This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, its leadup and aftermath, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region.

Who was that traveler? And what did she signify to the poet?

Jefferson’s system depended on shoring up the bulwarks of race and basing the law on a theory of government that withdrew the protection of government from unfavored groups.

Women’s economic labor was essential to state function.

As a teacher, the Black convention movement in the 1850s has helped me to broaden my story of the origins of the Civil War, especially the pitfalls to avoid when it comes to focusing too heavily on the controversy over slavery in the territories.

Understanding puzzles as agents of disorder runs counter to a common interpretation that associates puzzles with the quest for and ultimate affirmation of order.

The dispossession of Native lands for the purposes of organizing English tobacco plantations was a deepening and broadening of merchant capitalism in Virginia.

From 1863 onward, Beecher was obsessed with forgiveness. The most influential preacher in the country, he aggressively agitated for the Union to extend complete forgiveness to Confederates.

Rather than seeking to extinguish the humanity of its victims, slavery rather invests in, and relies upon, their human capacity for suffering.

In “Learning to Read,” Harper prompts critical attention to textual materiality by depicting enslaved characters who advance their own literacy by exploiting white cultural expectations about the proper look of reading material.

Within the narrow rhetoric of antislavery politics that shape Prince’s narrative, however, steady articulation of money markets, repeated reference to financial transactions, and descriptions of resource accrual stand out in a declared autobiography, a distinctly literary production.

A review of Michael Drexler and Ed White’s recent collaboration, The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

Ultimately, my students and I had to consider how to make sense of the Douglass of the 1840s, who viewed the Constitution as a “covenant with death,” and the Douglass of the 1850s, who adhered to an antislavery reading of the Constitution.

The Constitution’s compromises added an element of complexity to the Constitution that defies any effort to reduce it to Twitter-sized proslavery or antislavery soundbites that implicate or exonerate the founders.

Skilled slaves, North and South, worked in nearly every craft … but the fruits of their labor are often unmarked or uncritically attributed to their masters.

Jones focuses on how a proslavery “common sense” was the dominant ideological platform against which black people sought to exercise self-determination.

Tracing the intellectual and economic connections between Black women, Black data and colored conventions in the antebellum era.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue
Whether in fact Douglas was a scoundrel
had become the key issue in American politics
in 1858…

In this era of click-bait headlines and little time to settle in with a complicated and nuanced book (not to mention pressures to publish), categories offer a quick way to make sense of complex phenomena. 

Calling the exercise a Caribbean “game” begs the question of who, in the end, won the Caribbean.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History illuminates the early republic’s “unknown known”—its political unconscious—with incredible precision.

Mather, like most other Christians of the time, also believed that racial equality before God did not demand equality on Earth–and, in particular, that it was wholly compatible with the institution of slavery.

Historians have tended to assume that enslaved people inevitably, and eagerly, resisted slavery in a quest for liberty. Yet in fact, in the Berbice rebellion, many enslaved people were reluctant to join.

Carp’s Boston Sons of Liberty are not the vanguard of the revolutionary era, as we have often seen them depicted, but rather a lot of wayward republicans.

“While bringing an incident of rape to legal officials was undoubtedly challenging for all victims, ironically, the cases that might be most successfully prosecuted were often the most difficult for victims to bring to court.”

Courtroom Drama, Constitutional Crisis and the Southern Quest to Nationalize Slavery

Thomas Crawford’s “Statue of Freedom”

Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe’s Traite des Nègres (ca. 1825)

We are in danger of replicating past commemorations of the Civil War that stressed sectional reconciliation and nation-building at the cost of forgetting the long history of abolitionist activism and the entrenched racial inequalities that abolitionists fought against.

New information on Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man who would turn escape into an art form.

When they arrived in Virginia, Africans joined a society that was divided between master and white servant, a society with such contempt for white servants that masters were not punished for beating them to death.

For the better part of a century, social historians have wrestled with the problem of the one and the many—that is […]

Yet it’s not at all clear what Thomas Jefferson’s political legacy, his racist writings, his slaveholding, his proclamations against slavery, his fear of miscegenation, and his (apparently) active miscegenation mean to us when taken together.

Among the library’s less heralded holdings are scores of volumes of community and parish records–including the revealing London list of burials mentioned above–major and minor manuscript collections (on paper or microfilm), and a substantial number of prints, paintings, maps, and other visual records, especially from the Renaissance but also before and after that era.

Sentimental reformist oration, fugitive confession, and the personal epistle are all represented in this text.

Although the film does effectively elicit laughs and outrage, its overall impact is less than the sum of its parts.

Crèvecoeur, William Bartram, Jefferson, and Audubon appropriate the “ideological assumptions, discursive conventions, and representational techniques” of earlier Caribbean natural histories to debate the implications of plantation slavery for a nation ostensibly committed to equality.

These versions of the Panic are capsules that carry other versions of the history of American capitalism into the bloodstream of historical consciousness.

Attacks on Black Charleston worshipers started well before 1822.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Now, instead of antiseptic and ahistorical entities, institutions became intensely historical and capable of dramatic and dynamic change.

In polarizing times, there is a price to be paid—at the polls and otherwise—for attempting to chart a middle path.

An unlikely alliance in antebellum America

Rice revolutionized life in Carolina, making the colony the richest in British North America. South Carolina also became home to the American mainland’s most brutal slave regime.

Jefferson quoted in Greek to substantiate a racial hierarchy by linking racial identity and classical learning, but the Greek in that quotation has been plagued by errors.

As I read this book in the midst of yet another presidential election cycle, it was nearly impossible not to find strong parallels between these figures and our own presidential candidates.

I realized that in order to help my students fully understand how black abolitionists in the North thought about the meaning of the Civil War, I needed to engage some issues that were not raised in Savannah and to explore how other black leaders defined freedom.

Some new evidence on an old controversy

Penned in 1897 by Julia C. Ferris, a white teacher and local educational leader, the manuscript narrates portions of the life of Jane Clark, an enslaved woman who escaped to Auburn in 1859. This narrative, rich with information about the Underground Railroad, has never been available to scholars, teachers, and lay readers—until now.

Little is known? One might well say that far too much is known to hold black lives within the comforting confines of a narrative biography.

During the course of the project, students began narrowing their research to topics that could be answered through the database. What was the racial and gender composition of the members of the various abolitionist groups? To what extent had both slavery and the slave trade flourished in Massachusetts?

Rusert intervenes in narratives of racist pseudo-science, establishing not only a more inclusive history of early American science, but in doing so, arguing for a revision of the concept of the human.

In recent years we have seen a surge of interest in American loyalists. Highlights of this renewed attention to loyalists […]

Presented as part of the Special Issue: “Revolution in Print: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

What would it be like to start off in life as a severely handicapped slave?

Why does Uncle Tom grow old?

Is slave food soul food?

Newell’s harrowing evidence effectively demonstrates the ruthlessness by which English settlers engineered expropriation of Indian bodies, forcing them into servitude and slavery.

For Brooks, antebellum political abolitionists—not the Populists, not the Progressives—deserve to be remembered as “the most important third-party movement in American history.”

Did fugitive slaves find haven on naval ships? And […] could I trace the lives of some of the colored mariners I had identified from other sources?

Classroom Collaborations, Public Engagement and Adventure This past September, the commemorations of the terrorist attacks on New York City and […]

Dred Scott did not intend to become famous.

As a result of her exemplary efforts, McCaskill has given us not only our richest account of the Crafts’ remarkable lives but also made a significant contribution to African American print culture broadly construed.

In Abolitionist Geographies Martha Schoolman challenges the dominant maps of nineteenth-century American literary studies.

Wolf skillfully weaves together a narrative of Johnson’s life, tracing his triumphs and defeats as he sought both freedom and a meaningful place in his community of Warrenton, Virginia

Few of us who teach early American history can be unfamiliar with the monumental transatlantic slave trade database. Research on […]

The newly recovered fifth chapter is critical to the development of both the novel’s plot and its themes.

Manegold crafts a narrative not stuffed with jargon but filled with lively prose that not only links the reader to past events but illustrates their connection to modern-day issues.

These documents cover the full range of the American past, from pre-Columbian societies to the present, and represent a wide variety of voices and experiences. Links to more than 600 images, dozens of audio files of speeches, over 150 landmark Supreme Court cases, newspaper articles from the New York Times archives, maps, and a database of annotated links to other collections on the Web are also included.

Revolutions in France and Haiti, or at least antislavery writers’ use of them, hastened calls for immediate emancipation, the association of the South with violence and depravity, and the rise of American sectionalism.

As “disunion threats materialized into a regional program, and as images of revolution and invasion swirled in the political atmosphere,” Republicans grew increasingly antagonistic towards Southern ultimatums.

But when it came to poetry, like many young poets, my first poems focused on myself. It was this exploration of my personal identity that ultimately led me to an exploration of the past. I’d brought several poems about my relationship with my father to a creative writing workshop, and a female classmate challenged me to write about the women in my family.

A Letter to Jefferson from Monticello Westward the course of empire makes its way. —Bishop George Berkeley                     I I climbed […]

Caroline Remembers Her First Mistress, Darla Ford When I think on it, it is of joy I recall. And knowing […]

In the antebellum era, well after the fall of the international slave trade, American abolitionists consistently turned to the domestic auction block for propaganda

“As the best biography does, Winch’s portrait of Forten illuminates not only the man’s life but his times.”

Jefferson is the organizing spirit of a web of connections that endlessly entice the researcher and lead to continual illumination as well as further uncertainty.

Poet Afaa M. Weaver explores his ancestors’ ability to maintain loving structures despite the pressures of slavery.

The heart of Fagan’s argument concerns how black newspapers transmitted, shaped, and fostered the myriad “practices of a dynamic black chosenness,” a powerful ideological tradition linking the experiences of black Americans with God’s chosen nation.

(October 1830)

Dewulf is right to address the important West Central African influences on North American celebrations such as Pinkster. West Central Africans played an important role in many American slave communities, as several scholars have shown in recent years.

Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University […]

We talk with Benjamin Fagan about the first black newspapers in the United States, biblical inspiration for freedom, and the place African Americans sought in society.

The next morning I was discussing My Bondage

Few topics in Atlantic history elicit more debate or stronger feelings than the transatlantic slave trade.

Cohen looks at how readers forged social connections through poems—by reading them aloud, recopying them, buying and selling them.

In taking seriously northern Republicans’ egalitarian ideals and the world-historical significance they attributed to the Union, Riley offers an important corrective to scholarship that exaggerates the political influence of racism.

Rented slaves built federal forts, roads, and the United States Capitol. Sometimes they served as soldiers and sailors.

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg have written a monumental work, detailing the lives of two men—James Madison and Thomas Jefferson—whose […]

Looking for connections between various reform movements, rather than examining them as distinct entities, can reveal surprising convergences.

Common-place talks with Christopher Cameron, author of To Plead Their Own Cause, about the chronology of abolition, the role of religion in the movement, and the importance of African-American voices in intellectual history.

What matters most in Django, then, is not the accuracy of the film’s historical claims but how Tarantino’s awareness of his contemporary audience mediates his symbolic enterprise.

Lincoln slowly becomes aware […] that a titanic struggle is going on in the background between free humans and vampires.

For many readers, the most eye-opening revelation of this book will be Osborn’s evolving position on slavery.

Despite the limited extant documents penned in Wheatley’s hand or published in her name, Carretta finds her almost everywhere, in church records, letters, newspaper articles, subscription lists, and elsewhere.

Slave status, in short, could be reaffixed based on the assumption that a former slave’s “consent” to travel back home reflected an “implied contract” to re-enter slavery.

Craving a taste of home—something to break the monotony of bland diets masters sometimes planned for them—African slaves applied knowledge that they possessed to grow some of their own food.

The problem with the book is the exact opposite of a dubious or controversial thesis.

To understand African American experience under slavery, it is imperative to consider region, and not just in northern versus southern terms.

By dispensing with the notion that there is a master text or a master figure capable of standing for fugitive or free African America, Chaney’s analytic strategy parallels the experiences and perspectives of his subjects.

For whites, death was perpetually connected to property and commercial exchange—yet another feature of a worldview centered upon economic transactions. For blacks, death became a way to create a culture that actually celebrated life by recognizing the interrelationship between the living and the dead.

The American Mediterranean had aspects that white Southerners regarded as foreboding.

A class’s engagement with the account book of a nineteenth-century plantation teaches painful lessons about the erasures embedded in historical records.

The world was rife with risk and uncertainty for early America’s urban middle classes, facing as they did the caprices […]

Slave financiers and shippers influenced the trajectory of American capitalism more directly than any other group of entrepreneurs during the antebellum era.

Harper’s early work adds a new genre–unabashedly romantic poetry– to her oeuvre.

As an abolitionist lecturer, Harper honed to perfection a polemical political style that appears to differ with the seemingly sentimental and religious form of Forest Leaves.

The CCP is committed to making available historical Black activism because it speaks to issues that occupy today’s movements, today’s concerns, today’s changing same.

This project narrates the Colored Conventions Project’s work to transcribe, catalogue, and visualize the minutes of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions.

Freedom occupies a permanent place in our national consciousness.

The minutes of Colored Conventions constitute one of the most important bodies of primary sources in African American history. The […]

“As matters now stand,” he sadly concluded, “there is a United North against a United South, and both marching to the field of blood.”

In the 1847 Grammar of the Mpongwe Language, principally authored by John Leighton Wilson, the American missionary to Gabon marveled […]

Indigenous and Atlantic Histories Common-place sits down with Brett H. Rushforth to discuss his 2012 book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous […]

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle placed “spectacle” (opsis, that which is seen) dead last in importance among the […]

In this erudite, thoughtful, and at times sparkling study, Simon Newman—author of noteworthy earlier books on festive culture in the […]

Enacting Nat Fuller’s Feast at the University of South Carolina

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s first book of poems had been considered lost to history for well over one hundred years. Johanna Ortner shares the tale of recovering this incredibly valuable text–and shares the text itself–with the readers of Common-place.

In memory of the unnamed woman branded Y, sent in 1719 from Barbados to Kittery, Massachusetts, Province of Maine.

Where and how to find the narrator, who was not only an escaped slave but an author with no name?

or, Please Don’t Accuse Me of Being Theodore Parker Incarnate Whenever I attend panels or professional conferences that are about […]

As one of my Clemente students once said in class: “Slavery was America’s original sin, but we’re all still paying for it.”

The lines between high and low culture were blurry in nineteenth-century America. Dime novels lacked critical acclaim, yet famous authors like Samuel Clemens readily drew from dime novel conventions.

Stowe took a fugitive black man into her home and, under the threat of very real danger, waited upon him, hid him, and allowed her children to help care for him.

How did a speech that began in Kansas end up in the Caribbean, by way of Crimea?

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings  When we […]

Recasting autobiographical revisions through aging studies enables us to see ambivalences that the dominant aging plot of decline has foreclosed.

As the preceding slides suggests, Confederate songsters did not shy away from “foreign” material. For instance, “Mary of Argyle” is […]

When historical novels are presented as works of historical interpretation, they can also serve as tools that help students learn to “read like historians.”

An open letter from Chef Kevin Mitchell to Chef Nat Fuller.

You don’t show up in a predominantly Muslim country during Ramadan and just start asking questions.

This coin box was created by the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) in late 1839 to […]

The American Revolution was disruptive and challenging for plantation societies. Its most significant long-term effect was an artificial separation of […]

How does one create memory around an event that has long been lost to history?

An interesting close-reading of an illustration from Moses Roper’s slave narrative.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“It was very hot and damp six months a year, it was one of the least-favored ports in the New World, and huge swarms of insects appeared seasonally with terrifying predictability.”

By the time the Union army reached Bayou Boeuf—the neighborhood where Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped from upstate […]

  It’s rare for a single work of scholarship to fundamentally change the way I teach a topic in U.S. […]

A twenty-first century chef invites guests to enter the spirit of Nat Fuller’s 1865 Reconciliation Banquet.

Initially, the students tend to dwell on the explicit message of the spirituals. They assert that the spirituals focus on another world and encourage slaves to passively accept their fate . . . Gradually, the classroom dialogue shifts to the implicit messages.

Wheatley does not write about race as a collective and embodied experience.

The American Revolution helped to form the idea of conscious, willed, systemic, historic change—and thereby the very notion of agency itself.

David Shields reflects on the legacy of Nat Fuller in the wake of the attack on the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.

With Mightier Than the Sword, Reynolds has written the biography of a book, and 2012 might be the perfect time to […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“In denouncing drunkenness, “white middle-class men were engaged in a battle over gender identity that was not exclusively an attempt at class domination against working-class men.”

The growth of the English-Indian slave trade after 1659 laid the groundwork for a series of deadly epidemics at the end of the seventeenth century.

Why was it, then, that such reverential colonists came to desecrate the king?

In virtually every story, loyal slaves reminisce about the era of slavery, and bring harmony to postwar plantations by ushering Southern belles and good Yankee soldiers to reconciliation and matrimony.

Whether or not the two men actually had conversational exchanges, there is no disputing the commonality of their experience.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Historians recommend American books

What was the meaning of the Revolution for African Americans and whites in Rhode Island in terms of their understanding of race and citizenship?

The colony established a model for success that all subsequent English colonies would follow.

Enslaved Virginians’ persistent attempts to acquire their personal liberty shaped nearly every discussion of taxes and military service.

By the time of John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry, both Northerners and Southerners seemed ready to go beyond the world of a make-believe courtroom.

Davis traces the roots of racism in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions that used the biblical “Curse on Ham” story to justify the enslavement of Africans and equated blackness with sin, slavery, and pollution.

During the Revolution, allegations of rape by British soldiers in newspapers and pamphlets were construed as attacks on American rights, rather than as the violation of an individual.

It was the absence of slavery that allowed for fair taxation in the North. Conversely, the paranoia surrounding the future of slavery—or at least the fear that slaves might be taxed to emancipatory levels—afflicted southern polities.

Menard is not alone in arguing for a reevaluation of the sugar revolution. But what he, as one of the most esteemed historians of the Atlantic economy, offers is a lucid and at times devastatingly simple case that makes it unmistakably clear that sugar alone did not revolutionize Barbados in the seventeenth century.

Plantation doctors understood that they worked for the slaveholder, not the patient, and elevated their reputations over their patients’ desires.

African American worshippers were carefully responding and interacting with each other exactly because each individual was free to shape the collective sound.

By broadening her narrative to encompass the wider urban context in which the trials took place, Lepore brilliantly reveals what theatrical plays men like Horsmanden saw, what accounts of other slave conspiracies they read about in local newspapers (most especially the recent plots and rebellions in Antigua and South Carolina), and how they regarded other faiths.

What Hochschild does is not so much revise our understanding of the British abolition movement as humanize it.

Caron’s speculation and his reliance on outdated literature lead him to significant interpretive errors.

Unbecoming British offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary history of identity formation in the United States between the Revolutionary War and the […]

When you encounter evidence of kinship between owners and slaves you have, first of all, learned something new about the complexity of their world, and next you are confronted with the question: did knowledge of his or her kinship to slaves influence the actions of an owner?

What separated Virginia from Pennsylvania and condemned the Old Dominion to second-rank industrial status was quite simply slavery.

History matters.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“How did this ultimate Tomistic curiosity evolve, and what does it mean?”

The obviousness of reproduction as a frame for hereditary racial slavery did not come quickly to me nor, I would argue, does it come so for most.

Historical inquiry may often be blocked by the prior agenda of the historian.

“Alongside horses and sheep, captives moved throughout the borderlands economies.”

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

Burstein is most provocative and imaginative, and the book is most intriguing, when he is exploring the “Jefferson-Hemings puzzle,” as he terms it.

This roundtable is part of an ongoing series devoted to “First Person” experiences with early American culture.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Why would clergymen of the Reformed Church use their office to baptize the offspring of men and women claimed as property by the Dutch West India Company, the premier slave-trading company of the seventeenth century?”

Only a year and a half after the fact, the rescue of Jessica Lynch has begun to seem like a quaint memory, as our attention has been turned from American captives to American captors, from Lynch’s blond ingenuousness to the scary hard eyes of Lynndie England and her comrades at Abu Ghraib.

History conveniently divided by nation-state boundaries and imperial rule to conform to academic specialization has neglected how fluid these commercial, cultural, political, and social boundaries have been since the fifteenth century.

Sweet provides rich evidence of slaves running away and thus directing their resistance towards individual masters rather than the slave system itself, but he broadens this view by arguing that the general threat of slave revolt was partly directed at a complicit public that failed to recognize the rights of slaves.

“In the course of this densely packed narrative, readers will find fresh insights into topics ranging from the political relations among Indian confederacies to the biographies of the English men who sponsored this sinister business.”

“Taylor’s text ends not, as almost all colonial American histories do, with a chapter on the coming of the Revolution, but with one that examines the expansion of various European empires to the West Coast of North America and to the islands of the Pacific Ocean.”

Look at you: sitting there at your computer checking the weather reports, studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode guides, and reading […]

“Plantation slavery was in decline in Louisiana when it was purchased. Thereafter, Arkansas and Missouri only came into the Union as slave states by bare majorities. Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Cause, a republic of free and independent yeoman farmers, was lost in a series of insufficiently contested choices.”

Common-place asks David Waldstreicher whether Franklin deserves his reputation as the nation’s antislavery founder.

What better way to explore the bare essentials of the master-slave relationship than with the figure of the black slaveholder, who comes to slavery without the delusion of racial difference that divided white owners from their slaves?

At its best, the book finds a kind of poetry in the act of diving into the wreck of the archive, the dark grottoes of history where competing narratives jostle, where myth and “truth” hopelessly blur.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“For Baltimore’s elected officials, prominent merchants, and moral reformers (who were often in fact the same people), the bad behavior of their working-class neighbors required much attention. Petitions to the city council complained of black women washing clothes too boisterously in a stream, Irish laborers singing too late into the evening, and unsupervised apprentices, servants, and slaves cursing and gambling in the marketplace.”

Parent turns to Marxist theory to structure his answer to the question of the origins of the slave system with markedly mixed results.

In these two almost random cases, the sounds created by African Americans induced in white observers a sense of cultural dissonance, prompting feelings of confusion, disgust, and even horror.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Daily life in the city often was an adventure on its own.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The fact that everyone in the city helped to build or run the new government led to a new kind of domesticity that was literally shaped by national politics, although in ways L’Enfant and Washington could not have foreseen.”

“The study guide, official or unofficial, is the least common denominator and the most common purchase at most of our state colleges and universities.”

“That Democrats were an impetus behind the [antislavery] amendment is one of the surprises of Vorenberg’s narrative…”

Part of the reason why courses about slavery and African American culture are so popular in institutions outside the United States, and why so many non-American scholars specialize in black history, is that “race” provides a quick way into America’s soft moral underbelly, laying bare in the starkest of fashions American sanctimony.

Like Wright’s, my trip to Ghana marked my first time in Africa and combined research with a spiritual homecoming.

“Whites were free, blacks were slaves. Yet there was constant interaction.”

Slavery and its aftermath are human drama still unsettled. Administrators, timekeepers, civil servants, guardians of the state try to revise our understanding of the period and its outcomes. An effort to convince us that the drama is over rages. Some of us insist, and rightly so, that we are now in this drama’s second act, we have not moved beyond the raised curtain, we are still in shock at what we have finally seen.

“[S]erving in a patrol may have reaffirmed Southern notions of community, kinship, masculinity, and honor.”

In the 1970s a number of excellent books, using the same kinds of sources and responding to the same social movements in contemporary American society, began to open up the study of slave life in the British West Indies. The new literature on slave life in the thirteen mainland British colonies and in the antebellum South was even larger and livelier. Did I really have anything fresh to contribute?

Perhaps the bottle traveled to the swamp full, part of a social gathering of African people, rather than empty, as part of a haul of refuse. The bottle could have been a pilfered item, or one reused after Brewton discarded it.

The evocative writing style pulls the reader into the book, creating word-pictures about the wharves of New Orleans, the slave pens where deals were struck, or the desperation of slave families confronted with the loss of loved ones, often forever.

While Davis’s erstwhile contention about the potential symbiosis between history and film is one that most of us can share conceptually, the history of the documentation of slavery as a subject for film is a sad and sorry one . . .

Roll, Jordan, Roll is the locus classicus for some of the most powerful and important ideas that have shaped the discussion of slavery for the last quarter century.

As rendered by Morgan, English-style freedom was naive, arrogant, and ethnocentric, qualities that readers in the post-Vietnam United States might have recognized with shame.

And yet, for all that, I am still troubled by the issue: why was a white person teaching about black history?

Why is there not a more detailed visual record of slavery and even slave life in early America?

The cry for ‘apology,’ no matter how heartfelt, sounds positively quaint against the hotter rhetoric today’s activists embrace: Restitution. Redress. And, especially, reparation.

“Compared with most heritage tourism, ghost tours—by turns campy and didactic—offer visitors unblinking and, no doubt, at times unwelcome views of the skeletons in the closet of early American history: slave coffles, Indian massacres, debtor’s prisons, and the sundry other sad and sorry fates of people you might expect would want to haunt America’s cities.”

At the very least Linebaugh and Rediker break the tradition of treating mixed-race love as purely exploitative and herein lift such a union into a brave act of defiance.

Far reaching in its range, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture” amasses a rich archive of textual material in print, sheet music, song, illustration, and film, allowing viewers to encounter the many faces of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

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