Slavery, enslaved persons and abolition of slavery Books

Book SynopsisBeginning with antiquity, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora captures the essential political, cultural, social, and economic developments that shaped the black experience. The second edition updates the text of the previous edition to be current with the most recent research on the African Diaspora.Trade Review'No other study seeks to identify and globally illuminate the African diaspora from antiquity to the present day. This second edition of Reversing Sail is a must-read for general undergraduate course development, but also important for a popular informative and cognitive understanding of Africa's role in world history.' Margaret Washington, Cornell University, New York'This gem of a book conveys the uniqueness of the African diaspora among migrations of humankind. Gomez, the leading chronicler of the diaspora, elicits insight and inspiration in tracing the achievements of antiquity, the brave and effective responses to centuries of enslavement and empire, and the recent generations of creative genius in cultural leadership.' Patrick Manning, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History, Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh'In Reversing Sail, Michael A. Gomez gives us the full sweep of the early African diaspora - not just the story of slavery, but the story of Africans with their lives, their languages, and their civilization as it encountered Europe. For those who were enslaved, the story goes beyond the bare-bones narrative of plantation and service to include the transformation of African culture by that of America, and the African part in the creation of the culture of the Americas.' John Thornton, Boston University'Reversing Sail will endure as the most competent book to introduce generations of students to what we now characterize as the African diaspora, as well as yielding considerable knowledge on the Indian Ocean, the Black Atlantic, Atlantic History, and World History.' Toyin Falola, Frances and Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas, Austin'Reversing Sail succeeds beautifully in its goal of introducing readers to the challenges and rewards of studying the African diaspora and laying out categories for making sense of an enormously rich subject. In so doing, Gomez demonstrates the value of approaching the stories of the African diaspora with a 'diasporic lens.'' Harvey Hill, Anglican and Episcopal History ReviewTable of ContentsPart I. 'Old' World Dimensions and the First Wave: 1. Antiquity; 2. Africans and the Bible; 3. Africans and the Islamic World; Part II. 'New' World Realities and Diaspora's Second Wave (to 1945): 4. Transatlantic moment and the dawn of modernity; 5. Enslavement; 6. Asserting the right to be; 7. Reconnecting; Part III. Empire's Dismantling and the Third Wave (since 1945): 8. Movement people; 9. Global Africa in the era of Mandela and Obama; Epilogue; Index.

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Book SynopsisBronwen Everill offers a new perspective on African global history, applying a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia to understand their role in the anti-slavery colonization movements of Britain and America.Table of ContentsList of Maps, Tables, and Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction PART I: FOUNDATIONS Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Networks An African Middle Class Americans in Africa PART II: INTERACTIONS The Abolitionist Propaganda War Slave Trade Interventionism Commercial Rivalry and Liberian Independence Arguments for Colonial Expansion Epilogue: 1861 and Beyond Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTy Seidule scorches us with the truth and rivets us with his fierce sense of moral urgency. --Ron ChernowIn a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule''s Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacyand explores why some of this country's oldest wounds have never healed.Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning.In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about t

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Book SynopsisThe groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated.Trade Review"Meticulously researched.... The 25th-anniversary edition of this pathbreaking work of scholarship is a gift to those interested in thinking deeply and expansively about slavery’s ever-running machinations." -- Omari Weekes - Vulture"Innovative.... [Hartman’s] writing is impassioned and even lyrical at times.... This is a powerful and thought-provoking examination of slavery’s far-reaching legacy." -- Publishers Weekly"Audacious. Original and provocative. What Hartman has to say about both slavery and its continuing resonances should be heard as widely as possible. A major scholarly contribution." -- Nation"The brilliance of the book—a brilliance that is considerable, formidable and rare—is present in the space Hartman leaves for the ongoing (re)production of [black] performance in all its guises and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originarity of that primal scene [of violence]." -- Fred Moten, author of The Consent Not to Be a Single Being"Sharpens our understanding of whiteness, property, and happiness in startling ways." -- David Roediger, author of Wages of Whiteness"In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman prepared an intellectual ground for the phrase [the afterlife of slavery] to take root. Insisting that the conventional wisdom that slavery had died with legal emancipation was wrong, and that slavery was, as she put, ‘transformed rather than annulled by the 13th amendment of the US constitution,’ Hartman challenged us to consider that slavery didn’t just have a lingering trace or a shadowy aftereffect in the post-emancipation moment." -- Stephanie Smallwood, author of Saltwater Slavery

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Book SynopsisUndoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the human body was universal and faced with the growing racism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, abolitionists in North America and Britain focused on undoing slavery’s harm to the bodies of the enslaved. Their pragmatic focus on restoring the bodily integrity and wellbeing of enslaved people threw up many unexpected challenges. This book explores those challenges. Slavery exploited the bodies of men and women differently: enslaved women needed to be acknowledged as mothers rather than as reproducers of slave property, and enslaved men needed to claim full adult personhood without triggering white fears about their access to male privilege. Slavery’s undoing became more fraught by the 1850s, moreover, as federal Fugitive Slave Law and racist medicine converged. The reach of the federal government across the borders of free states and theories about innate racial difference collapsed the distinctions between enslaved and emancipated people of African descent, making militant action necessary. Escaping to so-called “free” jurisdictions, refugees from slavery demonstrated that a person could leave the life of slavery behind. But leaving behind the enslaved body, the fleshy archive of trauma and injury, proved impossible. Bodies damaged by slavery needed urgent physical care as well as access to medical knowledge untainted by racist science. As the campaign to end slavery revealed, legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.Trade Review"Undoing Slavery offers a powerful, sophisticated, and timely re-examination of the American antislavery struggle that focuses on the central importance of both bodily emancipation and embodied freedom. Brimming with insights on gender, medicine, race, rights, and the ultimate meaning of human liberation, Kathleen M. Brown’s book is one of the most innovative treatments of abolitionism in years. Yet it also provides lessons for our own time, when new generations of scholars and citizens look to the past to better understand the fundamental link between human rights and bodily freedom. Simply a must-read book by one of our most creative and thought-provoking historians." * Richard Newman, author of Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers *"Undoing Slavery will undo what you thought you knew about abolitionist campaigns. Combining a dazzling array of primary sources with insights gleaned from legal, medical, and gender studies, Kathleen M. Brown brilliantly upends the seemingly incontrovertible argument that abolition resulted from a discourse empowered by the Enlightenment and instead shows how concerns about the corporeal body framed the ways in which abolitionists developed their arguments to end slavery and led them to insist on bodily care as the urgent rationale for abolition. This is a truly original account of the people we all thought we knew and the conversations we all thought they had." * Jim Downs, author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine *"Undoing Slavery arrives at the perfect moment for all who need to understand what’s at stake in the current battles over reproductive rights. An expert on law, race, gender, and sexuality in early America, Kathleen M. Brown shows how antislavery activists, especially Black women abolitionists, put bodies at the center of the fight to undo slavery. Ultimately, ending slavery was as much about Black women reclaiming control over their bodies and their reproductive freedom as it was about electoral politics or human rights discourse. Deftly moving among medicine, law, religion, and economics, Brown delivers a brilliant, necessary history for our time." * Ariela Gross, author of Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana *

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Book SynopsisRobert Wedderburn was one of the first promoters of black power by revolutionary force, if necessary. His publications had an enormous impact in his time. The Horrors of Slavery is a vivid record of the history, ideas, and rhetoric of a leader in the movement to abolish slavery in the West Indies.

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Book SynopsisThe author compares slave societies with the ir relatively modern counterparts in the New World to show a new perspective on the history of slavery. He sheds light o n the complex ways in which ideological interests affect his torical interpretation. '

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Book SynopsisThis collection of essays offers a new paradigm, in which the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic worlds of slavery are brought into focus under the same lens. While slave studies have considered either trans-Atlantic or Islamic slavery, rarely has any study combined the enslavement of Africans in America and the Lands of Islam in one volume. Both the Saharan and Atlantic worlds imported enslaved populations from western and central Sudan, but in general the two markets have been treated in isolation and without reference to the common bond of Islam and the multiple roles that Islam has played in the history of slavery, whether in West Africa itself, the Americas, or the Islamic Mediterranean. Western Africa served as the point of dispersion across desert and sea, but it was also the final destination of many of those who were enslaved but who were not transported across the Atlantic or the Sahara. The relationship between Islam and slavery is explored as a series of frontiers: in the Americas between enslaved Muslims and their Christian masters and the types of resistance and accommodation that arose there; in West Africa between Muslim and non-Muslim societies and the attempts at defining who was a Muslim in terms of issues of enslavement; in North Africa between Muslim masters and the enslaved population from West Africa and the popularity of spirit possession cults. The resistance of Muslims to assimilation and the accommodation of Muslims to bondage also created other frontiers that are explored in this book.

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Book SynopsisIn Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs, Riggins R. Earl Jr. investigates how slave owners intentionally manipulated Christianity as they passed it on to slaves and demonstrates how slaves successfully challenged that distorted interpretation. Analyzing slaves’ response to Christianity as expressed in testimonies, songs, stories, and sermons, Earl reveals the conversion experience as the initial step toward an autonomy that defied white control. Contrary to what their white owners expected or desired, enslaved African Americans found in Christianity a life-affirming identity and strong sense of community.Slave owners believed Christianity would instill docility and obedience, but the slaves discovered in the Bible a different message, sharing among themselves the “dark symbols and obscure signs” that escaped the notice of their captors. Finding a sense of liberation rather than submission in their conversion experience, slaves discovered their own self-worth and their values as children of God.Originally published in 1993, Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs traces the legacy of slaves’ embrace of Christianity both during and after the slavery era. In a new introduction, the author places the book within the context of contemporary scholarship on the roots of the African American cultural experience. He argues that any interpretation of this experience must begin with a foundational study of the theological and ethical constructs that have shaped the way blacks understand themselves in relationship to God, their oppressors, and each other.The Author: Riggins R. Earl Jr. teaches at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

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Book SynopsisAugust 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying such illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed. Here, Gerald Horne argues forcefully that, in order to understand the arrival of colonists from the British Isles in the early seventeenth century, one must first understand the “long sixteenth century”—from 1492 until the arrival of settlers in Virginia in 1607. During this prolonged century, Horne contends, “whiteness” morphed into “white supremacy,” and allowed England to co-opt not only religious minorities but also various nationalities throughout Europe, thus forging a muscular bloc that was needed to confront rambunctious Indigenes and Africans. In retelling the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas, Horne recounts how the fierce resistance by Africans and their Indigenous allies weakened Spain and enabled London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607. These settlers laid the groundwork for the British Empire and what became the United States of America.

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Book SynopsisThe New York City Slave Revolt of 1712. The First Comprehensive Investigation into the First Uprising Against Slavery in North America.

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Book SynopsisIn 1841, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass formed a partnership that would last a decade and forever change the abolitionist movement. Throughout the stages of their extraordinary alliance, anti-slavery mobilization was accelerated, reaching its height between 1841 and 1851. Centering their arguments on emancipation, women’s equality, and suffrage, the two men worked tirelessly to publicize and recruit for their cause. Their work initiated a new discourse of social reform and critique, positioning the abolition of slavery at the center of progressive social concerns throughout the first half of the nineteenth century Dismantling Slavery is the first book to address these two giants of abolition—Douglass and Garrison—simultaneously. While underscoring the evolution of abolitionist discourse, Dismantling Slavery unveils the true nature of the friendship between Douglass and Garrison, a key ingredient often overlooked by scholars. Drawing on the writings, speeches, and experiences that shaped the two as abolitionists, Nilgün Anadolu-Okur’s groundbreaking study is one account of the ways in which abolitionist discourse was shaped and put to the purposes of moral and democratic reforms. In addition to turning a close eye on the relationship between Douglass and Garrison, Anadolu-Okur also details significant developments that occurred in tandem among other abolitionists and activists of the era, making for a compelling account of this pivotal decade in American history, up until the dissolution of Garrison and Douglass’s partnership. Dismantling Slavery represents a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the study of abolitionist discourse and will appeal to a wide range of nineteenth-century scholars.

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Book SynopsisFeaturing a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches, Celluloid Chains is the most comprehensive volume to date on films about slavery. This collection examines works from not only the United States but elsewhere in the Americas, and it attests to slavery’s continuing importance as a source of immense fascination for filmmakers and their audiences.Each of the book’s fifteen original essays focuses on a particular film that directly treats the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. Beginning with an essay on the Cuban film El otro Francisco (1975), Sergio Giral’s reworking of a nineteenth-century abolitionist novel, the book proceeds to examine such works as the landmark miniseries Roots (1977), which sparked intense controversy over its authenticity; Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde (1987), which raises questions about what constitutes a slavery film; Guy Deslauriers’s Passage du milieu (1999), a documentary-style reconstruction of what Africans experienced during the Middle Passage; and Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), which embodies the tensions between faithfully adapting a nineteenth-century slave narrative and bending it for modern purposes.Films about slavery have shown a special power to portray the worst and best of humanity, and Celluloid Chains is an essential guide to this important genre.

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Book SynopsisSome scholars of Islam have argued that slavery and concubinage are permissible according to the Qur'an and the teachings and practice of the Prophet Muhammad. When faced with dissenting views on the disputed subject of the legitimacy of slavery in Islam, they often respond with a loaded question and a theological trap: "Did the Prophet Muhammad commit a grave moral wrong?" Others advance moral relativism. Georgetown University's Jonathan Brown, for example, controversially maintained that "slavery is wrong," but added the disclaimer that "as a Muslim myself, I cannot condemn it as grossly, intrinsically immoral across space and time. To do so would be to condemn the Qur'an, the Prophet Muhammad and God's law as morally compromised." As Dr. John Andrew Morrow makes clear in Islam & Slavery, there is not a single verse in the Qur'an that commands slavery. Slavery is neither an article of faith nor is it a religious obligation. In fact, the Qur'an encourages and even requires Muslims to emancipate enslaved people. As far as the exponents of Islam's spiritual, moral, ethical, and egalitarian tradition are concerned, the Qur'an, the Prophet, and Islam introduced a system that would reform the practice of slavery and abolish it entirely and forever. As God asks in the Qur'an: "What will make you know what the steep path is? It is the freeing of a slave.

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