This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different “spaces of freedom” that fugitive slaves inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. South, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Browse by Subject: African American History
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This book explores the politics and meanings of citizenry and citizens’ rights in the nineteenth-century American South.
This volume expands the chronology and geography of the black freedom struggle beyond the traditional emphasis on the old South and the years between 1954 and 1968.
Between Washington and Du Bois describes the life and work of James Edward Shepard, the founder and president of the first state-supported black liberal arts college in the South—what is today known as North Carolina Central University.
This volume closely examines the movement to resettle Black Americans in Africa, an effort led by the American Colonization Society during the nineteenth century and a heavily debated part of American history.
While bus boycotts, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience were the engine of the civil rights movement, the law was a primary context. Lawyers played a key role amid profound social upheavals, and the twenty-six contributors to this volume reveal what it was like to be a southern civil rights lawyer in this era.
Annotating and interpreting a vast collection of documents that illuminate and contextualize the 1822 Denmark Vesey plot, the editors of this volume argue that this landmark event was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States.
In Known for My Work, Lynda Morgan looks beyond slavery’s legacy of racial and economic inequality and counters the idea that slaves were unprepared for freedom. By examining African American social and intellectual thought, Morgan highlights how slaves built an ethos of "honest labor" and collective humanism. As moral economists, slaves and their descendants insisted that economic motives formed the foundation of their exploitation and made sophisticated arguments about the appropriate role of labor in a just and democratic society.
Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.
Exploring parts of the city’s early nineteenth-century history that have previously been neglected, Dessens examines how New Orleans came to symbolize progress, adventure, and culture to so many.