Dismal Freedom

Dismal Freedom PDF Author: J. Brent Morris
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

Dismal Freedom

Dismal Freedom PDF Author: J. Brent Morris
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

Freedom in the Dismal

Freedom in the Dismal PDF Author: Monifa A. Love
Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
ISBN: 9780917635274
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Because of his participation in a crime, David Lesesne Carmichael -- a young black man of great promise -- has been given the unusually harsh sentence of thirty years in jail.As the novel opens, he and his childhood sweetheart, Camille Royce Dumas, find themselves separated, faced with the Herculean task of sustaining their impassioned relationship through words and words alone. Their letters necessarily become their only means of communication; they embody the sublimated love they can never consummate.The voices of the dead-both strangers and family members -- echo through these letters, bringing up images that ring with racial memories. David's and Camille's written words are vehicles not only for the expression of their love, but also for the remembrance of the cruel realities of their history: there is the runaway slave who hangs himself from a tree rather than face the possibility of recapture; and the woman who goes down to the sea literally to smell the ships in the hope that she can envision her native Africa.This bizarre, seemingly impossible romanticism is a backdrop to our lovers' plight. It highlights their own deprivation, that the tragedy of David and Camille was inevitable and will go on repeating itself -- through other lovers and other live -- until the historic injustices suffered by African-Americans on this continent are ameliorated.While love, in any form, offers no solutions, it is a vital element in this intense novel that provides the reader with new insights into the meaning and complexity of the black experience.

City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Marcus Peyton Nevius
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820356425
Category : Dismal Swamp (N.C. and Va.)
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Intimate Direct Democracy

Intimate Direct Democracy PDF Author: Modibo Kadalie
Publisher: On Our Own Authority!
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, many African people who were enslaved in North America emancipated themselves and fled into vast swamplands and across colonial borders, beyond the reach of oppressive settler-colonialism and the institution of slavery. On the peripheries of empire, these freedom-seeking "maroons" established their own autonomous, ethnically diverse, and intimately democratic communities of resistance. In this new volume, Modibo Kadalie offers a critical reexamination of the history and historiography surrounding two sites of African maroonage: The Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina; and Fort Mose in Florida. In these communities of refuge, deep-rooted directly democratic social movements emanating from West Africa converged with those of indigenous North Americans. Kadalie's study of these sites offers a new lens of "intimate direct democracy," through which readers are invited to re-examine their notions of human social history and the true meaning of democracy.

A Desolate Place for a Defiant People

A Desolate Place for a Defiant People PDF Author: Daniel Sayers
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813055245
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In the 250 years before the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was a brutal landscape—2,000 square miles of undeveloped and unforgiving wetlands, peat bogs, impenetrable foliage, and dangerous creatures. It was also a protective refuge for marginalized communities, including Native Americans, African-American maroons, free African Americans, and outcast Europeans. Here they created their own way of life, free of the exploitation and alienation they had escaped. In the first thorough examination of this vital site, Daniel Sayers examines the area’s archaeological record, exposing and unraveling the complex social and economic systems developed by these defiant communities that thrived on the periphery. He develops an analytical framework based on the complex interplay between alienation, diasporic exile, uneven geographical development, and modes of production to argue that colonialism and slavery inevitably created sustained critiques of American capitalism.

Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy

Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy PDF Author: Moses Grandy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
This book is a slave narrative, written by former slave, Moses Grandy.

Freedom of Simplicity

Freedom of Simplicity PDF Author: Richard J. Foster
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0060759712
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
A revised and updated edition of the manifesto that shows how simplicity is not merely having less stress and more leisure but an essential spiritual discipline for the health of our soul.

Slavery's Exiles

Slavery's Exiles PDF Author: Sylviane A. Diouf
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814760287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
The forgotten stories of America maroons—wilderness settlers evading discovery after escaping slavery Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women’s proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.

Epic Journeys of Freedom

Epic Journeys of Freedom PDF Author: Cassandra Pybus
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807055182
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Cassandra Pybus adds greatly to the work of [previous] scholars by insisting that slaves stand at the center of their own history . . . Her 'biographies' of flight expose the dangers that escape entailed and the courage it took to risk all for freedom. Only by measuring those dangers can the exhilaration of success be comprehended and the unspeakable misery of failure be appreciated.--Ira Berlin, from the Foreword During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Epic Journeys of Freedom is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their own lives. This alternative narrative of freedom fought for and won is uniquely compelling; historian Cassandra Pybus's groundbreaking research has uncovered individual stories of runaways who left America to forge difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Harry, for example, one of George Washington's slaves, escaped from Mount Vernon in 1776, was evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783, and eventually relocated to Sierra Leone in West Africa with his wife and three children. Ralph Henry, who ran away from the Virginia firebrand Patrick Henry in 1776, took a similar path to precarious freedom in Sierra Leone, while others, such as John Moseley and John Randall, were evacuated with the British forces to England. Stranded in England without skills or patronage during a period of high unemployment, they were among thousands of newly freed poor blacks who struggled just to survive. While some were relocated to Sierra Leone, others, like Moseley and Randall, found themselves transported to the distant penal colony of Botany Bay, in Australia. Epic Journeys of Freedom, written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, is a fascinating insight into the meaning of liberty; it will change forever the way we think about the American Revolution.

Pure America

Pure America PDF Author: Elizabeth Catte
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1953368050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN America John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, a "riveting and tightly argued" history of eugenics and its ripple effects, by acclaimed historian Elizabeth Catte. Between 1927 and 1979