Black Life On The Mississippi

Author : Thomas C. Buchanan
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2006-03-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807876565

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Black Life on the Mississippi by Thomas C. Buchanan Pdf

All along the Mississippi--on country plantation landings, urban levees and quays, and the decks of steamboats--nineteenth-century African Americans worked and fought for their liberty amid the slave trade and the growth of the cotton South. Offering a counternarrative to Twain's well-known tale from the perspective of the pilothouse, Thomas C. Buchanan paints a more complete picture of the Mississippi, documenting the rich variety of experiences among slaves and free blacks who lived and worked on the lower decks and along the river during slavery, through the Civil War, and into emancipation. Buchanan explores the creative efforts of steamboat workers to link riverside African American communities in the North and South. The networks African Americans created allowed them to keep in touch with family members, help slaves escape, transfer stolen goods, and provide forms of income that were important to the survival of their communities. The author also details the struggles that took place within the steamboat work culture. Although the realities of white supremacy were still potent on the river, Buchanan shows how slaves, free blacks, and postemancipation freedpeople fought for better wages and treatment. By exploring the complex relationship between slavery and freedom, Buchanan sheds new light on the ways African Americans resisted slavery and developed a vibrant culture and economy up and down America's greatest river.

Author : Julius Eric Thompson
Publisher : University Press of America
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : History
ISBN : 0761819223

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Black Life in Mississippi by Julius Eric Thompson Pdf

Black Life in Mississippi is a collection of essays which explore the underexposed life and culture of black Mississippians between the 1860's and the 1980's.

Author : George Pabis
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2007-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780313054006

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Daily Life along the Mississippi by George Pabis Pdf

The Mississippi River has influenced the economy, domestic life, culture, politics, and rhythms of American daily life. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1813 gave the river a central part in the evolution of the United States. Events such as the birth of jazz and technological advances such as the steamboat solidified its place in American lore. Pabis's rich thematic chapters detail the daily lives of those living along the Mississippi and the culture that surrounded it, from the Native Americans at Cahokia to the rise of major port cities such as New Orleans, St. Louis, and St. Paul. Readers will learn how the river's transportation economy fed America's agricultural heartland, how ethnic ties and technological advances affected home and family life, and how the region's current residents still cope with living in a flood culture. An ideal resource for students of American history. Pabis's rich thematic chapters explore many aspects of daily life, including the influence of the Trans-Atlantic fur trade on the lives of Native tribes; how the river's transportation economy fed America's agricultural heartland; the effects of ethnic ties and Jim Crow laws on the river communities, the development of food production and cuisine; and how present-day residents cope with life in a flood culture, including the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Mark Twain once called the Mississippi the Body of the Nation. Readers will learn how this influential region lived and breathed from day to day, from pre-Columbian times to the present. An ideal reference source for any student of American history and culture.

Author : Anne Moody
Publisher : Dell
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2011-09-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780307803580

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Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody Pdf

The unforgettable memoir of a woman at the front lines of the civil rights movement—a harrowing account of black life in the rural South and a powerful affirmation of one person’s ability to affect change. “Anne Moody’s autobiography is an eloquent, moving testimonial to her courage.”—Chicago Tribune Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till’s lynching. Before then, she had “known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was . . . the fear of being killed just because I was black.” In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life. A straight-A student who realized her dream of going to college when she won a basketball scholarship, she finally dared to join the NAACP in her junior year. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC, she experienced firsthand the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement—and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs, and deadly force that were used to destroy it. A deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation’s destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the footsoldiers in the civil rights movement. Praise for Coming of Age in Mississippi “A history of our time, seen from the bottom up, through the eyes of someone who decided for herself that things had to be changed . . . a timely reminder that we cannot now relax.”—Senator Edward Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review “Something is new here . . . rural southern black life begins to speak. It hits the page like a natural force, crude and undeniable and, against all principles of beauty, beautiful.”—The Nation “Engrossing, sensitive, beautiful . . . so candid, so honest, and so touching, as to make it virtually impossible to put down.”—San Francisco Sun-Reporter

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 500 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1883
Category : Mississippi River
ISBN : HARVARD:32044080901317

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Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain Pdf

A memoir of the steamboat era on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. The first half details a brief history of the river from its discovery by Hernando de Soto in 1541 and describes Twain's career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. The second half of Life on the Mississippi tells of Twain's return, many years after, to travel the river from St. Louis to New Orleans. By then the competition from railroads had made steamboats passe, in spite of improvements in navigation and boat construction. Twain sees new, large cities on the river, and records his observations on greed, gullibility, tragedy, and bad architecture.

Author : Eddy Harris
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 1998-09-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0805059032

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Mississippi Solo by Eddy Harris Pdf

The true story of a young black man's quest: to canoe the length of the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans.

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 1876
Category : Mississippi River
ISBN : PRNC:32101068150174

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Old Times on the Mississippi by Mark Twain Pdf

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 634 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 1883
Category : Authors, American
ISBN : OXFORD:300004800

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Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain Pdf

Author : Michael Pasquier
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2013-02-27
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780253008084

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Gods of the Mississippi by Michael Pasquier Pdf

From the colonial period to the present, the Mississippi River has impacted religious communities from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Exploring the religious landscape along the 2,530 miles of the largest river system in North America, the essays in Gods of the Mississippi make a compelling case for American religion in motion—not just from east to west, but also from north to south. With discussion of topics such as the religions of the Black Atlantic, religion and empire, antebellum religious movements, the Mormons at Nauvoo, black religion in the delta, Catholicism in the Deep South, and Johnny Cash and religion, this volume contributes to a richer understanding of this diverse, dynamic, and fluid religious world.

Author : Norma Watkins
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2011-05-09
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781604739787

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The Last Resort by Norma Watkins Pdf

Raised under the racial segregation that kept her family's southern country hotel afloat, Norma Watkins grows up listening at doors, trying to penetrate the secrets and silences of the black help and of her parents' marriage. Groomed to be an ornament to white patriarchy, she sees herself failing at the ideal of becoming a southern lady. The Last Resort, her compelling memoir, begins in childhood at Allison's Wells, a popular Mississippi spa for proper white people, run by her aunt. Life at the rambling hotel seems like paradise. Yet young Norma wonders at a caste system that has colored people cooking every meal while forbidding their sitting with whites to eat. Once integration is court-mandated, her beloved father becomes a stalwart captain in defense of Jim Crow as a counselor to fiery, segregationist Governor Ross Barnett. His daughter flounders, looking for escape. A fine house, wonderful children, and a successful husband do not compensate for the shock of Mississippi's brutal response to change, daily made manifest by the men in her home. A sexually bleak marriage only emphasizes a growing emotional emptiness. When a civil rights lawyer offers love and escape, does a good southern lady dare leave her home state and closed society behind? With humor and heartbreak, The Last Resort conveys at once the idyllic charm and the impossible compromises of a lost way of life.

Author : Roy DeBerry,Aviva Futorian,Stephen Klein,John Lyons
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2020-07-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781496828859

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Voices from the Mississippi Hill Country by Roy DeBerry,Aviva Futorian,Stephen Klein,John Lyons Pdf

Voices from the Mississippi Hill Country is a collection of interviews with residents of Benton County, Mississippi—an area with a long and fascinating civil rights history. The product of more than twenty-five years of work by the Hill Country Project, this volume examines a revolutionary period in American history through the voices of farmers, teachers, sharecroppers, and students. No other rural farming county in the American South has yet been afforded such a deep dive into its civil rights experiences and their legacies. These accumulated stories truly capture life before, during, and after the movement. The authors’ approach places the region’s history in context and reveals everyday struggles. African American residents of Benton County had been organizing since the 1930s. Citizens formed a local chapter of the NAACP in the 1940s and ’50s. One of the first Mississippi counties to get a federal registrar under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Benton achieved the highest per capita total of African American registered voters in Mississippi. Locals produced a regular, clandestinely distributed newsletter, the Benton County Freedom Train. In addition to documenting this previously unrecorded history, personal narratives capture pivotal moments of individual lives and lend insight into the human cost and the long-term effects of social movements. Benton County residents explain the events that shaped their lives and ultimately, in their own humble way, helped shape the trajectory of America. Through these first-person stories and with dozens of captivating photos covering more than a century’s worth of history, the volume presents a vivid picture of a people and a region still striving for the prize of equality and justice.

Author : James W. Loewen
Publisher : Waveland Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 1988-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478609407

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The Mississippi Chinese by James W. Loewen Pdf

This scholarly, carefully researched book studies one of the most overlooked minority groups in Americathe Chinese of the Mississippi Delta. During Reconstruction, white plantation owners imported Chinese sharecroppers in the hope of replacing their black laborers. In the beginning they were classed with blacks. But the Chinese soon moved into the towns and became almost without exception, owners of small groceries. Loewen details their astounding transition from black to essentially white status with an insight seldom found in studies of race relationships in the Deep South.

Author : Bonnie Stepenoff
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2015-07-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780826273499

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Working the Mississippi by Bonnie Stepenoff Pdf

The Mississippi River occupies a sacred place in American culture and mythology. Often called The Father of Rivers, it winds through American life in equal measure as a symbol and as a topographic feature. To the people who know it best, the river is life and a livelihood. River boatmen working the wide Mississippi are never far from land. Even in the dark, they can smell plants and animals and hear people on the banks and wharves. Bonnie Stepenoff takes readers on a cruise through history, showing how workers from St. Louis to Memphis changed the river and were in turn changed by it. Each chapter of this fast-moving narrative focuses on representative workers: captains and pilots, gamblers and musicians, cooks and craftsmen. Readers will find workers who are themselves part of the country’s mythology from Mark Twain and anti-slavery crusader William Wells Brown to musicians Fate Marable and Louis Armstrong.

Author : Charles M. Payne
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 570 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 0520207068

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I've Got the Light of Freedom by Charles M. Payne Pdf

This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South. Using wide-ranging archival work and extensive interviews with movement participants, Charles Payne uncovers a chapter of American social history forged locally, in places like Greenwood, Mississippi, where countless unsung African Americans risked their lives for the freedom struggle. The leaders were ordinary women and men--sharecroppers, domestics, high school students, beauticians, independent farmers--committed to organizing the civil rights struggle house by house, block by block, relationship by relationship. Payne brilliantly brings to life the tradition of grassroots African American activism, long practiced yet poorly understood. Payne overturns familiar ideas about community activism in the 1960s. The young organizers who were the engines of change in the state were not following any charismatic national leader. Far from being a complete break with the past, their work was based directly on the work of an older generation of activists, people like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Aaron Henry. These leaders set the standards of courage against which young organizers judged themselves; they served as models of activism that balanced humanism with militance. While historians have commonly portrayed the movement leadership as male, ministerial, and well-educated, Payne finds that organizers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the most dangerous parts of the South looked for leadership to working-class rural Blacks, and especially to women. Payne also finds that Black churches, typically portrayed as frontrunners in the civil rights struggle, were in fact late supporters of the movement.

Author : Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2022-09-30
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781317206859

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African Americans and the Mississippi River by Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted Pdf

This book follows the historical trajectory of African Americans and their relationship with the Mississippi River dating back to the 1700s and ending with Hurricane Katrina and the still-contested Delta landscape. Long touted in literary and historical works, the Mississippi River remains an iconic presence in the American landscape. Whether referred to as "Old Man River" or the "Big Muddy," the Mississippi River represents imageries ranging from the pastoral and Acadian to turbulent and unpredictable. However, these imageries—revealed through the cultural production of artists, writers, poets, musicians, and even filmmakers—did not reflect the experiences of everyone living and working along the river. Missing is a broader discourse of the African American community and the Mississippi River. Through the experiences of African Americans with the Mississippi River, which included narratives of labor (free and enslaved), refuge, floods, and migration, a different history of the river and its environs emerges. The book brings multiple perspectives together to explore this rich history of the Mississippi River through the intersection of race and class with the environment. The text will be of great interest to students and researchers in environmental humanities, including environmental justice studies, ethnic studies, and US and African American history.