Charleston And The Emergence Of Middle Class Culture In The Revolutionary Era

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Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era

Author : Jennifer L. Goloboy
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 082034995X
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era by : Jennifer L. Goloboy

Download or read book Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era written by Jennifer L. Goloboy and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016-10-10 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Too often, says Jennifer L. Goloboy, we equate being middle class with “niceness”—a set of values frozen in the antebellum period and centered on long-term economic and social progress and a close, nurturing family life. Goloboy’s case study of merchants in Charleston, South Carolina, looks to an earlier time to establish the roots of middle-class culture in America. She argues for a definition more applicable to the ruthless pursuit of profit in the early republic. To be middle class then was to be skilled at survival in the market economy. What prompted cultural shifts in the early middle class, Goloboy shows, were market conditions. In Charleston, deference and restraint were the bywords of the colonial business climate, while rowdy ambition defined the post-Revolutionary era, which in turn gave way to institution building and professionalism in antebellum times. Goloboy’s research also supports a view of the Old South as neither precapitalist nor isolated from the rest of American culture, and it challenges the idea that post-Revolutionary Charleston was a port in decline by reminding us of a forgotten economic boom based on slave trading, cotton exporting, and trading as a neutral entity amid warring European states. This fresh look at Charleston’s merchants lets us rethink the middle class in light of the new history of capitalism and its commitment to reintegrating the Old South into the world economy.

The Emergence of the Middle Class

Author : Stuart M. Blumin
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521376129
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (761 download)

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Book Synopsis The Emergence of the Middle Class by : Stuart M. Blumin

Download or read book The Emergence of the Middle Class written by Stuart M. Blumin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-09-29 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the emergence of the recongnizable 'middle class' from the 1760-1900.

A Short History of Charleston

Author : Robert N. Rosen
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643361872
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (433 download)

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Book Synopsis A Short History of Charleston by : Robert N. Rosen

Download or read book A Short History of Charleston written by Robert N. Rosen and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively chronicle of the South's most renowned city from the founding of colonial Charles Town through the present day A Short History of Charleston—a lively chronicle of the South's most renowned and charming city—has been hailed by critics, historians, and especially Charlestonians as authoritative, witty, and entertaining. Beginning with the founding of colonial Charles Town and ending three hundred and fifty years later in the present day, Robert Rosen's fast-paced narrative takes the reader on a journey through the city's complicated history as a port to English settlers, a bloodstained battlefield, and a picturesque vacation mecca. Packed with anecdotes and enlivened by passages from diaries and letters, A Short History of Charleston recounts in vivid detail the port city's development from an outpost of the British Empire to a bustling, modern city. This revised and expanded edition includes a new final chapter on the decades since Joseph Riley was first elected mayor in 1975 through its rapid development in geographic size, population, and cultural importance. Rosen contemplates both the city's triumphs and its challenges, allowing readers to consider how Charleston's past has shaped its present and will continue to shape its future.

Carolina's Golden Fields

Author : Hayden R. Smith
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110842340X
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Carolina's Golden Fields by : Hayden R. Smith

Download or read book Carolina's Golden Fields written by Hayden R. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The basis for this book began twenty years ago when I enrolled in the College of Charleston's summer archaeological field school. After spending the first half of the semester honing our technique by digging five-foot by five-foot units, identifying soil stratigraphy, and collecting artifacts at the Charleston Museum's Stono Plantation, the archaeologists reoriented us students to a new site. For the remainder of the field school we investigated Willtown Bluff on the Edisto River, an early-eighteenth century township surrounded by plantations. My interest in inland rice cultivation grew from our work at the James Stobo site, a 1710 plantation located on the edge of the Willtown township and one mile from the tidal river. For three archaeological seasons between 1997 and 1999, I participated in excavations of the Stobo Plantation house foundation located on a hardwood knoll surrounded by a sea of low-lying Cypress wetlands. During this time, I had a unique opportunity to walk off the dry terra firma and explore miles of inland rice embankments sprawling to the east and to the south of the house site. Major embankments traverse the wetlands on a magnetic north/south and east/west axis, intersected by smaller check banks and drainage canals as far as the eye can see under the dense cypress and hardwood canopy"--

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

Author : Kerri K. Greenidge
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1324090855
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (24 download)

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Book Synopsis The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by : Kerri K. Greenidge

Download or read book The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family written by Kerri K. Greenidge and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist • National Book Critics Circle Award [Biography] New York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022 Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award Publishers Weekly • 10 Best Books of 2022 Best Books of 2022: NPR, Oprah Daily, Smithsonian, Boston Globe, Chicago Public Library A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family. Sarah and Angelina Grimke—the Grimke sisters—are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality. That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery’s most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers’ trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the post–Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis’s wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family’s past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance. In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental—an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics. A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.

Branding Trust

Author : Jennifer M. Black
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 1512824992
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (128 download)

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Book Synopsis Branding Trust by : Jennifer M. Black

Download or read book Branding Trust written by Jennifer M. Black and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early nineteenth century, the American commercial marketplace was a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knock-offs and outright frauds thrived. Appearances could be deceiving, and entrepreneurs often relied on their personal reputations to close deals and make sales. Rapid industrialization and expanding trade routes opened new markets with enormous potential, but how could distant merchants convince potential customers, whom they had never met, that they could be trusted? Through wide-ranging visual and textual evidence, including a robust selection of early advertisements, Branding Trust tells the story of how advertising evolved to meet these challenges, tracing the themes of character and class as they intertwined with and influenced graphic design, trademark law, and ideas about ethical business practice in the United States. As early as the 1830s, printers, advertising agents, and manufacturers collaborated to devise new ways to advertise goods. They used eye-catching designs and fonts to grab viewers’ attention and wove together meaningful images and prose to gain the public’s trust. At the same time, manufacturers took legal steps to safeguard their intellectual property, formulating new ways to protect their brands by taking legal action against counterfeits and frauds. By the end of the nineteenth century, these advertising and legal strategies came together to form the primary components of modern branding: demonstrating character, protecting goodwill, entertaining viewers to build rapport, and deploying the latest graphic innovations in print. Trademarks became the symbols that embodied these ideas—in print, in the law, and to the public. Branding Trust thus identifies and explains the visual rhetoric of trust and legitimacy that has come to reign over American capitalism. Though the 1920s has often been held up as the birth of modern advertising, Jennifer M. Black argues that advertising professionals had in fact learned how to navigate public relations over the previous century by adapting the language, imagery, and ideas of the American middle class.

The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861

Author : Jonathan Daniel Wells
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807876291
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 by : Jonathan Daniel Wells

Download or read book The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-11-16 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a fresh take on social dynamics in the antebellum South, Jonathan Daniel Wells contests the popular idea that the Old South was a region of essentially two classes (planters and slaves) until after the Civil War. He argues that, in fact, the region had a burgeoning white middle class--including merchants, doctors, and teachers--that had a profound impact on southern culture, the debate over slavery, and the coming of the Civil War. Wells shows that the growth of the periodical press after 1820 helped build a cultural bridge between the North and the South, and the emerging southern middle class seized upon northern middle-class ideas about gender roles and reform, politics, and the virtues of modernization. Even as it sought to emulate northern progress, however, the southern middle class never abandoned its attachment to slavery. By the 1850s, Wells argues, the prospect of industrial slavery in the South threatened northern capital and labor, causing sectional relations to shift from cooperative to competitive. Rather than simply pitting a backward, slave-labor, agrarian South against a progressive, free-labor, industrial North, Wells argues that the Civil War reflected a more complex interplay of economic and cultural values.

The Enslaved and Their Enslavers

Author : Edward Pearson
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 1512824399
Total Pages : 521 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (128 download)

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Book Synopsis The Enslaved and Their Enslavers by : Edward Pearson

Download or read book The Enslaved and Their Enslavers written by Edward Pearson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution's development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them. Throughout South Carolina's long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.

The Denmark Vesey Affair

Author : Douglas R. Egerton
Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 0813072662
Total Pages : 915 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis The Denmark Vesey Affair by : Douglas R. Egerton

Download or read book The Denmark Vesey Affair written by Douglas R. Egerton and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-10-26 with total page 915 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vast collection of documents that illuminate one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the U.S. In 1822, thirty-four slaves and their leader, a free black man named Denmark Vesey, were tried and executed for "attempting to raise an insurrection" in Charleston, South Carolina. In The Denmark Vesey Affair, Douglas Egerton and Robert Paquette annotate and interpret a vast collection of contemporary documents that illuminate and contextualize this complicated saga, providing the definitive account of a landmark event that played a role in the nation’s path to Civil War. The editors ultimately argue that the Vesey plot was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Play Among Books

Author : Miro Roman
Publisher : Birkhäuser
ISBN 13 : 3035624054
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (356 download)

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Book Synopsis Play Among Books by : Miro Roman

Download or read book Play Among Books written by Miro Roman and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.

Class Matters

Author : Simon Middleton
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 9780812205565
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (55 download)

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Book Synopsis Class Matters by : Simon Middleton

Download or read book Class Matters written by Simon Middleton and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-03 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a category of historical analysis, class is dead—or so it has been reported over the past two decades. The contributors to Class Matters contest this demise. Although differing in their approaches, they all agree that socioeconomic inequality remains indispensable to a true understanding of the transition from the early modern to modern era in North America and the rest of the Atlantic world. As a whole, they chart the emergence of class as a concept and its subsequent loss of analytic purchase in Anglo-American historiography. The opening section considers the dynamics of class relations in the Atlantic world across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—from Iroquoian and Algonquian communities in North America to tobacco lords in Glasgow. Subsequent chapters examine the cultural development of a new and aspirational middle class and its relationship to changing economic conditions and the articulation of corporate and industrial ideologies in the era of the American Revolution and beyond. A final section shifts the focus to the poor and vulnerable—tenant farmers, infant paupers, and the victims of capital punishment. In each case the authors describe how elite Americans exercised their political and social power to structure the lives and deaths of weaker members of their communities. An impassioned afterword urges class historians to take up the legacies of historical materialism. Engaging the difficulties and range of meanings of class, the essays in Class Matters seek to energize the study of social relations in the Atlantic world.

The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century

Author : Jonathan Daniel Wells
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807138541
Total Pages : 548 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century by : Jonathan Daniel Wells

Download or read book The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-12-12 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green provide a series of provocative essays reflecting innovative, original research on professional and commercial interests in the nineteenth-century South, a place often seen as being composed of just two classes -- planters and slaves. Rather, an active middle class, made up of men and women devoted to the cultural and economic modernization of Dixie, worked with each other -- and occasionally their northern counterparts -- to bring reforms to the region. With a balance of established and younger authors, of antebellum and postbellum analyses, and of narrative and quantitative methodologies, these essays offer new ways to think about politics, society, gender, and culture during this exciting era of southern history. The contributors show that many like-minded southerners sought to create a "New South" with a society similar to that of the North. They supported the creation of public schools and an end to dueling, but less progressive reform was also endorsed, such as building factories using slave labor rather than white wage earners. The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century significantly influences thought on the social structure of the South, the centrality of class in history, and the events prior to and after the Civil War.

Anglo-Native Virginia

Author : Kristalyn Marie Shefveland
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820350257
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Anglo-Native Virginia by : Kristalyn Marie Shefveland

Download or read book Anglo-Native Virginia written by Kristalyn Marie Shefveland and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shefveland examines Anglo-Indian interactions through the conception of Native tributaries to the Virginia colony, with particularemphasis on the colonial and tributary and foreign Native settlements of thePiedmont and southwestern Coastal Plain between 1646 and 1722.

A Weary Land

Author : Kelly Houston Jones
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820360198
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis A Weary Land by : Kelly Houston Jones

Download or read book A Weary Land written by Kelly Houston Jones and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book-length study of Arkansas slavery in more than sixty years, A Weary Land offers a glimpse of enslaved life on the South’s western margins, focusing on the intersections of land use and agriculture within the daily life and work of bonded Black Arkansans. As they cleared trees, cultivated crops, and tended livestock on the southern frontier, Arkansas’s enslaved farmers connected culture and nature, creating their own meanings of space, place, and freedom. Kelly Houston Jones analyzes how the arrival of enslaved men and women as an imprisoned workforce changed the meaning of Arkansas’s acreage, while their labor transformed its landscape. They made the most of their surroundings despite the brutality and increasing labor demands of the “second slavery”—the increasingly harsh phase of American chattel bondage fueled by cotton cultivation in the Old Southwest. Jones contends that enslaved Arkansans were able to repurpose their experiences with agricultural labor, rural life, and the natural world to craft a sense of freedom rooted in the ability to own land, the power to control their own movement, and the right to use the landscape as they saw fit.

Borderless Empire

Author : Bram Hoonhout
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820356077
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Borderless Empire by : Bram Hoonhout

Download or read book Borderless Empire written by Bram Hoonhout and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borderless Empire explores the volatile history of Dutch Guiana, in particular the forgotten colonies of Essequibo and Demerara, to provide new perspectives on European empire building in the Atlantic world. Bram Hoonhout argues that imperial expansion was a process of improvisation at the colonial level rather than a project that was centrally orchestrated from the metropolis. Furthermore, he emphasizes that colonial expansion was far more transnational than the oft-used divisions into "national Atlantics" suggest. In so doing, he transcends the framework of the "Dutch Atlantic" by looking at the connections across cultural and imperial boundaries. The openness of Essequibo and Demerara affected all levels of the colonial society. Instead of counting on metropolitan soldiers, the colonists relied on Amerindian allies, who captured runaway slaves and put down revolts. Instead of waiting for Dutch slavers, the planters bought enslaved Africans from foreign smugglers. Instead of trying to populate the colonies with Dutchmen, the local authorities welcomed adventurers from many different origins. The result was a borderless world in which slavery was contingent on Amerindian support and colonial trade was rooted in illegality. These transactions created a colonial society that was far more Atlantic than Dutch.

Generations of Freedom

Author : Nik Ribianszky
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820368075
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Generations of Freedom by : Nik Ribianszky

Download or read book Generations of Freedom written by Nik Ribianszky and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Generations of Freedom Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865. Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America's system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one's status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual's continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system. Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together—by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies—these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property—including that most precious, themselves.

In the Shadow of Dred Scott

Author : Kelly M. Kennington
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820350850
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis In the Shadow of Dred Scott by : Kelly M. Kennington

Download or read book In the Shadow of Dred Scott written by Kelly M. Kennington and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-04-15 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dred Scott suit for freedom, argues Kelly M. Kennington, was merely the most famous example of a phenomenon that was more widespread in antebellum American jurisprudence than is generally recognized. The author draws on the case files of more than three hundred enslaved individuals who, like Dred Scott and his family, sued for freedom in the local legal arena of St. Louis. Her findings open new perspectives on the legal culture of slavery and the negotiated processes involved in freedom suits. As a gateway to the American West, a major port on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and a focal point in the rancorous national debate over slavery’s expansion, St. Louis was an ideal place for enslaved individuals to challenge the legal systems and, by extension, the social systems that held them in forced servitude. Kennington offers an in-depth look at how daily interactions, webs of relationships, and arguments presented in court shaped and reshaped legal debates and public attitudes over slavery and freedom in St. Louis. Kennington also surveys more than eight hundred state supreme court freedom suits from around the United States to situate the St. Louis example in a broader context. Although white enslavers dominated the antebellum legal system in St. Louis and throughout the slaveholding states, that fact did not mean that the system ignored the concerns of the subordinated groups who made up the bulk of the American population. By looking at a particular example of one group’s encounters with the law—and placing these suits into conversation with similar encounters that arose in appellate cases nationwide—Kennington sheds light on the ways in which the law responded to the demands of a variety of actors.