West of Slavery

West of Slavery PDF Author: Kevin Waite
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469663201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white southerners defended the institution of African American chattel slavery as well as systems of Native American bondage. This surprising history uncovers the Old South in unexpected places, far beyond the region's cotton fields and sugar plantations. Slaveholders' western ambitions culminated in a coast-to-coast crisis of the Union. By 1861, the rebellion in the South inspired a series of separatist movements in the Far West. Even after the collapse of the Confederacy, the threads connecting South and West held, undermining the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.

West of Slavery

West of Slavery PDF Author: Kevin Waite
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469663201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white southerners defended the institution of African American chattel slavery as well as systems of Native American bondage. This surprising history uncovers the Old South in unexpected places, far beyond the region's cotton fields and sugar plantations. Slaveholders' western ambitions culminated in a coast-to-coast crisis of the Union. By 1861, the rebellion in the South inspired a series of separatist movements in the Far West. Even after the collapse of the Confederacy, the threads connecting South and West held, undermining the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.

Slavery and the American West

Slavery and the American West PDF Author: Michael A. Morrison
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807864323
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step--from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War--the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.

Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West

Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West PDF Author: John Craig Hammond
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813946042
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Most treatments of slavery, politics, and expansion in the early American republic focus narrowly on congressional debates and the inaction of elite "founding fathers" such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, John Craig Hammond looks beyond elite leadership and examines how the demands of western settlers, the potential of western disunion, and local, popular politics determined the fate of slavery and freedom in the West between 1790 and 1820. By shifting focus away from high politics in Philadelphia and Washington, Hammond demonstrates that local political contests and geopolitical realities were more responsible for determining slavery’s fate in the West than were the clashing proslavery and antislavery proclivities of Founding Fathers and politicians in the East. When efforts to prohibit slavery revived in 1819 with the Missouri Controversy it was not because of a sudden awakening to the problem on the part of northern Republicans, but because the threat of western secession no longer seemed credible. Including detailed studies of popular political contests in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri that shed light on the western and popular character of conflicts over slavery, Hammond also provides a thorough analysis of the Missouri Controversy, revealing how the problem of slavery expansion shifted from a local and western problem to a sectional and national dilemma that would ultimately lead to disunion and civil war.

Greatest Emancipations

Greatest Emancipations PDF Author: Jim Powell
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 0230612989
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
For thousands of years, slavery went unchallenged in principle. Then in a single century, slavery was abolished and more than seven million slaves were freed. Greatest Emancipation tells this amazing story, focusing on Haiti, the British Caribbean, the United States, Cuba and Brazil, which accounted for the vast majority of slaves in the west. Jim Powell offers some surprising insights and shows that while the abolition of slavery was essential to any free society, it wasn't the sole determing factor, since some societies that abolished slavery later embraced dictatorships. Jim Powell reveals the process and tremendous influence that slavery's eradication had on individual societies in the west.

Enslaved Women in America

Enslaved Women in America PDF Author: Daina Ramey Berry Ph.D.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
This singular reference provides an authoritative account of the daily lives of enslaved women in the United States, from colonial times to emancipation following the Civil War. Through essays, photos, and primary source documents, the female experience is explored, and women are depicted as central, rather than marginal, figures in history. Slavery in the history of the United States continues to loom large in our national consciousness, and the role of women in this dark chapter of the American past is largely under-examined. This is the first encyclopedia to focus on the daily experiences and roles of female slaves in the United States, from colonial times to official abolition provided by the 13th amendment to the Constitution in 1865. Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia contains 100 entries written by a range of experts and covering all aspects of daily life. Topics include culture, family, health, labor, resistance, and violence. Arranged alphabetically by entry, this unique look at history features life histories of lesser-known African American women, including Harriet Robinson Scott, the wife of Dred Scott, as well as more notable figures.

West African Narratives of Slavery

West African Narratives of Slavery PDF Author: Sandra E. Greene
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025322294X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Slavery in Africa existed for hundreds of years before it was abolished in the late 19th century. Yet, we know little about how enslaved individuals, especially those who never left Africa, talked about their experiences. Collecting never before published or translated narratives of Africans from southeastern Ghana, Sandra E. Greene explores how these writings reveal the thoughts, emotions, and memories of those who experienced slavery and the slave trade. Greene considers how local norms and the circumstances behind the recording of the narratives influenced their content and impact. This unprecedented study affords unique insights into how ordinary West Africans understood and talked about their lives during a time of change and upheaval.

The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 3, AD 1420-AD 1804

The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 3, AD 1420-AD 1804 PDF Author: David Eltis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521840686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 777

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Book Description
The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh PDF Author: Daina Ramey Berry
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807047627
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities. A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death. Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award – from the University Coop (Austin, TX) Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR) Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery

The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery PDF Author: Eric Williams
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442231408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
In his influential and widely debated Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams examined the relation of capitalism and slavery in the British West Indies. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, his study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that has set the tone for an entire field. Williams’s profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development and has been widely debated since the book’s initial publication in 1944. The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery now makes available in book form for the first time his dissertation, on which Capitalism and Slavery was based. The significant differences between his two works allow us to rethink questions that were considered resolved and to develop fresh problems and hypotheses. It offers the possibility of a much deeper reconsideration of issues that have lost none of their urgency—indeed, whose importance has increased.

Reconfiguring Slavery

Reconfiguring Slavery PDF Author: Benedetta Rossi
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1846315646
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A fascinating collection that advances a renewed conceptual framework for understanding slavery in West Africa today: instead of retracing the end of West African slavery, this work highlights the preliminary contours of its recent reconfigurations.