Epic Journeys of Freedom

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Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 0807055182
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Epic Journeys of Freedom by : Cassandra Pybus

Download or read book Epic Journeys of Freedom written by Cassandra Pybus and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cassandra Pybus adds greatly to the work of [previous] scholars by insisting that slaves stand at the center of their own history . . . Her 'biographies' of flight expose the dangers that escape entailed and the courage it took to risk all for freedom. Only by measuring those dangers can the exhilaration of success be comprehended and the unspeakable misery of failure be appreciated.--Ira Berlin, from the Foreword During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Epic Journeys of Freedom is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their own lives. This alternative narrative of freedom fought for and won is uniquely compelling; historian Cassandra Pybus's groundbreaking research has uncovered individual stories of runaways who left America to forge difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Harry, for example, one of George Washington's slaves, escaped from Mount Vernon in 1776, was evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783, and eventually relocated to Sierra Leone in West Africa with his wife and three children. Ralph Henry, who ran away from the Virginia firebrand Patrick Henry in 1776, took a similar path to precarious freedom in Sierra Leone, while others, such as John Moseley and John Randall, were evacuated with the British forces to England. Stranded in England without skills or patronage during a period of high unemployment, they were among thousands of newly freed poor blacks who struggled just to survive. While some were relocated to Sierra Leone, others, like Moseley and Randall, found themselves transported to the distant penal colony of Botany Bay, in Australia. Epic Journeys of Freedom, written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, is a fascinating insight into the meaning of liberty; it will change forever the way we think about the American Revolution. From the Hardcover edition.

Liberty Is Sweet

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1476750394
Total Pages : 688 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (767 download)

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Book Synopsis Liberty Is Sweet by : Woody Holton

Download or read book Liberty Is Sweet written by Woody Holton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes. Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics. Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.

Death Or Liberty

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199782253
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis Death Or Liberty by : Douglas R. Egerton

Download or read book Death Or Liberty written by Douglas R. Egerton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, the author offers a sweeping chronicle of African American history stretching from Britain's 1763 victory in the Seven Years' War to the election of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800.

Women in the American Revolution

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Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813942608
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis Women in the American Revolution by : Barbara B. Oberg

Download or read book Women in the American Revolution written by Barbara B. Oberg and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-05-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on a quarter century of scholarship following the publication of the groundbreaking Women in the Age of the American Revolution, the engagingly written essays in this volume offer an updated answer to the question, What was life like for women in the era of the American Revolution? The contributors examine how women dealt with years of armed conflict and carried on their daily lives, exploring factors such as age, race, educational background, marital status, social class, and region. For patriot women the Revolution created opportunities—to market goods, find a new social status within the community, or gain power in the family. Those who remained loyal to the Crown, however, often saw their lives diminished—their property confiscated, their businesses failed, or their sense of security shattered. Some essays focus on individuals (Sarah Bache, Phillis Wheatley), while others address the impact of war on social or commercial interactions between men and women. Patriot women in occupied Boston fell in love with and married British soldiers; in Philadelphia women mobilized support for nonimportation; and in several major colonial cities wives took over the family business while their husbands fought. Together, these essays recover what the Revolution meant to and for women.

Freedom's Debtors

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300231520
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Freedom's Debtors by : Padraic X. Scanlan

Download or read book Freedom's Debtors written by Padraic X. Scanlan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone and how the British used its success to justify colonialism in Africa British anti-slavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. After the slave trade was abolished, anti-slavery activists in England profited, colonial officials in Freetown, Sierra Leone, relied on former slaves as soldiers and as cheap labor, and the British armed forces conscripted former slaves to fight in the West Indies and in West Africa. At once scholarly and compelling, this history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone draws on a wealth of archival material. Scanlan’s social and material study offers insight into how the success of British anti-slavery policies were used to justify colonialism in Africa. He reframes a moment considered to be a watershed in British public morality as rather the beginning of morally ambiguous, violent, and exploitative colonial history.

Embracing Protestantism

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Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 0813055709
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Embracing Protestantism by : John W. Catron

Download or read book Embracing Protestantism written by John W. Catron and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Embracing Protestantism, John Catron argues that people of African descent in America who adopted Protestant Christianity during the eighteenth century did not become African Americans but instead assumed more fluid Atlantic-African identities. America was then the land of slavery and white supremacy, where citizenship and economic mobility were off-limits to most people of color. In contrast, the Atlantic World offered access to the growing abolitionist movement in Europe. Catron examines how the wider Atlantic World allowed membership in transatlantic evangelical churches that gave people of color unprecedented power in their local congregations and contact with black Christians in West and Central Africa. It also channeled inspiration from the large black churches then developing in the Caribbean and from black missionaries. Unlike deracinated creoles who attempted to merge with white culture, people of color who became Protestants were "Atlantic Africans," who used multiple religious traditions to restore cultural and ethnic connections. And this religious heterogeneity was a critically important way black Anglophone Christians resisted slavery.

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804

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Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393253872
Total Pages : 387 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (932 download)

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Book Synopsis American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by : Alan Taylor

Download or read book American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 written by Alan Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Excellent . . . deserves high praise. Mr. Taylor conveys this sprawling continental history with economy, clarity, and vividness.”—Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history. The American Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain’s colonies, fueled by local conditions and resistant to control. Emerging from the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, the revolution pivoted on western expansion as well as seaboard resistance to British taxes. When war erupted, Patriot crowds harassed Loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. The war exploded in set battles like Saratoga and Yorktown and spread through continuing frontier violence. The discord smoldering within the fragile new nation called forth a movement to concentrate power through a Federal Constitution. Assuming the mantle of “We the People,” the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government. But it was Jefferson’s expansive “empire of liberty” that carried the revolution forward, propelling white settlement and slavery west, preparing the ground for a new conflagration.

Becoming African in America

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199886415
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (998 download)

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Book Synopsis Becoming African in America by : James Sidbury

Download or read book Becoming African in America written by James Sidbury and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-27 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first slaves imported to America did not see themselves as "African" but rather as Temne, Igbo, or Yoruban. In Becoming African in America, James Sidbury reveals how an African identity emerged in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tracing the development of "African" from a degrading term connoting savage people to a word that was a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade. In this wide-ranging work, Sidbury first examines the work of black writers--such as Ignatius Sancho in England and Phillis Wheatley in America--who created a narrative of African identity that took its meaning from the diaspora, a narrative that began with enslavement and the experience of the Middle Passage, allowing people of various ethnic backgrounds to become "African" by virtue of sharing the oppression of slavery. He looks at political activists who worked within the emerging antislavery moment in England and North America in the 1780s and 1790s; he describes the rise of the African church movement in various cities--most notably, the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent denomination--and the efforts of wealthy sea captain Paul Cuffe to initiate a black-controlled emigration movement that would forge ties between Sierra Leone and blacks in North America; and he examines in detail the efforts of blacks to emigrate to Africa, founding Sierra Leone and Liberia. Elegantly written and astutely reasoned, Becoming African in America weaves together intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and political threads into an important contribution to African American history, one that fundamentally revises our picture of the rich and complicated roots of African nationalist thought in the U.S. and the black Atlantic.

The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190257768
Total Pages : 696 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution by : Edward G. Gray

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution written by Edward G. Gray and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution draws on a wealth of new scholarship to create a vibrant dialogue among varied approaches to the revolution that made the United States. In thirty-three essays written by authorities on the period, the Handbook brings to life the diverse multitudes of colonial North America and their extraordinary struggles before, during, and after the eight-year-long civil war that secured the independence of thirteen rebel colonies from their erstwhile colonial parent. The chapters explore battles and diplomacy, economics and finance, law and culture, politics and society, gender, race, and religion. Its diverse cast of characters includes ordinary farmers and artisans, free and enslaved African Americans, Indians, and British and American statesmen and military leaders. In addition to expanding the Revolution's who, the Handbook broadens its where, portraying an event that far transcended the boundaries of what was to become the United States. It offers readers an American Revolution whose impact ranged far beyond the thirteen colonies. The Handbook's range of interpretive and methodological approaches captures the full scope of current revolutionary-era scholarship. Its authors, British and American scholars spanning several generations, include social, cultural, military, and imperial historians, as well as those who study politics, diplomacy, literature, gender, and sexuality. Together and separately, these essays demonstrate that the American Revolution remains a vibrant and inviting a subject of inquiry. Nothing comparable has been published in decades.

Revolutions without Borders

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300213433
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Revolutions without Borders by : Janet Polasky

Download or read book Revolutions without Borders written by Janet Polasky and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nation-based histories cannot do justice to the rowdy, radical interchange of ideas around the Atlantic world during the tumultuous years from 1776 to 1804. National borders were powerless to restrict the flow of enticing new visions of human rights and universal freedom. This expansive history explores how the revolutionary ideas that spurred the American and French revolutions reverberated far and wide, connecting European, North American, African, and Caribbean peoples more closely than ever before. Historian Janet Polasky focuses on the eighteenth-century travelers who spread new notions of liberty and equality. It was an age of itinerant revolutionaries, she shows, who ignored borders and found allies with whom to imagine a borderless world. As paths crossed, ideas entangled. The author investigates these ideas and how they were disseminated long before the days of instant communications and social media or even an international postal system. Polasky analyzes the paper records—books, broadsides, journals, newspapers, novels, letters, and more—to follow the far-reaching trails of revolutionary zeal. What emerges clearly from rich historic records is that the dream of liberty among America’s founders was part of a much larger picture. It was a dream embraced throughout the far-flung regions of the Atlantic world.

To Begin the World Over Again

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300248865
Total Pages : 545 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis To Begin the World Over Again by : Matthew Lockwood

Download or read book To Begin the World Over Again written by Matthew Lockwood and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first exploration of the profound and often catastrophic impact the American Revolution had on the rest of the worldWhile the American Revolution led to domestic peace and liberty, it ultimately had a catastrophic global impact—it strengthened the British Empire and led to widespread persecution and duress. From the opium wars in China to anti-imperial rebellions in Peru to the colonization of Australia—the inspirational impact the American success had on fringe uprisings was outweighed by the influence it had on the tightening fists of oppressive world powers.Here Matthew Lockwood presents, in vivid detail, the neglected story of this unintended revolution. It sowed the seeds of collapse for the preeminent empires of the early modern era, setting the stage for the global domination of Britain, Russia, and the United States. Lockwood illuminates the forgotten stories and experiences of the communities and individuals who adapted to this new world in which the global balance of power had been drastically altered.

Whose American Revolution was It?

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Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814797105
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis Whose American Revolution was It? by : Alfred F. Young

Download or read book Whose American Revolution was It? written by Alfred F. Young and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This moving account of a key figure in American history contributes greatly to our understanding of the past. It also informs our vision of the servant leader needed to guide the 1990s movement." --Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children's Defense Fund "First-rate intellectual and political history, this study explores the relations between the practical objectives of SNCC and its moral and cultural goals." --Irwin Unger, Author of These United States and Postwar America "Robert Moses emerges from these pages as that rare modern hero, the man whose life enacts his principles, the rebel who steadfastly refuses to be victim or executioner and who mistrusts even his own leadership out of commitment to cultivating the strength, self-reliance, and solidarity of those with and for whom he is working. Eric Burner's engrossing account of Robert Moses's legendary career brings alive the everyday realities of the Civil Rights Movement, especially the gruelling campaign for voter registration and political organization in Mississippi." --Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities, Emory University, author of Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South Next to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Bob Moses was arguably one of the most influential and respected leaders of the civil rights movement. Quiet and intensely private, Moses quickly became legendary as a man whose conduct exemplified leadership by example. He once resigned as head of the Council of Federated Organizations because "my position there was too strong, too central." Despite his centrality to the most important social movement in modern American history, Moses' life and the philosophy on which it is based have only been given cursory treatment and have never been the subject of a book-length biography. Biography is, by its very nature, a complicated act of recovery, even more so when the life under scrutiny deliberately avoids such attention. Eric Burner therefore sets out here not to reveal the "secret" Bob Moses, but to examine his moral philosophy and his political and ideological evolution, to provide a picture of the public person. In essence, his book provides a primer on a figure who spoke by silence and led through example. Moses spent almost three years in Mississippi trying to awaken the state's black citizens to their moral and legal rights before the fateful summer of 1964 would thrust him and the Freedom Summer movement into the national spotlight. We follow him through the civil rights years -- his intensive, fearless tradition of community organizing, his involvements with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and his negotiations with the Department of Justice --as Burner chronicles both Moses' political activity and his intellectual development, revealing the strong influence of French philosopher Albert Camus on his life and work. Moses' life is marked by the conflict between morality and politics, between purity and pragmatism, which ultimately left him disillusioned with a traditional Left that could talk only of coalitions and leaders from the top. Pursued by the Vietnam draft board for a war which he opposed, Moses fled to Canada in 1966 before departing for Africa in 1969 to spend the next decade teaching in Tanzania. Returning in 1977 under President Carter's amnesty program, he was awarded a five-year MacArthur genius grant in 1982 to establish and develop an innovative program to teach math to Boston's inner-city youth called the Algebra Project. The success of the program, which Moses has referred to as our version of Civil Rights 1992, has landed him on the cover of The New York Times Magazineemphasizing the new, central dimension that math and computer literacy lends to the pursuit of equal rights. And Gently He Shall Lead Them is the story of a remarkable man, an elusive hero of the civil rights movement whose flight from adulation has only served to increase his reputation as an intellectual and moral leader, a man whom nobody ever sees, but whose work is always in evidence. From his role as one of the architects of the civil rights movement thirty years ago to his ongoing work with inner city children, Robert Moses remains one of America's most courageous, energetic, and influential leaders. Wary of the cults of celebrity he saw surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and fueled by a philosophy that shunned leadership, Moses has always labored behind the scenes. This first biography, a primer in the life of a unique American, sheds significant light on the intellectual and philosophical worldview of a man who is rarely seen but whose work is always in evidence.

Bind Us Apart

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192516612
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Bind Us Apart by : Nicholas Guyatt

Download or read book Bind Us Apart written by Nicholas Guyatt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-11 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising and counterintuitive origins of America's racial crisis Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that "all men are created equal"? The usual answer is racism, but the reality is more complex and unsettling. In Bind Us Apart, historian Nicholas Guyatt argues that, from the Revolution through the Civil War, most white liberals believed in the unity of all human beings. But their philosophy faltered when it came to the practical work of forging a colour-blind society. Unable to convince others - and themselves - that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of colour could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia. Herein lie the origins of "separate but equal." Decades before Reconstruction, America's liberal elite was unable to imagine how people of colour could become citizens of the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, Native Americans were pushed farther and farther westward, while four million slaves freed after the Civil War found themselves among a white population that had spent decades imagining that they would live somewhere else.

The Epic Journey in Greek and Roman Literature

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108498094
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis The Epic Journey in Greek and Roman Literature by : Thomas Biggs

Download or read book The Epic Journey in Greek and Roman Literature written by Thomas Biggs and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Homer to the moon, this volume explores the epic journey across space and time in the ancient world.

Freedom's Prophet

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Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814758576
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis Freedom's Prophet by : Richard S. Newman

Download or read book Freedom's Prophet written by Richard S. Newman and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the life of the first black pamphleteer, abolitionist, and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations

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Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820353108
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations by : Whitney Nell Stewart

Download or read book Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations written by Whitney Nell Stewart and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The African American Odyssey of John Kizell

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1611171334
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis The African American Odyssey of John Kizell by : Kevin G. Lowther

Download or read book The African American Odyssey of John Kizell written by Kevin G. Lowther and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspirational story of John Kizell celebrates the life of a West African enslaved as a boy and brought to South Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution. Fleeing his owner, Kizell served with the British military in the Revolutionary War, began a family in the Nova Scotian wilderness, then returned to his African homeland to help found a settlement for freed slaves in Sierra Leone. He spent decades battling European and African slave traders along the coast and urging his people to stop selling their own into foreign bondage. This in-depth biography—based in part on Kizell's own writings—illuminates the links between South Carolina and West Africa during the Atlantic slave trade's peak decades. Seized in an attack on his uncle's village, Kizell was thrown into the brutal world of chattel slavery at age thirteen and transported to Charleston, South Carolina. When Charleston fell to the British in 1780, Kizell joined them and was with the Loyalist force defeated in the pivotal battle of Kings Mountain. At the war's end, he was evacuated with other American Loyalists to Nova Scotia. In 1792 he joined a pilgrimage of nearly twelve hundred former slaves to the new British settlement for free blacks in Sierra Leone. Among the most prominent Africans in the antislavery movement of his time, Kizell believed that all people of African descent in America would, if given a way, return to Africa as he had. Back in his native land, he bravely confronted the forces that had led to his enslavement. Late in life he played a controversial role—freshly interpreted in this book—in the settlement of American blacks in what became Liberia. Kizell's remarkable story provides insight to the cultural and spiritual milieu from which West Africans were wrenched before being forced into slavery. Lowther sheds light on African complicity in the slave trade and examines how it may have contributed to Sierra Leone's latter-day struggles as an independent state. A foreword by Joseph Opala, a noted researcher on the "Gullah Connection" between Sierra Leone and coastal South Carolina and Georgia, highlights Kizell's continuing legacy on both sides of the Atlantic.