The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen's Bureau
This book offers the definitive history of how formerly enslaved men and women pursued federal benefits from the Civil War to the New Deal and, in the process, transformed themselves from a stateless people into documented citizens. As claimants, Black southerners engaged an array of federal agencies. Their encounters with the more familiar ......
The Sugar and Cotton Revolutions in the Lower Mississippi Valley
Although it eventually became a regrettably profitable business for enslavers and their partners, a successful slave economy in the American South was no foregone conclusion. Bringing the lower Mississippi valley to the foreground of the history of the early republic, Replanting a Slave Society is the first major study to analyze in tandem the ......
Over the course of more than twenty years, James D. Richardson and his wife, Lori, retraced the steps of his ancestor, George Richardson (1824-1911), across nine states, uncovering letters, diaries, and more memoirs hidden away Their journey brought them to the brink of the racial divide in America, revealing how his great-great-grandfather ......
Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America
Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Proving Pregnancy documents how women-Black and white, enslaved and free-gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a ......
Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America
Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Proving Pregnancy documents how women-Black and white, enslaved and free-gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a ......
Antebellum slave narratives have taken pride of place in the American literary canon. Once ignored, disparaged, or simply forgotten, the autobiographical narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other formerly enslaved men and women are now widely read and studied. One key aspect of the genre, however, has been left unexamined: its ......
A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp
The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who ......
Translated into English for the first time, Andres Avelino de Orihuela's El Sol de Jesus del Monte is a landmark Cuban antislavery novel. Published originally in 1852, the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (which Orihuela had translated into Spanish), it provides an uncompromising critique of discourses of white superiority ......
Translated into English for the first time, Andres Avelino de Orihuela's El Sol de Jesus del Monte is a landmark Cuban antislavery novel. Published originally in 1852, the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (which Orihuela had translated into Spanish), it provides an uncompromising critique of discourses of white superiority ......