Born in Bondage

Born in Bondage PDF

Author: Marie Jenkins Schwartz

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780674043343

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Each time a child was born in bondage, the system of slavery began anew. Although raised by their parents or by surrogates in the slave community, children were ultimately subject to the rule of their owners. Following the life cycle of a child from birth through youth to young adulthood, Marie Jenkins Schwartz explores the daunting world of slave children, a world governed by the dual authority of parent and owner, each with conflicting agendas. Despite the constant threats of separation and the necessity of submission to the slaveowner, slave families managed to pass on essential lessons about enduring bondage with human dignity. Schwartz counters the commonly held vision of the paternalistic slaveholder who determines the life and welfare of his passive chattel, showing instead how slaves struggled to give their children a sense of self and belonging that denied the owner complete control. Born in Bondage gives us an unsurpassed look at what it meant to grow up as a slave in the antebellum South. Schwartz recreates the experiences of these bound but resilient young people as they learned to negotiate between acts of submission and selfhood, between the worlds of commodity and community.

The Work of Reconstruction

The Work of Reconstruction PDF

Author: Julie Saville

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780521566254

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This book examines social, political, and cultural conflicts opened by the abolition of slavery and the fashioning of wage relations in the era of the American Civil War. It offers a new, close look at the origins, goals, and tactics of popular political clubs created by emancipated workers in the countryside of one of the Deep South's oldest plantation states. The Work of Reconstruction draws on a rich documentary record that allowed ex-slaves to express in their own words and behavior the aspirations and goals that underlay their efforts. Not satisfied to render freed men and women as objects of theoretical inquiry, this book vividly recovers the concrete practices and language in which ex-slaves achieved freedom and the expectations that they had of liberty.

Saving Savannah

Saving Savannah PDF

Author: Jacqueline Jones

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-11-03

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 1400078164

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In this masterful portrait of life in Savannah before, during, and after the Civil War, prize-winning historian Jacqueline Jones transports readers to the balmy, raucous streets of that fabled Southern port city. Here is a subtle and rich social history that weaves together stories of the everyday lives of blacks and whites, rich and poor, men and women from all walks of life confronting the transformations that would alter their city forever. Deeply researched and vividly written, Saving Savannah is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the Civil War years.

Slavery Rice Culture

Slavery Rice Culture PDF

Author: Julia Floyd Smith

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780870497315

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Rice plantations were found in coastal Georgia which included Chatham, Bryan, Liberty, McIntosh, Glynn and Camden counties.

Mastered by the Clock

Mastered by the Clock PDF

Author: Mark M. Smith

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0807864579

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Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrates that white southern slaveholders began to incorporate this new sense of time in the 1830s. Influenced by colonial merchants' fascination with time thrift, by a long-held familiarity with urban, public time, by the transport and market revolution in the South, and by their own qualified embrace of modernity, slaveowners began to purchase timepieces in growing numbers, adopting a clock-based conception of time and attempting in turn to instill a similar consciousness in their slaves. But, forbidden to own watches themselves, slaves did not internalize this idea to the same degree as their masters, and slaveholders found themselves dependent as much on the whip as on the clock when enforcing slaves' obedience to time. Ironically, Smith shows, freedom largely consolidated the dependence of masters as well as freedpeople on the clock.

Africa in America

Africa in America PDF

Author: Michael Mullin

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780252064463

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In an attempt to lay bare the historical and cultural roots of modern African American societies in the South and the British West Indies, Michael Mullin gives a vivid depiction of slave family life, economic strategies, and religion and their relationship to patterns of resistance and acculturation in two major plantation regions, the Caribbean and the American South. Generalized observations of plantation slavery, usually assumed to be the whole of Africans' experience, fail to provide definitive answers about how they met and often overcame the challenges and deprivations of their new lives. Mullin discusses three phases of slave resistance and religion in Anglo-America, both on and off plantations. During the first, or African, phase from the 1730s to the 1760s slave resistance was generally sudden, violently destructive, and charged with African ritual. The second phase, from the late 1760s to the early 1800s, involved plantation slaves who were more conservative and wary. The third phase, from the late 1760s to the second quarter of the nineteenth century, was led by assimilated blacks - artisans and drivers - who, having developed skills both on and off the plantation, led the large preemancipation rebellions. Mullin's case studies of slaveowners and plantation overseers draw on personal diaries and other documents to reveal memorable men whose approaches to their jobs varied widely and were as much affected by interactions with slaves as by personal background, the location of the plantation, and the economic climate of the times. Extensive archival and anecdotal sources inform this pioneering study of slavery as it was practiced in tidewater Virginia, on the rice coast of the Carolinas, and in Jamaica and Barbados. Bringing his training in anthropology to bear on sources from Great Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, Mullin offers new and definitive information.

Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry

Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry PDF

Author: Peter McCandless

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-04-11

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1139499149

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On the eve of the Revolution, the Carolina lowcountry was the wealthiest and unhealthiest region in British North America. Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry argues that the two were intimately connected: both resulted largely from the dominance of rice cultivation on plantations using imported African slave labor. This development began in the coastal lands near Charleston, South Carolina, around the end of the seventeenth century. Rice plantations spread north to the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and south to Georgia and northeast Florida in the late colonial period. The book examines perceptions and realities of the lowcountry disease environment; how the lowcountry became notorious for its 'tropical' fevers, notably malaria and yellow fever; how people combated, avoided or perversely denied the suffering they caused; and how diseases and human responses to them influenced not only the lowcountry and the South, but the United States, even helping to secure American independence.

Chains of Love

Chains of Love PDF

Author: Emily West

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0252092848

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Historians have traditionally neglected relationships between slave men and women during the antebellum period. In Chains of Love, historian Emily West remedies this situation by investigating the social and cultural history of slave relationships in the very heart of the South. Focusing on South Carolina, West deals directly with the most intimate areas of the slave experience including courtship, love and affection between spouses, the abuse of slave women by white men, and the devastating consequences of forced separations. Slaves fought these separations through cross-gender bonding and cross-plantation marriages, illustrating West's thesis about slave marriage as a fierce source of resistance to the oppression of slavery in general. Making expert use of sources such as the Works Progress Administration narratives, slave autobiographies, slave owner records, and church records, this book-length study is the first to focus on the primacy of spousal support as a means for facing oppression. Chains of Love provides telling insights into the nature of the slave family that emerged from these tensions, celebrates its strength, and reveals new dimensions to the slaves' struggle for freedom.