Search results for ""author elise lemire""

Concord, Massachusetts, has long been heralded as the birthplace of American liberty and American letters. It was here that the first military engagement of the Revolutionary War was fought and here that Thoreau came to "live deliberately" on the shores of Walden Pond. Between the Revolution and the settlement of the little cabin with the bean rows, however, Walden Woods was home to several generations of freed slaves and their children. Living on the fringes of society, they attempted to pursue lives of freedom, promised by the rhetoric of the Revolution, and yet withheld by the practice of racism. Thoreau was all but alone in his attempt "to conjure up the former occupants of these woods." Other than the chapter he devoted to them in Walden, the history of slavery in Concord has been all but forgotten. In Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts, Elise Lemire brings to life the former slaves of Walden Woods and the men and women who held them in bondage during the eighteenth century. After charting the rise of Concord slaveholder John Cuming, Black Walden follows the struggles of Cuming's slave, Brister, as he attempts to build a life for himself after thirty-five years of enslavement. Brister Freeman, as he came to call himself, and other of the town's slaves were able to leverage the political tensions that fueled the American Revolution and force their owners into relinquishing them. Once emancipated, however, the former slaves were permitted to squat on only the most remote and infertile places. Walden Woods was one of them. Here, Freeman and his neighbors farmed, spun linen, made baskets, told fortunes, and otherwise tried to survive in spite of poverty and harassment. With a new preface that reflects on community developments since the hardcover's publication, Black Walden reminds us that this was a black space before it was an internationally known green space and preserves the legacy of the people who strove against all odds to overcome slavery and segregation.

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In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the question of black political rights was debated more and more vociferously, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially unthinkable, this "amalgamation" of the races would manifest itself in the perverse union of "whites" with "blacks," the latter figured as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. In Miscegenation, Elise Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for what they can tell us about the connection between the racialization of desire and the social construction of race. Previous studies of the prohibition of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. have focused on either the slave South or the post-Reconstruction period. Looking instead to the North, and to such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word "miscegenation" was first used, Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and same-race desire came to seem a biological imperative.

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In the spring of 1971, the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts history unfolded at a site nationally celebrated as the birthplace of freedom and democracy. With peace efforts at a standstill, the New England chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War had organized an event to rouse public support for their cause. Over the course of the long Memorial Day weekend, a band of more than two hundred young, fatigue-clad veterans sounded the alarm for peace and patriotism by marching—in reverse—the path Paul Revere had taken two centuries earlier when he called on the American colonists to rise against their British oppressors. Enacting the parts of colonial militiamen, the veterans set off in patrol formation along the famed Battle Road, a route calculated to take them past Concord's Old North Bridge, onto Lexington's Battle Green, and up to Bunker Hill. Determined to reanimate the patriotic sentiments expressed by the area's many Revolutionary War memorials, they revealed how far the nation had veered from its ideals by staging reenactments of the brutal atrocities they had witnessed and perpetrated in the name of freedom on the other side of the world. "With an ironic twist," the fliers they distributed explained, "our presence in Indochina as viewed by a native of an occupied village easily coincides with the British army in America." To the selectmen of the town of Lexington who ordered their mass arrest, the veterans were defiling spaces sacred to the nation's Revolutionary past; to the hundreds of bystanders who fed, sheltered, and committed civil disobedience with them, they were an inspiration. Elise Lemire tells this extraordinary story from the perspective of six men who played central roles in the events of May 1971. Based on more than one hundred interviews with participants and accompanied by nearly forty photographs and maps, Battle Green Vietnam demonstrates the power of mobilizing history, myth, and memorials to effect revolutionary change.

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