refugees in southern ports accelerated heated arguments between divergent antebellum political movements--from abolitionist human rights campaigns to slave-trade revivalism--that used recaptives to support their claims about slavery, slave trading, and race. By focusing on shipmate relations rather than naval exploits or legal trials, and by analyzing the experiences of both children and adults of varying African origins, Fett provides the first history of U.S. slave-trade suppression centered on recaptive Africans themselves. In so doing, she examines the state of "recaptivity" as a distinctive variant of slave-trade captivity and situates the recaptives' story within the broader diaspora of "Liberated Africans" throughout the Atlantic world.

Black Women Abolitionists

Black Women Abolitionists PDF Author: Shirley J. Yee
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870497360
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Looks at how the pattern was set for Black female activism in working for abolitionism while confronting both sexism and racism.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Mary Ann Shadd Cary PDF Author: Jane Rhodes
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253067960
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
"Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a courageous and outspoken nineteenth-century African American who used the press and public speaking to fight slavery and oppression in the United States and Canada. Part of the small free black elite who used their education and limited freedoms to fight for the end of slavery and racial oppression, Shadd Cary is best known as the first African American woman to publish and edit a newspaper in North America. But her importance does not stop there. She was an active participant in many of the social and political movements that influenced nineteenth century abolition, black emigration and nationalism, women's rights, and temperance. Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century explores her remarkable life and offers a window on the free black experience, emergent black nationalisms, African American gender ideologies, and the formation of a black public sphere. This new edition contains a new epilogue and new photographs"--

Made in Britain

Made in Britain PDF Author: Stephen Tuffnell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520975634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The United States was made in Britain. For over a hundred years following independence, a diverse and lively crowd of emigrant Americans left the United States for Britain. From Liverpool and London, they produced Atlantic capitalism and managed transfers of goods, culture, and capital that were integral to US nation-building. In British social clubs, emigrants forged relationships with elite Britons that were essential not only to tranquil transatlantic connections, but also to fighting southern slavery. As the United States descended into Civil War, emigrant Americans decisively shaped the Atlantic-wide battle for public opinion. Equally revered as informal ambassadors and feared as anti-republican contagions, these emigrants raised troubling questions about the relationship between nationhood, nationality, and foreign connection. Blending the histories of foreign relations, capitalism, nation-formation, and transnational connection, Stephen Tuffnell compellingly demonstrates that the United States’ struggle toward independent nationhood was entangled at every step with the world’s most powerful empire of the time. With deep research and vivid detail, Made in Britain uncovers this hidden story and presents a bold new perspective on nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic relations.

John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65

John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65 PDF Author: William F. Cheek
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252065910
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
"A marvel of scholarship and artistry. The general reader will be fascinated to discover the vitality of the free black community that Langston moved and moved in." -- Joyce Appleby, University of California "Provides the mirror in which to reflect Langston's brilliant, turbulent career, as well as the nation's ongoing struggle against racism. Life-and-times biography could be put to no better use." -- David W. Blight, Journal of American History "One of the most thorough studies ever done of a nineteenth-century black American. It] will be the standard." -- J. M. Matthews, Choice "Breaks new and important ground in the field of African-American history. . . . It] is both a social history of the period and the remarkable story of Langston's formative life and career as a free black Ohioan in pre-Civil War America." -- David C. Dennard, Journal of Southern History "A sensitive biography of a black leader and a full-scale history of the society in which he matured and began his career." -- John B. Boles, American Historical Review "The Cheeks have masterfully performed . . . their chief task--the transformation of autobiography into social history." -- Wilson J. Moses, Reviews in American History A volume in the series Blacks in the New World, edited by August Meier and John H. Bracey

Borderland Blacks

Borderland Blacks PDF Author: dann j. Broyld
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807177679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
In the early nineteenth century, Rochester, New York, and St. Catharines, Canada West, were the last stops on the Niagara branch of the Underground Railroad. Both cities handled substantial fugitive slave traffic and were logical destinations for the settlement of runaways because of their progressive stance on social issues including abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and temperance. Moreover, these urban centers were home to sizable free Black communities as well as an array of individuals engaged in the abolitionist movement, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Anthony Burns, and Hiram Wilson. dann j. Broyld’s Borderland Blacks explores the status and struggles of transient Blacks within this dynamic zone, where the cultures and interests of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the African Diaspora overlapped. Blacks in the two cities shared newspapers, annual celebrations, religious organizations, and kinship and friendship ties. Too often, historians have focused on the one-way flow of fugitives on the Underground Railroad from America to Canada when in fact the situation on the ground was far more fluid, involving two-way movement and social collaborations. Black residents possessed transnational identities and strategically positioned themselves near the American-Canadian border where immigration and interaction occurred. Borderland Blacks reveals that physical separation via formalized national barriers did not sever concepts of psychological memory or restrict social ties. Broyld investigates how the times and terms of emancipation affected Blacks on each side of the border, including their use of political agency to pit the United States and British Canada against one another for the best possible outcomes.