The American Dreams Of John B Prentis Slave Trader

Author : Kari J. Winter
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2011-06-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0820339539

Get Book

The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader by Kari J. Winter Pdf

As a young man, John B. Prentis (1788-1848) expressed outrage over slavery, but by the end of his life he had transported thousands of enslaved persons from the upper to the lower South. Kari J. Winter's life-and-times portrayal of a slave trader illuminates the clash between two American dreams: one of wealth, the other of equality. Prentis was born into a prominent Virginia family. His grandfather, William Prentis, emigrated from London to Williamsburg in 1715 as an indentured servant and rose to become the major shareholder in colonial Virginia's most successful store. William's son Joseph became a Revolutionary judge and legislator who served alongside Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and James Madison. Joseph Jr. followed his father's legal career, whereas John was drawn to commerce. To finance his early business ventures, he began trading in slaves. In time he grew besotted with the high-stakes trade, appeasing his conscience with the populist platitudes of Jacksonian democracy, which aggressively promoted white male democracy in conjunction with white male supremacy. Prentis's life illuminates the intertwined politics of labor, race, class, and gender in the young American nation. Participating in a revolution in the ethics of labor that upheld Benjamin Franklin as its icon, he rejected the gentility of his upbringing to embrace solidarity with "mechanicks," white working-class men. His capacity for admirable thoughts and actions complicates images drawn by elite slaveholders, who projected the worst aspects of slavery onto traders while imagining themselves as benign patriarchs. This is an absorbing story of a man who betrayed his innate sense of justice to pursue wealth through the most vicious forms of human exploitation.

Author : Gerald Horne
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2016-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9781479806898

Get Book

The Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne Pdf

Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.

Author : Peter Wallenstein
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 552 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2014-08-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780700619948

Get Book

Cradle of America by Peter Wallenstein Pdf

As the site of the first permanent English settlement in North America, the birthplace of a presidential dynasty, and the gateway to western growth in the nation’s early years, Virginia can rightfully be called the “cradle of America.” Peter Wallenstein traces major themes across four centuries in a brisk narrative that recalls the people and events that have shaped the Old Dominion. The second edition is updated with new material throughout, including a new chapter on Virginia and world affairs from the Korean War through 9/11 and beyond, and, an expanded bibliography. Historical accounts of Virginia have often emphasized harmony and tradition, but Wallenstein focuses on the impact of conflict and change. From the beginning, Virginians have debated and challenged each other’s visions of Virginia, and Wallenstein shows how these differences have influenced its sometimes turbulent development. Casting an eye on blacks as well as whites, and on people from both east and west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he traces such key themes as political power, racial identity, and education. Bringing to bear his long experience teaching Virginia history, Wallenstein takes readers back, even before Jamestown, to the Elizabethan settlers at Roanoke Island and the inhabitants they encountered, as well as to Virginia’s leaders of the American Revolution. He chronicles the state’s dramatic journey through the Civil War era, a time that revealed how the nation’s evolution sometimes took shape in opposition to the vision of many leading Virginians. He also examines the impact of the civil rights movement and considers controversies that accompany Virginia into its fifth century. The text is copiously illustrated to depict not only such iconic figures as Pocahontas, George Washington, and Robert E. Lee, but also such other prominent native Virginians as Carter G. Woodson, Patsy Cline, and L. Douglas Wilder. Sidebars throughout the book offer further insight, while maps and appendixes of reference data make the volume a complete resource on Virginia’s history.

Author : Jeff Forret
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 485 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2020-01-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108493031

Get Book

Williams' Gang by Jeff Forret Pdf

Explores a Washington, DC slave trader's legal misadventures associated with transporting convict slaves through New Orleans.

Author : Joshua D. Rothman
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2012-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820344669

Get Book

Flush Times and Fever Dreams by Joshua D. Rothman Pdf

In 1834 Virgil Stewart rode from western Tennessee to a territory known as the “Arkansas morass” in pursuit of John Murrell, a thief accused of stealing two slaves. Stewart’s adventure led to a sensational trial and a wildly popular published account that would ultimately help trigger widespread violence during the summer of 1835, when five men accused of being professional gamblers were hanged in Vicksburg, nearly a score of others implicated with a gang of supposed slave thieves were executed in plantation districts, and even those who tried to stop the bloodshed found themselves targeted as dangerous and subversive. Using Stewart’s story as his point of entry, Joshua D. Rothman details why these events, which engulfed much of central and western Mississippi, came to pass. He also explains how the events revealed the fears, insecurities, and anxieties underpinning the cotton boom that made Mississippi the most seductive and exciting frontier in the Age of Jackson. As investors, settlers, slaves, brigands, and fortune-hunters converged in what was then America’s Southwest, they created a tumultuous landscape that promised boundless opportunity and spectacular wealth. Predicated on ruthless competition, unsustainable debt, brutal exploitation, and speculative financial practices that looked a lot like gambling, this landscape also produced such profound disillusionment and conflict that it contained the seeds of its own potential destruction. Rothman sheds light on the intertwining of slavery and capitalism in the period leading up to the Panic of 1837, highlighting the deeply American impulses underpinning the evolution of the slave South and the dizzying yet unstable frenzy wrought by economic flush times. It is a story with lessons for our own day. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

Author : Andrew N. Wegmann
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2022-01-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820360775

Get Book

An American Color by Andrew N. Wegmann Pdf

For decades, scholars have conceived of the coastal city of New Orleans as a remarkable outlier, an exception to nearly every “rule” of accepted U.S. historiography. A frontier town of the circum-Caribbean, the popular image of New Orleans has remained a vestige of North America’s European colonial era rather than an Atlantic city on the southern coast of the United States. Beginning with the French founding of New Orleans in 1718 and concluding with the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, An American Color seeks to correct this vision. By tracing the impact of racial science, law, and personal reputation and identity through multiple colonial and territorial regimes, it shows how locally born mulâtres in French New Orleans became part of a self-conscious, identifiable community of Creoles of color in the United States. An American Color places this local history in the wider context of the North American continent and the Atlantic world. This book shows that New Orleans and its free population of color did not develop in a cultural, legal, or intellectual vacuum. More than just a study of race and law, this work tells a story of humanity in the Atlantic world, a story of how a people on the French colonial frontier in the mid-eighteenth century became unlikely, accepted parts of a vast political, social, and racial United States without ever leaving home.

Author : Whitney Nell Stewart,John Garrison Marks
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : Citizenship
ISBN : 9780820353104

Get Book

Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations by Whitney Nell Stewart,John Garrison Marks Pdf

With these essays, historians contend that emancipation was not something that simply happened to enslaved peoples but rather something in which they actively participated. Their examination uncovers the various techniques employed by people of African descent across the Atlantic World, allowing a broader picture of their paths to freedom.

Author : Claire Bourhis-Mariotti
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2023
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820365558

Get Book

Wanted! a Nation! by Claire Bourhis-Mariotti Pdf

"Covering the whole of the nineteenth century, Wanted! A Nation! reveals how Haiti remained a focus of attention for white as well as Black Americans before, during, and even after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, Claire Bourhis-Mariotti argues, the Black republic was considered by free Black Americans as a place where full citizenship was at hand. Haiti was essentially viewed and concretely experienced as a refuge during moments when free Black Americans lost hope of obtaining rights in the United States. Haiti is also at the heart of this book, as Haitian leaders supported the American emigration to Haiti (in the 1820s and early 1860s), opposed the American geostrategic and diplomatic diktats in the 1870s and 1880s, and finally offered an international platform to Frederick Douglass at the 1893 Columbian World's Fair, thus helping Black people who faced discrimination at home to fight first against slavery and the slave trade, and then for equal rights. By spanning the entire nineteenth century, Wanted! A Nation! presents a complex panorama of the emergence of African American identity and argues that Haiti should be considered as an essential prism to understand how African Americans forged their identity in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a variety of sources, Wanted! A Nation! goes far beyond the usual framework of national American history and contributes to the writing of an Atlantic and global history of the struggle for equal rights. By spanning the entire nineteenth century, Wanted! A Nation! presents a complex panorama of the emergence of African American identity and argues that Haiti should be considered as an essential prism to understand how African Americans forged their identity in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a variety of sources, Wanted! A Nation! goes far beyond the usual framework of national American history and contributes to the writing of an Atlantic and global history of the struggle for equal rights"--

Author : Dawn P. Harris
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2017-12-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820351711

Get Book

Punishing the Black Body by Dawn P. Harris Pdf

Punishing the Black Body examines the punitive and disciplinary technologies and ideologies embraced by ruling white elites in nineteenth-century Barbados and Jamaica. Among studies of the Caribbean on similar topics, this is the first to look at the meanings inscribed on the raced, gendered, and classed bodies on the receiving end of punishment. Dawn P. Harris uses theories of the body to detail the ways colonial states and their agents appropriated physicality to debase the black body, assert the inviolability of the white body, and demarcate the social boundaries between them. Noting marked demographic and geographic differences between Jamaica and Barbados, as well as any number of changes within the separate economic, political, and social trajectories of each island, Harris still finds that societal infractions by the subaltern populations of both islands brought on draconian forms of punishments aimed at maintaining the socio-racial hierarchy. Her investigation ranges across such topics as hair-cropping, the 1836 Emigration Act of Barbados and other punitive legislation, the state reprisals following the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, the use of the whip and the treadmill in jails and houses of correction, and methods of surveillance, policing, and limiting free movement. By focusing on meanings ascribed to the disciplined and punished body, Harris reminds us that the transitions between slavery, apprenticeship, and post-emancipation were not just a series of abstract phenomena signaling shifts in the prevailing order of things. For a large part of these islands’ populations, these times of dramatic change were physically felt.

Author : Marcus Peyton Nevius
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 169 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Dismal Swamp (N.C. and Va.)
ISBN : 9780820356426

Get Book

City of Refuge by Marcus Peyton Nevius Pdf

City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Author : Michael Lawrence Dickinson
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2022-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820368627

Get Book

Almost Dead by Michael Lawrence Dickinson Pdf

Author : Ronald Angelo Johnson,Ousmane K. Power-Greene
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2021-07-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820368108

Get Book

In Search of Liberty by Ronald Angelo Johnson,Ousmane K. Power-Greene Pdf

In Search of Liberty explores how African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggles for freedom as part of the larger Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture the pursuits of equality and justice by African Americans across the Atlantic World through the end of the nineteenth century, as their fights for emancipation and enfranchisement in the United States continued. This book illuminates stories of individual Black people striving to escape slavery in places like Nova Scotia, Louisiana, and Mexico and connects their eff orts to emigration movements from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as to Black abolitionist campaigns in Europe. By placing these diverse stories in conversation, editors Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have curated a larger story that is only beginning to be told. By focusing on Black internationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In Search of Liberty reveals that Black freedom struggles in the United States were rooted in transnational networks much earlier than the better-known movements of the twentieth century.

Author : Richard Price,Sally Price
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2022-06-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820361567

Get Book

Maroons in Guyane by Richard Price,Sally Price Pdf

For more than four centuries, communities of maroons (men and women who escaped slavery) dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States. Today their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves—in Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, Belize, Suriname, Guyane, and elsewhere—remaining proud of their maroon origins and, in some cases, faithful to unique cultural traditions forged during the earliest days of Afro-American history. In 1986, expelled by the military regime of Suriname, anthropologists Richard and Sally Price turned to neighboring Guyane (French Guiana), where thousands of Maroons were taking refuge from the Suriname civil war. Over the next fifteen years, their conversations with local people convinced them of the need to replace the pervasive stereotypes about Maroons in Guyane with accurate information. In 2003, Les Marrons became a local best seller. In 2020, after a series of further visits, the Prices wrote a new edition taking into account the many rapid changes. Available for the first time in English, Maroons in Guyane reviews the history of Maroon peoples in Guyane, explains how these groups differ from one another, and analyzes their current situations in the bustling, multicultural world of this far-flung outpost of the French Republic. A gallery of the magnificent arts of the Maroons completes the volume.

Author : Jessica Millward
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2015-12-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820348780

Get Book

Finding Charity’s Folk by Jessica Millward Pdf

Finding Charity’s Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre. Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman’s reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women’s future interactions with the state.

Author : Lisa Ze Winters
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2016-01-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780820348971

Get Book

The Mulatta Concubine by Lisa Ze Winters Pdf

Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure’s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora. Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers’ narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian Vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure’s manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.