Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Karen Cook Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009092138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This rich and innovative collection explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous periods in American history – the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The essays included shed new light on individual narratives and case studies of women in war and freedom, revealing that Black women recognized they had to make their own freedom, and illustrating how that influenced their postwar political, social and economic lives. Black women and children are examined as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy during the war, and as widows who relied on kinship and community solidarity. Expanding and deepening our understanding of the various ways Black women seized wartime opportunities and made powerful claims on citizenship, this volume highlights the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Karen Cook Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009092138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
This rich and innovative collection explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous periods in American history – the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The essays included shed new light on individual narratives and case studies of women in war and freedom, revealing that Black women recognized they had to make their own freedom, and illustrating how that influenced their postwar political, social and economic lives. Black women and children are examined as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy during the war, and as widows who relied on kinship and community solidarity. Expanding and deepening our understanding of the various ways Black women seized wartime opportunities and made powerful claims on citizenship, this volume highlights the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.

A Hard Fight for We

A Hard Fight for We PDF Author: Leslie A. Schwalm
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
African-American women fought for their freedom with courage and vigor during and after the Civil War. Leslie Schwalm explores the vital roles of enslaved and formerly enslaved women on the rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina, both in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery. From there, she chronicles their efforts as freedwomen to recover from the impact of the war while redefining their lives and labor. Freedwomen asserted their own ideas of what freedom meant and insisted on important changes in the work they performed both for white employers and in their own homes. As Schwalm shows, these women rejected the most unpleasant or demeaning tasks, guarded the prerogatives they gained under the South's slave economy, and defended their hard-won freedoms against unwanted intervention by Northern whites and the efforts of former owners to restore slavery's social and economic relations during Reconstruction. A bold challenge to entrenched notions, A Hard Fight for We places African American women at the center of the South's transition from a slave society.

To ’Joy My Freedom

To ’Joy My Freedom PDF Author: Tera W. Hunter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674264630
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta—the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south—in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers’ domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post–Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception—and at the heart—of the new south.

Running from Bondage

Running from Bondage PDF Author: Karen Cook Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108831540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A compelling examination of the ways enslaved women fought for their freedom during and after the Revolutionary War.

Climbing Up to Glory

Climbing Up to Glory PDF Author: Wilbert L. Jenkins
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742573869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The Civil War was undeniably an integral event in American history, but for African Americans, whose personal liberties were dependent upon its outcome, it was an especially critical juncture. The Union defeat of the Confederacy brought African Americans a simultaneous victory over their captors, freeing them from slavery and domination and establishing them as masters of their own fate. But African Americans were far from passive victims of the war. Black soldiers fought on both sides of the conflict_Union and Confederate. In Climbing Up to Glory: A Short History of African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wilbert L. Jenkins explores this defining period in a story that documents the journey of average African Americans as they struggled to reinvent their lives following the abolition of slavery. In this highly readable book, Jenkins examines the unflagging determination and inner strength of African Americans as they sought to construct a solid economic base for themselves and their families by establishing their own businesses and banks and strove to own their own land. He portrays the racial violence and other obstacles blacks endured as they pooled meager resources to institute and maintain their own schools and attempted to participate in the political process. The family unit was also impacted by these profound societal changes. During this tumultuous time, African Americans struggled to rebuild families torn apart by slavery and to legalize family relationships such as slave marriages that were previously deemed unlawful. Compelling and informative, Climbing Up to Glory is an unforgettable tribute to a glowing period in African-American history sure to enrich and inspire American and African-American history enthusiasts.

Freedom's Women

Freedom's Women PDF Author: Noralee Frankel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
"Frankel's scholarship in this carefully researched and clearly written study is impressive.... The study is thoroughly documented with 70 pages of footnotes and a 14-page bibliography, refleccting Frankel's grasp of the secondary literature as well as extensive work in primary documents." -- Choice Freedom's Women examines African American women's experiences during the Civil War and early Reconstruction years in Mississippi. Exploring issues of family and work, the author shows how African American women's attempts to achieve more control over their lives shaped their attitudes toward work, marriage, family, and community.

Black Reconstruction in America (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois)

Black Reconstruction in America (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois) PDF Author: W. E. B. Du Bois
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019938567X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1134

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Book Description
W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication in 1935, Black Reconstruction has only grown in historical and literary importance. In the 1960s it joined the canon of the most influential revisionist historical works. Its greatest achievement is weaving a credible, lyrical historical narrative of the hostile and politically fraught years of 1860-1880 with a powerful critical analysis of the harmful effects of democracy, including Jim Crow laws and other injustices. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by David Levering Lewis, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

Gender and the Jubilee

Gender and the Jubilee PDF Author: Sharon Romeo
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820348015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
CHAPTER 5 The Legacy of Slave Marriage: Freedwomen's Marital Claims and the Process of Emancipation -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W

Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore PDF Author: Laura F. Edwards
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252072185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Establishing the household as the central institution of southern society, Edwards delineates the inseparable links between domestic relations and civil and political rights in ways that highlight women's active political role throughout the nineteenth century. She draws on diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, government records, legal documents, court proceedings, and other primary sources to explore the experiences and actions of individual women in the changing South, demonstrating how family, kin, personal reputation, and social context all merged with gender, race, and class to shape what particular women could do in particular circumstances.

Gender and the Jubilee

Gender and the Jubilee PDF Author: Sharon Romeo
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820348015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
CHAPTER 5 The Legacy of Slave Marriage: Freedwomen's Marital Claims and the Process of Emancipation -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W