The Blind African Slave

Author : Jeffrey Brace
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2005-02-16
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780299201432

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The Blind African Slave by Jeffrey Brace Pdf

The Blind African Slave recounts the life of Jeffrey Brace (né Boyrereau Brinch), who was born in West Africa around 1742. Captured by slave traders at the age of sixteen, Brace was transported to Barbados, where he experienced the shock and trauma of slave-breaking and was sold to a New England ship captain. After fighting as an enslaved sailor for two years in the Seven Years War, Brace was taken to New Haven, Connecticut, and sold into slavery. After several years in New England, Brace enlisted in the Continental Army in hopes of winning his manumission. After five years of military service, he was honorably discharged and was freed from slavery. As a free man, he chose in 1784 to move to Vermont, the first state to make slavery illegal. There, he met and married an African woman, bought a farm, and raised a family. Although literate, he was blind when he decided to publish his life story, which he narrated to a white antislavery lawyer, Benjamin Prentiss, who published it in 1810. Upon his death in 1827, Brace was a well-respected abolitionist. In this first new edition since 1810, Kari J. Winter provides a historical introduction, annotations, and original documents that verify and supplement our knowledge of Brace's life and times.

Author : Benjamin F Prentiss
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 71 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2024-06-30
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9780557536573

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The Blind African African Slave, Or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace by Benjamin F Prentiss Pdf

Author : Benjamin Franklin Prentiss
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 1810
Category : Slaves
ISBN : OCLC:12961935

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The Blind African Slave, Or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch Nick-named Jeffrey Brace by Benjamin Franklin Prentiss Pdf

Author : Benjamin F. Prentiss
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2017-10
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1946640697

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The Blind African Slave by Benjamin F. Prentiss Pdf

African slave; some account of his ancestors, the kingdom of Bow-woo situate on the river Neboah or Niger in the interior of Africa; a description of the soil, climate, vegetables, animals, fowls, fishes, inhabitants, population, government, religion, manners, customs, &c. with a detail of the manner, in which he was kidnapped by the English; a brief account of the custom of civilized nations, in luring the innocent natives of Africa into the net of slavery; and a regular narrative from his own mouth of his captivity, together with many of his native brethren, their sufferings in the prison, or house of subjection, his adventures in the British navy, travels, sufferings, sales, abuses, education, service in the American war, emancipation, conversion to the christian religion, knowledge of the scriptures, memory, and blindness. WHILE we regret that one innocent man should be held in chains of bondage by another, at any period of time, we must spurn with indignation any idea of the propriety of christian nations, with no other excuse than lust of lucre and difference of religion, holding as slaves, the whole African people, because they are not civilized, or bear not the same complexion, having no other crime, save credulity or innocence. WHEN we look at the custom of European and American nations, of purchasing, stealing, and decoying into the chains of bondage the negroes of Africa, and that custom sanctioned by the laws of the several governments; that public and private sales are legal; that they are bartered sold, and used as beasts of the field, to the disgrace of civilization, civil liberty, and Christianity; each manly feeling swells with indignation at the horrid spectacle, and whoever have witnessed the miserable and degraded situation to which these unfortunate mortals are reduced, in the West Indies and southern states of United America, must irresistibly be led to ask--Does not civilization produce barbarity? Liberty legalize tyranny? And Christianity deny the humanity it professes? THIS simple narrative of an individual African cannot possibly compass all the objections to slavery; yet we hope, that the extraordinary features and simplicity of the facts, with the novelty of this publication, will induce many to read and learn the abuses of their fellow beings. If the miserable owner of human blood is not moved to acknowledge the iniquity of his possession, and thereby emancipate his slaves, he will at least alleviate their sufferings.

Author : Manu Herbstein
Publisher : Moritz HERBSTEIN
Page : 473 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2018-01-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781508040804

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Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Manu Herbstein Pdf

"I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, here and here, I am still a free woman." During a period of four hundred years, European slave traders ferried some 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the Americas, teaching a slave to read and write was a criminal offense. When the last slaves gained their freedom in Brazil, barely a thousand of them were literate. Hardly any stories of the enslaved and transported Africans have survived. This novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories, one story of a possible 12 million or more.Lawrence Hill created another in The Book of Negroes (Someone Knows my Name in the U.S.) and, more recently, Yaa Gyasi has done the same in Homegoing. Ama occupies center stage throughout this novel. As the story opens, she is sixteen. Distant drums announce the death of her grandfather. Her family departs to attend the funeral, leaving her alone to tend her ailing baby brother. It is 1775. Asante has conquered its northern neighbor and exacted an annual tribute of 500 slaves. The ruler of Dagbon dispatches a raiding party into the lands of the neighboring Bekpokpam. They capture Ama. That night, her lover, Itsho, leads an attack on the raiders’ camp. The rescue bid fails. Sent to collect water from a stream, Ama comes across Itsho’s mangled corpse. For the rest of her life she will call upon his spirit in time of need. In Kumase, the Asante capital, Ama is given as a gift to the Queen-mother. When the adolescent monarch, Osei Kwame, conceives a passion for her, the regents dispatch her to the coast for sale to the Dutch at Elmina Castle. There the governor, Pieter de Bruyn, selects her as his concubine, dressing her in the elegant clothes of his late Dutch wife and instructing the obese chaplain to teach her to read and write English. De Bruyn plans to marry Ama and take her with him to Europe. He makes a last trip to the Dutch coastal outstations and returns infected with yellow fever. On his death, his successor rapes Ama and sends her back to the female dungeon. Traumatized, her mind goes blank. She comes to her senses in the canoe which takes her and other women out to the slave ship, The Love of Liberty. Before the ship leaves the coast of Africa, Ama instigates a slave rebellion. It fails and a brutal whipping leaves her blind in one eye. The ship is becalmed in mid-Atlantic. Then a fierce storm cripples it and drives it into the port of Salvador, capital of Brazil. Ama finds herself working in the fields and the mill on a sugar estate. She is absorbed into slave society and begins to adapt, learning Portuguese. Years pass. Ama is now totally blind. Clutching the cloth which is her only material link with Africa, she reminisces, dozes, falls asleep. A short epilogue brings the story up to date. The consequences of the slave trade and slavery are still with us. Brazilians of African descent remain entrenched in the lower reaches of society, enmeshed in poverty. “This is story telling on a grand scale,” writes Tony Simões da Silva. “In Ama, Herbstein creates a work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty. By focusing on the brutalization of Ama's body, and on the psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatizes the collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African woman. Ama echoes the views of writers, historians and philosophers of the African diaspora who have argued that the phenomenon of slavery is inextricable from the deepest foundations of contemporary western civilization.” Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book.

Author : Douglas A. Blackmon
Publisher : Icon Books
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2012-10-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781848314139

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Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon Pdf

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Author : Michael Lawrence Dickinson
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2022-05-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780820362243

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Almost Dead by Michael Lawrence Dickinson Pdf

Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead reveals how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities. Michael Lawrence Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean. The study adopts the perspectives of those enslaved to reveal that, in the eyes of the enslaved, the distinctions were often of degree rather than kind as cities throughout the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience. The tenets of subjugation remained all too similar, as did captives’ need to stave off social death and hold on to their humanity. Almost Dead argues that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth: the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives individually and collectively after forced exportation from West Africa. This was an active process of cultural remembrance, continued resistance, and communal survival. It was in these urban slave communities—within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk—that the enslaved found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by Black lives.

Author : Saul Friedman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2017-09-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9781351510769

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Jews and the American Slave Trade by Saul Friedman Pdf

The Nation of Islam's Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employed in Secret Relationship, offers a detailed response to Farrakhan's charges, and analyzes the impetus behind these charges. He begins with in-depth discussion of the attitudes of ancient peoples, Africans, Arabs, and Jews toward slavery and explores the Jewish role hi colonial European economic life from the Age of Discovery tp Napoleon. His state-by-state analyses describe in detail the institution of slavery in North America from colonial New England to Louisiana. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.Rooted in incontrovertible historical evidence, provocative without being incendiary, Jews and the American Slave Trade demonstrates that the anti-slavery tradition rooted in the Old Testament translated into powerful prohibitions with respect to any involvement in the slave trade. This brilliant exploration will be of interest to scholars of modern Jewish history, African-American studies, American Jewish history, U.S. history, and minority studies.

Author : Kari J. Winter
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820338378

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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 : Venture Smith
Publisher : BoD – Books on Demand
Page : 46 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2024-05-07
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9783387335477

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A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture; A Native of Africa, but Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America by Venture Smith Pdf

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Author : Patrick Manning
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 1990-09-28
Category : History
ISBN : 0521348676

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Slavery and African Life by Patrick Manning Pdf

This book summarizes a wide range of recent literature on slavery for all of tropical Africa.

Author : Sowande M Mustakeem
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2016-11-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780252098994

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Slavery at Sea by Sowande M Mustakeem Pdf

Most times left solely within the confine of plantation narratives, slavery was far from a land-based phenomenon. This book reveals for the first time how it took critical shape at sea. Expanding the gaze even more widely, the book centers on how the oceanic transport of human cargoes--known as the infamous Middle Passage--comprised a violently regulated process foundational to the institution of bondage. Sowande' Mustakeem's groundbreaking study goes inside the Atlantic slave trade to explore the social conditions and human costs embedded in the world of maritime slavery. Mining ship logs, records and personal documents, Mustakeem teases out the social histories produced between those on traveling ships: slaves, captains, sailors, and surgeons. As she shows, crewmen manufactured captives through enforced dependency, relentless cycles of physical, psychological terror, and pain that led to the making--and unmaking--of enslaved Africans held and transported onboard slave ships. Mustakeem relates how this process, and related power struggles, played out not just for adult men, but also for women, children, teens, infants, nursing mothers, the elderly, diseased, ailing, and dying. As she does so, she offers provocative new insights into how gender, health, age, illness, and medical treatment intersected with trauma and violence transformed human beings into the most commercially sought commodity for over four centuries.

Author : Emma Christopher
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2018-06-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780299316204

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Freedom in White and Black by Emma Christopher Pdf

A gripping true account of African slaves and white slavers whose fates are seemingly reversed, shedding fascinating light on the early development of the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Australia, and on the role of former slaves in combatting the illegal trade.

Author : Kari J. Winter
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2010-07-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780820336992

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Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change by Kari J. Winter Pdf

In Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change Kari J. Winter compares the ways in which two marginalized genres of women's writing - female Gothic novels and slave narratives - represent the oppression of women and their resistance to oppression. Analyzing the historical contexts in which Gothic novels and slave narratives were written, Winter shows that both types of writing expose the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture and both represent the terrifying aspects of life for women. Female Gothic novelists such as Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley uncover the terror of the familiar - the routine brutality and injustice of the patriarchal family and of conventional religion, as well as the intersecting oppressions of gender and class. They represent the world as, in Mary Wollstonecraft's words, "a vast prison" in which women are "born slaves." Writing during the same period, Harriet Jacobs, Nancy Prince, and other former slaves in the United States expose the "all-pervading corruption" of southern slavery. Their narratives combine strident attacks on the patriarchal order with criticism of white women's own racism and classism. These texts challenge white women to repudiate their complicity in a racist culture and to join their black sisters in a war against the "peculiar institution." Winter explores as well the ways that Gothic heroines and slave women resisted subjugation. Moments of escape from the horrors of patriarchal domination provide the protagonists with essential periods of respite from pain. Because this escape is never more than temporary, however, both types of narrative conclude tensely. The novelists refuse to affirm either hope or despair, thereby calling into question conventional endings of marriage or death. And although slave narratives were typically framed by white-authored texts, containment of the black voice did not diminish the inherent revolutionary conclusion of antislavery writing. According to Winter, both Gothic novels and slave narratives suggest that although women are victims and mediators of the dominant order they also can become agents of historical change.

Author : Sitiki
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2009-09-27
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813047959

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The Odyssey of an African Slave by Sitiki Pdf

Recently discovered as a hand-written document in the Buckingham Smith Collection at the New York Historical Society, this remarkable first-person narrative traces the life of Sitiki, whose name was changed to Jack Smith after his enslavement in America. Captured and sold into slavery in Africa as a five-year-old, Sitiki traveled to America as a cabin boy. Eventually sold by the ship's captain to Josiah Smith of Savannah, Georgia, he lived there and in Connecticut with his new master. Captured by the British during the War of 1812, he was returned to the Smiths, to be freed only after the Civil War. He went on to become the first black Methodist minister in St. Augustine, Florida, where he established his own church. Patricia Griffin does not leave the story at the conclusion of the slave narrative, but explores Sitiki's experiences and places them in clear and valuable context. She presents the narrative unencumbered, allowing Sitiki’s authority, compassion, and personality to speak for itself.