Undoing Slavery

Author : Kathleen M. Brown
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 457 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2023-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781512823288

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Undoing Slavery by Kathleen M. Brown Pdf

Undoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the human body was universal and faced with the growing racism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, abolitionists in North America and Britain focused on undoing slavery's harm to the bodies of the enslaved. Their pragmatic focus on restoring the bodily integrity and wellbeing of enslaved people threw up many unexpected challenges. This book explores those challenges. Slavery exploited the bodies of men and women differently: enslaved women needed to be acknowledged as mothers rather than as reproducers of slave property, and enslaved men needed to claim full adult personhood without triggering white fears about their access to male privilege. Slavery's undoing became more fraught by the 1850s, moreover, as federal Fugitive Slave Law and racist medicine converged. The reach of the federal government across the borders of free states and theories about innate racial difference collapsed the distinctions between enslaved and emancipated people of African descent, making militant action necessary. Escaping to so-called "free" jurisdictions, refugees from slavery demonstrated that a person could leave the life of slavery behind. But leaving behind the enslaved body, the fleshy archive of trauma and injury, proved impossible. Bodies damaged by slavery needed urgent physical care as well as access to medical knowledge untainted by racist science. As the campaign to end slavery revealed, legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.

Author : Collectif
Publisher : Éditions Rue d’Ulm via OpenEdition
Page : 173 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2022-01-25
Category : History
ISBN : 9782728809677

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Undoing Slavery by Collectif Pdf

Undoing Slavery: American Abolitionism in Transnational Perspective (1776-1865) is a collection of seven essays by leading and emerging scholars of abolition in France. Contributors to the volume situate American abolitionism in a transnational framework, pointing out how slaves running away to Canada, free African Americans emigrating to Haiti and activists meeting in a Paris salon all influenced the fate of slavery in the United States. In the wake of recent historiographical trends, they extend not only the geography but also the chronology of abolitionism, attending to its development and evolutions over the longue durée. Special emphasis is also placed on the varied print culture of abolition, from antislavery novels, newspapers, gift books and almanacs to black-authored pamphlets and printed orations on the abolition of the slave trade. Undoing Slavery is prefaced by Manisha Sinha, author of the award-winning The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.

Author : Manisha Sinha
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 163 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : Antislavery movements
ISBN : 2728827826

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Undoing Slavery by Manisha Sinha Pdf

Author : Gordon P. Andrews
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2014-04-11
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781443859295

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Undoing Plessy by Gordon P. Andrews Pdf

Undoing Plessy: Charles Hamilton Houston, Race, Labor and the Law, 1895–1950 explores the manner in which African Americans countered racialized impediments, attacking their legal underpinnings during the first half of the twentieth century. Specifically, Undoing Plessy explores the professional life of Charles Hamilton Houston, and the way it informs our understanding of change in the pre-Brown era. Houston dedicated his life to the emancipation of oppressed people, and was inspired early-on to choose the law as a tool to become, in his own words, a “social engineer.” Further, Houston’s life provides a unique lens through which one may more accurately view the threads of race, labor, and the law as they are woven throughout American society. Houston understood the difficulties facing black workers in America, and, by marshaling his considerable skills as an attorney and leader, was able to construct a strategy that fought for full integration by changing the laws of the United States at the highest level. With unparalleled success, Houston developed a three-pronged strategy from 1925–1950 that focused on the courts, the workplace, and politics, securing the expansion of labor rights and civil rights for African Americans. Better than most, Charles Houston understood that the right to work was inherently necessary to achieve real, not just perceived, freedom. To that end, Undoing Plessy situates Houston’s life within the contested cultural and political realities of his time, expanding our understanding of what it meant to work and be free in America during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, these gains were achieved in areas significant to workers, including education, the workplace, access to unions, housing, and equality before the law at the local, state, and federal levels. To understand Charles Houston’s contributions on behalf of those who labored in the black community, and more broadly in American society, his life is contextualized within the long Civil Rights Movement. Houston’s work was intimately connected with many profound efforts to liberate those who were oppressed. Undoing Plessy examines his strategies and accomplishments, helping us to further understand the complexities of change in the pre-Brown Era, and offers us compelling insights into dilemmas currently facing those in the workplace.

Author : Harsha Walia
Publisher : AK Press
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2014-02-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781849351355

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Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia Pdf

“Harsha Walia has played a central role in building some of North America’s most innovative, diverse, and effective new movements. That this brilliant organizer and theorist has found time to share her wisdom in this book is a tremendous gift to us all.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine Undoing Border Imperialism combines academic discourse, lived experiences of displacement, and movement-based practices into an exciting new book. By reformulating immigrant rights movements within a transnational analysis of capitalism, labor exploitation, settler colonialism, state building, and racialized empire, it provides the alternative conceptual frameworks of border imperialism and decolonization. Drawing on the author’s experiences in No One Is Illegal, this work offers relevant insights for all social movement organizers on effective strategies to overcome the barriers and borders within movements in order to cultivate fierce, loving, and sustainable communities of resistance striving toward liberation. The author grounds the book in collective vision, with short contributions from over twenty organizers and writers from across North America. Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist, writer, and popular educator rooted in emancipatory movements and communities for over a decade. Praise for Undoing Border Imperialism: “Border imperialism is an apt conceptualization for capturing the politics of massive displacement due to capitalist neoglobalization. Within the wealthy countries, Canada’s No One Is Illegal is one of the most effective organizations of migrants and allies. Walia is an outstanding organizer who has done a lot of thinking and can write—not a common combination. Besides being brilliantly conceived and presented, this book is the first extended work on immigration that refuses to make First Nations sovereignty invisible.”—Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, author of Indians of the Americas and Blood on the Border “Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism demonstrates that geography has certainly not ended, and nor has the urge for people to stretch out our arms across borders to create our communities. One of the most rewarding things about this book is its capaciousness—astute insights that emerge out of careful organizing linked to the voices of a generation of strugglers, trying to find their own analysis to build their own movements to make this world our own. This is both a manual and a memoir, a guide to the world and a guide to the organizer's heart.”—Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World “This book belongs in every wannabe revolutionary’s war backpack. I addictively jumped all over its contents: a radical mixtape of ancestral wisdoms to present-day grounded organizers theorizing about their own experiences. A must for me is Walia’s decision to infuse this volume’s fight against border imperialism, white supremacy, and empire with the vulnerability of her own personal narrative. This book is a breath of fresh air and offers an urgently needed movement-based praxis. Undoing Border Imperialism is too hot to be sitting on bookshelves; it will help make the revolution.”—Ashanti Alston, Black Panther elder and former political prisoner

Author : Ira Berlin
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2015-09-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780674088993

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The Long Emancipation by Ira Berlin Pdf

Ira Berlin offers a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Emancipation was not an occasion but a century-long process of brutal struggle by generations of African Americans who were not naive about the price of freedom. Just as slavery was initiated and maintained by violence, undoing slavery also required violence.

Author : Marguerite Steen
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 1174 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 1941
Category : Electronic
ISBN : LCCN:41022075

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The Sun is My Undoing by Marguerite Steen Pdf

Author : David Nathaniel Gellman
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807131749

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Emancipating New York by David Nathaniel Gellman Pdf

"David N. Gellman has written the most complete study to date of the abolition of slavery in New York State. Focusing on public opinion, he shows New Yorkers engaged in vigorous debates and determined activism during the final decades of the eighteenth century as they grappled with the possibility of freeing the state's black population. In 1799, gradual emancipation in New York began - a profound event, Gellman argues. It helped move an entire region of the country toward a historically rare slaveless democracy, creating a wedge in the United States that would ultimately lead to the Civil War." "Gellman presents a comprehensive examination of the reasons for and timing of New York's dismantling of slavery. It was the northern state with the greatest number of slaves, more than 20,000 in 1790. Newspapers, pamphlets, legislative journals, and organizational records reveal how whites and blacks, citizens and slaves, activists and politicians, responded to the changing ideologies and evolving political landscape of the early national period and concluded that slavery did not fit with their state's emerging identity. Support for the institution atrophied, and eventually the preponderance of New York's political leaders endorsed gradual abolition." "The first book on its subject, Emancipating New York provides a fascinating narrative of citizenry addressing longstanding injustices central to some of the greatest traumas of American history. The debate within the New York public sphere over abolition proved a pivotal contest in the unraveling of worldwide slavery, Gellman shows, and set the stage for intense political conflicts in the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Alexander von Humboldt
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 548 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2011-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226465678

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Political Essay on the Island of Cuba by Alexander von Humboldt Pdf

The research Alexander von Humboldt amassed during his five-year trek through the Americas in the early 19th century proved foundational to the fields of botany and geology. But his visit to Cuba yielded observations that extended far beyond the natural world. This title presents a physical and cultural study of the island nation.

Author : Christopher Freeburg
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 79 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2020-11-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781478012962

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Counterlife by Christopher Freeburg Pdf

In Counterlife Christopher Freeburg poses a question to contemporary studies of slavery and its aftereffects: what if freedom, agency, and domination weren't the overarching terms used for thinking about Black life? In pursuit of this question, Freeburg submits that current scholarship is too preoccupied with demonstrating enslaved Africans' acts of political resistance, and instead he considers Black social life beyond such concepts. He examines a rich array of cultural texts that depict slavery—from works by Frederick Douglass, Radcliffe Bailey, and Edward Jones to spirituals, the television cartoon The Boondocks, and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained—to show how enslaved Africans created meaning through artistic creativity, religious practice, and historical awareness both separate from and alongside concerns about freedom. By arguing for the impossibility of tracing slave subjects solely through their pursuits of freedom, Freeburg reminds readers of the arresting power and beauty that the enigmas of Black social life contain.

Author : Jim Sleeper
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1991-09-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780393346213

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Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York by Jim Sleeper Pdf

"In this study of race relations in N.Y.C., Sleeper, an editorial writer for New York Newsday, harshly criticizes both black leaders and their liberal supporters for pointing a finger at America's racist society rather than setting concrete goals to overcome inequality." —Kirkus Reviews A report of the current state of race relations in New York City, which examines the differing views of militants, liberals and forgotten minorities, and presents suggestions for racial common sense that attempt to demolish long-standing stereotypes.

Author : Kathleen M. Brown
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 9780300160277

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Foul Bodies by Kathleen M. Brown Pdf

In colonial times few Americans bathed regularly; by the mid-1800s, a cleanliness “revolution” had begun. Why this change, and what did it signify? A nation’s standards of private cleanliness reveal much about its ideals of civilization, fears of disease, and expectations for public life, says Kathleen Brown in this unusual cultural history. Starting with the shake-up of European practices that coincided with Atlantic expansion, she traces attitudes toward “dirt” through the mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that cleanliness—and the lack of it—had moral, religious, and often sexual implications. Brown contends that care of the body is not simply a private matter but an expression of cultural ideals that reflect the fundamental values of a society.The book explores early America’s evolving perceptions of cleanliness, along the way analyzing the connections between changing public expectations for appearance and manners, and the backstage work of grooming, laundering, and housecleaning performed by women. Brown provides an intimate view of cleanliness practices and how such forces as urbanization, immigration, market conditions, and concerns about social mobility influenced them. Broad in historical scope and imaginative in its insights, this book expands the topic of cleanliness to encompass much larger issues, including religion, health, gender, class, and race relations.

Author : Premesh Lalu
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2022-10-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781509552849

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Undoing Apartheid by Premesh Lalu Pdf

Post-apartheid South Africa still struggles to overcome the past, not just because the material conditions of apartheid linger but because the intellectual conditions it created have not been thoroughly dismantled. The system of 'petty apartheid', which controlled the minutia of everyday life, became a means of dragooning human beings into adapting to increasingly mechanized forms of life that stifle desire and creative endeavour. As a result, apartheid is incessantly repeated in the struggle to move beyond it. In Undoing Apartheid, Premesh Lalu argues that only an aesthetic education can lead to a future beyond apartheid. To find ways to escape the vicious cycle, he traces the patterns created by three theatrical works by William Kentridge, Jane Taylor, and the Handspring Puppet Company – Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld, and Ubu and the Truth Commission – which coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. Through the analysis of these works, Lalu uncovers the roots of modern thinking about race and affirms the need to revitalize a post-apartheid reconciliation endowed with truth – if only to keep alive the rhyme of hope and history.

Author : Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor,Lisa G. Materson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 640 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2018-09-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780190906573

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The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History by Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor,Lisa G. Materson Pdf

From the first European encounters with Native American women to today's crisis of sexual assault, The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History boldly interprets the diverse history of women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America. Over twenty-nine chapters, this handbook illustrates how women's and gender history can shape how we view the past, looking at how gender influenced people's lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter is alive with colorful historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, and transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars across multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women's opinions to the suppression of Indian women's involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. Together and separately, these essays offer readers a deep understanding of the variety and centrality of women's lives to all dimensions of the American past, even as they show that the boundaries of "women," "American," and "history" have shifted across the centuries.

Author : Glenda Carpio
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2019-03-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781108475174

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The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright by Glenda Carpio Pdf

Shows Wright's art was intrinsic to his politics, grounding his exploration of the intersections between race, gender, and class.