How Millennialists Helped Abolish Slavery and Reform America
Shows how apocalypticism helped drive anti-slavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other "sins" that permeated America. Botsford was among one hundred thousand other ......
Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders' violent police regime continued after Emancipation, through Reconstruction, to today. Moving across time, space, and place, White Power uncovers how slaveholders created their own white supremacist police and government to ......
How slave rebellions influenced lawmakers as they shaped the legal traditions that led to the modern prison The violence of American slavery is often remembered for its excesses. Slave Rebellions and the Making of the Modern Prison adds a more chilling dimension, revealing how the violence of slavery was often deliberate, calculated, and ......
Born into slavery in free territory, Joseph Godfrey died widely reviled for his controversial role in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Separated from his mother at age five when his enslaver sold her, Godfrey sought refuge in his teens among the Dakota people he had befriended as a child. Godfrey married a Dakota woman and was living with his family ......
Undoing 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 ......
Service As Religious Metaphor and Social Reality in Early Medieval Europe
In Servants of God, Slaves of the Church, Lisa Kaaren Bailey uncovers the surprising intimacy between sacred devotion and coerced labor in early medieval Europe. From queens who scrubbed monastery floors to enslaved women forced into lifelong service, acts of humility and acts of subjugation often looked the same, and were interpreted through the ......
Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835-1861
Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize Jesse Olsavsky's The Most Absolute Abolition tells the dramatic story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground Railroad and revolutionized the abolitionist movement. These groups, based primarily in northeastern cities, defended Black neighborhoods from police and slave catchers. As the ......
Abolitionists of the Northeastprofiles the little-known yet historically prolific Black figures who actively participated in the abolitionist movement in America. The movement, which began in the 1820s in Northeastern America, was about ending slavery in the United States. History books have long emphasized the lives and work of Harriet Tubman, ......
