From Homicide to Slavery

From Homicide to Slavery PDF Author: David Brion Davis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description

From Homicide to Slavery

From Homicide to Slavery PDF Author: David Brion Davis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description


From Homicide to Slavery

From Homicide to Slavery PDF Author: David Brion Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195054180
Category : National characteristics, American
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of Davis' work includes essays on capital punishment, movements of counter-subversion, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.

From Homicide to Slavery : Studies in American Culture

From Homicide to Slavery : Studies in American Culture PDF Author: David Brion Davis Sterling Professor of History Yale University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198021127
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
For more than twenty years David Brion Davis has been recognized as a leading authority on the moral and ideological responses to slavery in the Western world. From Homicide to Slavery, Davis's first book of collected essays, brings together selections reflecting his wide-ranging interests in colonial history, Afro-American history, the social sciences, and American literature. The essays are interconnected by Davis's central concern with violence, irrationality, and the definition of moral limits during a period when Americans believed they were breaking free from historical constraints and acquiring new powers of self-perfection. Topics range from a socially revealing murder trial in 1843 to debates over capital punishment, movements of counter-subverison, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the portrayal of violence in American literature, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.

Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860

Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860 PDF Author: David Brion Davis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726226
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Get Book Here

Book Description
Homicide has many social and psychological implications that vary from culture to culture and which change as people accept new ideas concerning guilt, responsibility, and the causes of crime. A study of attitudes toward homicide is therefore a method of examining social values in a specific setting. Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860 is the first book to contrast psychological assumptions of imaginative writers with certain social and intellectual currents in an attempt to integrate social attitudes toward such diverse subjects as human evil, moral responsibility, criminal insanity, social causes of crime, dueling, lynching, the "unwritten law" of a husband's revenge, and capital punishment. In addition to works of literary distinction by Cooper, Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, among others, Davis considers a large body of cheap popular fiction generally ignored in previous studies of the literature of this period. This is an engrossing study of fiction as a reflection of and a commentary on social problems and as an influence shaping general beliefs and opinions.

Homicide Justified

Homicide Justified PDF Author: Andrew Fede
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351121
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description
This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.

American Homicide

American Homicide PDF Author: Randolph Roth
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674054547
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 672

Get Book Here

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 Lineaments of Wrath

The Lineaments of Wrath PDF Author: James W. Clarke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351303589
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Get Book Here

Book Description
Violence has marked relations between blacks and whites in America for nearly four hundred years. In The Lineaments of Wrath, James W. Clarke draws upon behavioral science theory and primary historical evidence to examine and explain its causes and enduring consequences. Beginning with slavery and concluding with the present, Clarke describes how the combined effects of state-sanctioned mob violence and the discriminatory administration of "race-blind" criminal and contract labor laws terrorized and immobilized the black population in the post-emancipation South. In this fashion an agricultural system, based on debt peonage and convict labor, quickly replaced slavery and remained the back-bone of the region's economy well into the twentieth century. Quoting the actual words of victims and witnesses from former slaves to "gangsta" rappers Clarke documents the erosion of black confidence in American criminal justice. In so doing, he also traces the evolution, across many generations, of a black subculture of violence, in which disputes are settled personally, and without recourse to the legal system. That subculture, the author concludes, accounts for historically high rates of black-on-black violence which now threatens to destroy the black inner city from within. The Lineaments of Wrath puts America's race issues into a completely original historical perspective. Those in the fields of political science, sociology, history, psychology, public policy, race relations, and law will find Clarke's work of profound importance.

The Fleming Lectures, 1937--1990

The Fleming Lectures, 1937--1990 PDF Author: Burl Noggle
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807117804
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Get Book Here

Book Description
As a quintessentially southern campus, Louisiana State University has logically spawned some of the most important regional scholarly studies of the twentieth century. During the campus' golden age in the 1930s, such eminent scholars as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Eric Voeglin made LSU one of the leading academic institutions in the country. It was during this period that a series called the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, named in honor of a noted scholar and researcher at LSU in the early 1900s, was created to add to the body of knowledge in the developing field of southern history.Now considered one of the most distinguished lecture series of its kind, the Fleming series has brought to the LSU campus scholars of note who have studied the South in its various aspects. Lecturers ranging from C. Vann Woodward and Lewis P. Simpson to Eric Foner and Drew Gilpin Faust have presented a wide panorama of views and methodological approaches. In this book Burl Noggle presents an informative history of the lectures from 1937 through 1990.As a member of the LSU history faculty for more than thirty years, Noggle has heard most of the Fleming lectures delivered and has participated in the selection of lecturers. He thus brings a rather special perspective to his subject -- that of an insider who has been intimately involved in the series itself -- as well as the broader understanding of a mature scholar who has devoted a substantial portion of his career to the analysis of American historiography.Noggle focuses on two aspects of the Fleming series. On one level, he discusses the history of the lectures themselves -- who lectured on what topic, why each lecturer was chose, what general historiographical trends prevailed at the time, and how each speaker's lectures were related to scholarly currents within the profession. On another level, Noggle discusses just what the lecturers said about southern history and how they contributed to, qualified, refuted, or revised existing conceptions about southern history. The Fleming Lectures, 1937--1990 is, therefore, both a history of the lecture series and an analysis of the history contained in the lectures.

A House Divided

A House Divided PDF Author: Mason I. Lowance Jr.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 567

Get Book Here

Book Description
This anthology brings together under one cover the most important abolitionist and--unique to this volume--proslavery documents written in the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War. It makes accessible to students, scholars, and general readers the breadth of the slavery debate. Including many previously inaccessible documents, A House Divided is a critical and welcome contribution to a literature that includes only a few volumes of antislavery writings and no volumes of proslavery documents in print. Mason Lowance's introduction is an excellent overview of the antebellum slavery debate and its key issues and participants. Lowance also introduces each selection, locating it historically, culturally, and thematically as well as linking it to other writings. The documents represent the full scope of the varied debates over slavery. They include examples of race theory, Bible-based arguments for and against slavery, constitutional analyses, writings by former slaves and women's rights activists, economic defenses and critiques of slavery, and writings on slavery by such major writers as William Lloyd Garrison, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Together they give readers a real sense of the complexity and heat of the vexed conversation that increasingly dominated American discourse as the country moved from early nationhood into its greatest trial.

Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave

Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave PDF Author: Hank Trent
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807151041
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
The American Anti-Slavery Society originally published Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave in 1838 to much fanfare, describing it as a rare slave autobiography. Soon thereafter, however, southerners challenged the authenticity of the work and the society retracted it. Abolitionists at the time were unable to defend the book; and, until now, historians could not verify Williams's identity or find the Alabama slave owners he named in the book. As a result, most scholars characterized the author as a fraud, perhaps never even a slave, or at least not under the circumstances described in the book. In this annotated edition of Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Hank Trent provides newly discovered biographical information about the true author of the book -- an African American man enslaved in Alabama and Virginia. Trent identifies Williams's owners in those states as well as in Maryland and Louisiana. He explains how Williams escaped from slavery and then altered his life story to throw investigators off his track. Through meticulous and extensive research, Trent also reveals unknown details of James Williams's real life, drawing upon runaway ads, court cases, census records, and estate inventories never before linked to him or to the narrative. In the end, Trent proves that the author of the book was truly an enslaved man, albeit one who wrote a romanticized, fictionalized story based on his real life, which proved even more complex and remarkable than the story he told.