Complicity

Complicity PDF Author: Anne Farrow
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307414795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery “The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco Chronicle The North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies and Africa. It also discloses the reality of Northern empires built on tainted profits—run, in some cases, by abolitionists—and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line. Culled from long-ignored documents and reports—and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings—Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past.

Complicity

Complicity PDF Author: Anne Farrow
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307414795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery “The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco Chronicle The North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies and Africa. It also discloses the reality of Northern empires built on tainted profits—run, in some cases, by abolitionists—and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line. Culled from long-ignored documents and reports—and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings—Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past.

Disowning Slavery

Disowning Slavery PDF Author: Joanne Pope Melish
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources—from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides—Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well. Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population of free people of color in its midst. Because emancipation was gradual, whites transferred prejudices shaped by slavery to their relations with free people of color, and their attitudes were buttressed by abolitionist rhetoric which seemed to promise riddance of slaves as much as slavery. She tells how whites came to blame the impoverished condition of people of color on their innate inferiority, how racialization became an important component of New England ante-bellum nationalism, and how former slaves actively participated in this discourse by emphasizing their African identity. Placing race at the center of New England history, Melish contends that slavery was important not only as a labor system but also as an institutionalized set of relations. The collective amnesia about local slavery's existence became a significant component of New England regional identity.

Slavery in the North

Slavery in the North PDF Author: Marc Howard Ross
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
In 2002, we learned that President George Washington had eight (and, later, nine) enslaved Africans in his house while he lived in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797. The house was only one block from Independence Hall and, though torn down in 1832, it housed the enslaved men and women Washington brought to the city as well as serving as the country's first executive office building. Intense controversy erupted over what this newly resurfaced evidence of enslaved people in Philadelphia meant for the site that was next door to the new home for the Liberty Bell. How could slavery best be remembered and memorialized in the birthplace of American freedom? For Marc Howard Ross, this conflict raised a related and troubling question: why and how did slavery in the North fade from public consciousness to such a degree that most Americans have perceived it entirely as a "Southern problem"? Although slavery was institutionalized throughout the Northern as well as the Southern colonies and early states, the existence of slavery in the North and its significance for the region's economic development has rarely received public recognition. In Slavery in the North, Ross not only asks why enslavement disappeared from the North's collective memories but also how the dramatic recovery of these memories in recent decades should be understood. Ross undertakes an exploration of the history of Northern slavery, visiting sites such as the African Burial Ground in New York, Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the ports of Rhode Island, old mansions in Massachusetts, prestigious universities, and rediscovered burying grounds. Inviting the reader to accompany him on his own journey of discovery, Ross recounts the processes by which Northerners had collectively forgotten 250 years of human bondage and the recent—and continuing—struggles over recovering, and commemorating, what it entailed.

Many Thousands Gone

Many Thousands Gone PDF Author: Ira Berlin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020825
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil. As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.

A Documentary History of Slavery in North America

A Documentary History of Slavery in North America PDF Author: Willie Lee Nichols Rose
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082032065X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
Documenting multiple aspects of slavery and its development in North America, this collection provides more than one hundred excerpts from personal accounts, songs, legal documents, diaries, letters, and other written sources. The book assembles a remarkable portrayal of the day-to-day connections between, and among, slaves and their owners across more than two centuries of subjugation and resistance, despair and hope. Beginning with a chronicle of the origins of slavery in the British colonies of North America, the collection traces the growth of the system to the antebellum period and includes accounts of slave revolts, auctions, slave travel and laws, and family life. Intimate as well as comprehensive, the documents reveal the individual views, goals, and lives of slaves and their masters, making this engaging work one of the most respected catalogs of firsthand information about slavery in North America.

Slavery in the North

Slavery in the North PDF Author: Charles River
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading "The deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture a situation more dreadful or disgusting. Numbers of the slaves having fainted, they were carried upon deck where several of them died and the rest with great difficulty were restored. It had nearly proved fatal to me also." - Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, an 18th century British surgeon Most Americans know that slavery is a central part of the nation's history, but the common perception of that history is selective because the general understanding is that slavery was characteristic of the states that seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy, and that slavery ended with the North's victory in the Civil War. People with a more thorough knowledge of the history of slavery are aware of the Emancipation Proclamation, the amendments that made slaves citizens and gave them the right to vote, the complex history of Reconstruction and its ultimate failure, the long history of Jim Crow and white supremacy, and the Civil Rights Movement. However, slavery was not simply a Southern phenomenon, but a national one. In fact, slavery was recognized legally first in Massachusetts, not in the South, and the belief that Puritans and Quakers were always abolitionists is wrong, as both groups owned slaves for generations. There were slaves in Vermont, New Hampshire, and the other New England colonies, including Native American slaves and then African slaves. Plantations that had gangs of slaves growing commodities for the market are associated with the South, but there were some plantations like that in New Jersey and in the Narragansett region in Rhode Island. Some slave rebellions in the South are well-known, like Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia, but slave rebellions occurred in New York City twice and were punished with barbaric severity. The North had only a fraction of the slaves the South did, but slavery existed in all 13 colonies, and for decades there were more slaves in New York City than any other city except Charleston, South Carolina. Yet another overlooked aspect of American slavery is its economic importance to the North. After independence was won, ships from Rhode Island dominated the American slave trade, trading in rum for slaves. Cotton was by far the most important American export before the Civil War, and slave-produced cotton was the main raw material processed by the North's growing industries, led by textile factories. Northern merchants sold tools, slave cloth, and many other things to Southern customers, while Northern banks financed the expansion of slavery. Northern shipping carried slave-produced cotton to Britain, so even as slavery died out in the North during the late 18th century, the North remained intimately tied to the Southern production of cotton. Slavery in the North: The History and Legacy of American Slaves in the North Before the Civil War examines how slavery took root in the North and the impact it had on the region. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about slavery in the North like never before.

Slavery in the City

Slavery in the City PDF Author: Clifton Ellis
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813940060
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Countering the widespread misconception that slavery existed only on plantations, and that urban areas were immune from its impacts, Slavery in the City is the first volume to deal exclusively with the impact of North American slavery on urban design and city life during the antebellum period. This groundbreaking collection of essays brings together studies from diverse disciplines, including architectural history, historical archaeology, geography, and American studies. The contributors analyze urban sites and landscapes that are likewise varied, from the back lots of nineteenth-century Charleston townhouses to movements of enslaved workers through the streets of a small Tennessee town. These essays not only highlight the diversity of the slave experience in the antebellum city and town but also clearly articulate the common experience of conflict inherent in relationships based on power, resistance, and adaptation. Slavery in the City makes significant contributions to our understanding of American slavery and offers an essential guide to any study of slavery and the built environment.

Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America

Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America PDF Author: Leland Donald
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918118
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
With his investigation of slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, Leland Donald makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the aboriginal cultures of this area. He shows that Northwest Coast servitude, relatively neglected by researchers in the past, fits an appropriate cross-cultural definition of slavery. Arguing that slaves and slavery were central to these hunting-fishing-gathering societies, he points out how important slaves were to the Northwest Coast economies for their labor and for their value as major items of exchange. Slavery also played a major role in more famous and frequently analyzed Northwest Coast cultural forms such as the potlatch and the spectacular art style and ritual systems of elite groups. The book includes detailed chapters on who owned slaves and the relations between masters and slaves; how slaves were procured; transactions in slaves; the nature, use, and value of slave labor; and the role of slaves in rituals. In addition to analyzing all the available data, ethnographic and historic, on slavery in traditional Northwest Coast cultures, Donald compares the status of Northwest Coast slaves with that of war captives in other parts of traditional Native North America.

Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North

Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North PDF Author: Graham Russell Hodges
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780945612513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Focusing on the development of a single African American community in eastern New Jersey, Hodges examines the experience of slavery and freedom in the rural north. This unique social history addresses many long held assumptions about the experience of slavery and emancipation outside the south. For example, by tracing the process by which whites maintained "a durable architecture of oppression" and a rigid racial hierarchy, it challenges the notions that slavery was milder and that racial boundaries were more permeable in the north. Monmouth County, New Jersey, because of its rich African American heritage and equally well-preserved historical record, provides an outstanding opportunity to study the rural life of an entire community over the course of two centuries. Hodges weaves an intricate pattern of life and death, work and worship, from the earliest settlement to the end of the Civil War.

North of Slavery

North of Slavery PDF Author: Leon F. Litwack
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Examines the ante bellum racial discrimination in the states north of the Mason-Dixon line.