Average customer rating:
- Pathbreaking work on race and revolution
|
Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898
Ada Ferrer
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
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A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Envisioning Cuba)
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The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Latin America Otherwise)
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ASIN: 0807847836
Release Date: 1999-09-29 |
Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement.
Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency.
Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.
Customer Reviews:
Pathbreaking work on race and revolution.......2000-01-20
Insurgent Cuba tracks the transformation of racial and gendered narratives of the revolution from the abolition of slavery to the war of independence. In this fascinating and pathbreaking book, Professor Ferrer reveals that, with the emergence of late 19th century Cuban nationalism, narratives of race, slavery, and the place of black people in the revolution shift dramatically. Through the voices of leaders like Jose Marti, black insurgents were constructed as color-blind patriots committed to the liberation of Cuba, not slaves and ex-slaves attempting to overthrow the regime of slavery and demand equal rights. Black people were transformed in these three decades from a problem and threat to the republic to the symbols of Cuban nationalism's commitment to multiracial democracy. Anti-racism became a weapon in the hands of Cuban revolutionaries in their battle against Spain, which changed the status of black insurgents, put them on a pedestal in a way, and made their stories fundamental to the narrative of the new republic--one that is colorblind and willing to incorporate everyone as long as they are patriots. For blacks and mulattoes, this discourse gave them a platform to complain about racism in the ranks of the army, in everyday life, everywhere. On the other hand, the ellision of racism in the discourse of Cuban nationalism and the celebration of multiracial republicanism was often used against critics of racism in Cuba. "To speak of race, then," Ferrer writes, "was to challenge the depth of racial and national unity." Any attempts to mobilize on the basis of racial solidarity was then dismissed as divisive and unpatriotic. By reconstructing these different narratives in the context of specific revolts and campaigns, Ferrer offers us a stunning alternative narrative of the struggle for Cuban Independence. Insurgent Cuba is perhaps the best book available on race and Cuba.
Book Description
Race and Revolution is a trenchant study of the revolutionary generation's early efforts to right the apparent contradiction of slavery and of their ultimate compromises that not only left the institution intact, but provided it with the protection of a vastly strengthened government after 1788. Race and Revolution describes the free black community's response to this failure of the revolution's promise, its vigorous and articulate pleas for justice, and the community's successes in building its own African-American institutions within the hostile environment of early nineteenth-century America.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent on slavery and the American Revolution.......1996-07-24
This book is a real eye-opener for anyone, like me, who thought that slavery was not an issue at the time of the American Revolution.
Did you think slaves did not understand what was going on?
Have a look!
Amazon.com
"I first visited Cambodia in 1975," Ben Kiernan writes. "None of the Cambodians I knew then survived the next four years." In The Pol Pot Regime, Kiernan presents the first definitive account of the four-year reign of terror known as "Democratic Kampuchea." Working very closely with Cambodian sources, including interviews with hundreds of survivors and the archived "confessions" extracted by the Khmer Rouge from political prisoners just before their execution, Kiernan depicts the horrific nature of Pol Pot and his thugs with chilling specificity, and his historical analysis makes a valuable contribution to understanding how they were able to come to power in the wake of the Vietnam War.
Book Description
What was the nature of the regime that turned Cambodia into grisly killing fields and murdered or starved to death 1.7 million of the country's eight million inhabitants? In this riveting book, the first definitive account of the Khmer Rouge revolution, a world renowned authority on Cambodia shows how an ideological preoccupation with racist and totalitarian policies led a group of intellectuals to impose genocide on their own country. This edition includes a new preface recounting the fatal disintegration of the Khmer Rouge army, the death of Pol Pot, the United Nations' foray into the struggle to bring his surviving accomplices to justice, and the damning new evidence they could face.
Customer Reviews:
How Much Does Vietnam Pay Kiernan?.......2007-07-09
Kiernan has made a small fortune writing lies and half-truths on behalf of his masters, the Vietnamese revisionists, who subjugated Kampuchea and reduced it to a colony of Vietnam. Take anything Kiernan says with a huge grain of salt, providing you can wade through his turgid writing style. Much, much better for info on this period is Phillip Short's bio of Pol Pot which is also available at Amazon.
Important But Not Written Well.......2006-01-30
I wish this book were written better. I'm awarding 4 stars on the basis of the importance of the topic and the enormous amount of valuable data collected by the author. This is a very detailed attempt to reconstruct the experience of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period. This is difficult because of the paranoid secrecy of the regime and lack of much formal documentation. A great deal of the primary data for reconstructing the history of Cambodia during this period comes from interviews with survivors, a large number of them collected by the author. Kiernan's efforts to collect data and to assemble it into a reasonable narrative are admirable. A defect of this book, however, is that Kiernan seems to be writing primarily for his fellow Cambodia specialists, not for a general audience. You really need to already know at least the basic narrative history to get the most out of this book. Kiernan proceeds through the tragic history of the Khmer Rouge period with a detailed effort to reconstruct events at the center of power and in all the provinces. This is admirable and the level of detail is convincing but to be really effective in terms of increasing reader understanding, it is necessary to regularly take a step back, provide a narrative summary, and also to give readers some understanding of the relevant regional and international context for these events. Kiernan also scants analysis in favor of his fine grained narrative. Important points like the importance of Cambodian nationalism and the putative role of racism emerge almost implicitly. Kiernan would have done better to discuss these issues and the evidence for and against his interpretations explicitly. In some ways, this book is an effort to write political history as social history. This history from below aspect makes this book an excellent source for other scholars in this and related fields. This is admirable and Kiernan's scholarly dedication deserves respect, but this book could have been much more than what it is.
Hypocrite historian... beware and read below!.......2005-12-31
"Ben Kiernan, a leftist Ausrtalian academic and former apologist for the Khemer Rouge [...] in 1977 declared, 'There is ample evidence in Cambodia and other sources that the Khmer Rouge is not the monster that the press have recently made it out to be.' After renouncing this view, Kiernan was appointed director of the Cambodian Genocide Program, a tax-payer funded institute located at Yale University (it is as though a former Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier had been appointed to direct Washington's Holocaust museum.)"
"Notwithstanding the attempt of Kiernan and others to turn the Red (communist) Khmer into the Brown (fascist) Khmer, the origins of Khmer Rouge policies are easily traced to the Marcist ideology of the chinese Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s."
These are extracted from pgs. 170-171 of Michael Lind's 'The Necessary War. Lind is a an anti-Bush democrat, by the way.
People must know what kind of people they are putting their money on when they buy. If you want to know about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot there's no better (and more honorable) place than the books of (real intellectuals, not intellectual-prostitutes) Philip Short or Karl D. Jackson.
You are very welcome.
The reference work on the khmer rouge.......2005-10-22
Quite simply the most authoritative work on the pol pot led khmer rouge. If planing a visit to Cambodia Kiernan's book will provide excellent background and explain much of what you see today in rural Cambodia. Further details can be obtained from the website of Sage Insights who support local disadvantaged children by their work in tourism.
Atrocities in Cambodia.......2005-09-17
This book are outstanding as one that explained the Cambodian war and its atrocities. It explained the rise of the Pol Pot's party and much of the atrocities in detail.One must be able to stomach its atrocities which is quite mind-boggling as inhuman treatment are occured around the country.For a number of times,i'd got to stop reading halfway because of its Holocaust-like atrocities.Its ideology of Marxism madness are spread thru' out its regime.
Book Description
Not only is it the world's largest and most watched sporting event, but also the most fearsome physical challenge ever conceived by man, demanding every last ounce of will and strength, every last drop of blood, sweat, and tears. If ever there was an athletic exploit specifically not for the faint of heart and feeble of limb, this is it. So you might ask, what is Tim Moore doing cycling it?
An extremely good question. Ignoring the pleading dictates of reason and common sense, Moore determined to tackle the Tour de France, all 2,256 miles of it, in the weeks before the professionals entered the stage. This decision was one he would regret for nearly its entire length. But readers-those who now know Moore's name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Bill Bryson and Calvin Trillin-will feel otherwise. They are in for a side-splitting treat.
French Revolutions gives us a hilariously unforgettable account of Moore's attempt to conquer the Tour de France. "Conquer" may not be quite the right word. He cheats when he can, pops the occasional hayfever pill for an ephedrine rush (a fine old Tour tradition), sips cheap wine from his water bottle, and occasionally weeps on the phone to his wife. But along the way he gives readers an account of the race's colorful history and greatest heroes: Eddy Merckx, Greg Lemond, Lance Armstrong, and even Firmin Lambot, aka the "Lucky Belgian," who won the race at the age of 36. Fans of the Tour de France will learn why the yellow jersey is yellow, and how cyclists learned to save precious seconds (a race that lasts for three weeks is all about split seconds) by relieving themselves en route. And if that isn't enough, his account of a rural France tarting itself up for its moment in the spotlight leaves popular quaint descriptions of small towns in Provence in the proverbial dust. If you either love or hate the French, or both, this is the book for you.
French Revolutions is Tim Moore's funniest book to date. It is also one of the funniest sports books ever written.
Customer Reviews:
Great bedtime book!.......2007-01-03
I loved this book. It was a little difficult to read as Moore is very British, but this also made the book entertaining.
It's was a slow read for me, but that gave me a chance to savor the trip!
I often felt I was right there with him on his journey around France.
One man and his over-inflated ego on a bicycle journey through France.......2006-09-14
Ultimately, after 277 pages and 19 chapters (including a prologue and an epilogue), reading Tim Moore's French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France is nearly as much of a long and frustrating slog as riding the Tour itself. Starting off as a unique and promising adventure, by the end of both the book and the journey that it encompasses, an unholy combination of the author's incessant, often petty whinging, his negativity towards nearly every place he visits and everyone he meets and, not least, his arrogant sense of self-importance will have many readers thanking their lucky stars that they have only been his literary rather than physical travelling companions through six weeks and several thousand kilometres of cycling the route of the 2000 Tour de France. Yes, Moore's humour is often self-deprecating, and the book is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny in places, but by the last several chapters, as with a long and increasingly stressful journey with an acquaintance who is becoming more and more irritating by the kilometre, more than anything one just wants the experience to end. However, even when that end finally, mercifully comes, Moore cannot even offer a graceful parting moment or thought, with the very last paragraph and, indeed, word offering a final grand monument to pomposity and ego. It's just a shame that, from the evidence of this book, Moore appears to be such an appalling jerk, as he does have genuine writing talent and comedic sense.
A little tedious yet still interesting.......2006-08-23
This book might be of interest to average or below-average cyclists who wonder what it would be like to attempt one of the grandest sport tours on the planet. The book is both hilarious and frustrating; in the course of the story, Moore goes from likeable athlete wanna-be to pompous jerk, and it is the honestly with which he recorded his behaviours--toward the people of France, a friend who arrives to accompany him through the Alps, even his family at times--that makes the story believable yet tedious. He effectively weaves the more interesting points in the history of the Tour into his travelogue, and his near-obsession with Tom Simpson brings a heartfelt honesty to the book that thankfully balances the cheating he employs to finish.
Non-British readers may at times find it difficult to follow Moore's writing style and references, and while the humor is clearly a selling point it is a bit overblown. In addition, Moore gives the distinct impression that he is not an athlete of any sort, yet the sheer speed and number of miles he claims to have covered each day would suggest otherwise. It seems as if he wanted to give the impression that he was an out-of-shape, average bloke attempting an enormous feat; he must have been fitter than he lets on, or else he may have fudged the numbers a bit and exaggerated his daily tally. Overall, this is an interesting and for the most part a very funny read, and it does what travel writing should: makes the reader wish s/he were there, too.
Engaging travelogue-torture test.......2005-11-01
I think Tim Moore is a very funny writer, and this book is quite engaging, and thoroughly enjoyable. Mr. Moore takes it upon himself to follow the exact 2000 Tour de France route. Much hilarity ensues. As a fellow cyclist, I'm deeply impressed by his ability to climb the fearsome cols of Galibier and Ventoux; I suspect he wasn't as ill-trained as he claims. That aside, the history of the Tour de France is covered quite well here, along with rotten hotel rooms, excruciating pain, abdominal mishaps, and frank surprise at his ability to finish the route. I give this four stars only because I think his "Travels with a Donkey" is superior. This is a fun read for anyone with a passing interest in cycling, road racing, and France.
Whining one's way through the Tour de France.......2005-09-23
While a light and overall enjoyable read, there's rather too much of the age-old English ambivalence, if not outright antipathy, towards everything French. It's amusing at first, but a little goes a long way -- in this case all the way to the end of the book. One begins to wonder if the author really enjoyed this epic ride, or if it wasn't overshadowed by an endless parade of disagreeable people and situations encountered at every stage. A bit more elation, a bit less suffering, would have made for a better read.
Book Description
Written by highly acclaimed historian Gary B. Nash, this book presents an interpretive account of the interactions between Native Americans, African Americans, and Euroamericans during the colonial and revolutionary eras. It reveals the crucial interconnections between North America's many peoples– illustrating the ease of their interactions in the first two centuries of European and African presence–to develop a fuller, deeper understanding of the nation's underpinnings.
Book Description
With its radical ideology and effective tactics, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the cutting edge of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. This sympathetic yet even-handed book records for the first time the complete story of SNCC's evolution, of its successes and its difficulties in the ongoing struggle to end white repression.
At its birth, SNCC was composed of black college students who shared an ideology of moral radicalism. This ideology, with its emphasis on nonviolence, challenged Southern segregation. SNCC students were the earliest civil rights fighters of the Second Reconstruction. They conducted sit-ins at lunch counters, spearheaded the freedom rides, and organized voter registration, which shook white complacency and awakened black political consciousness. In the process, Carson shows, SNCC changed from a group that endorsed white middle-class values to one that questioned the basic assumptions of liberal ideology and raised the fist for black power. Indeed, SNCC's radical and penetrating analysis of the American power structure reached beyond the black community to help spark wider social protests of the 1960s, such as the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Carson's history of SNCC goes behind the scene to determine why the group's ideological evolution was accompanied by bitter power struggles within the organization. Using interviews, transcripts of meetings, unpublished position papers, and recently released FBI documents, he reveals how a radical group is subject to enormous, often divisive pressures as it fights the difficult battle for social change.
Customer Reviews:
What would the US be like without them?.......2002-11-16
This book is a great account of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, which was started in 1960 in regard to Segregation on Americas buses and in the Woolworth dining room. This book leaves out no account, and anyone who had anything to do with the movement and SNCC is mentioned in this book. Carson went all out, and I think this book should be required reading in every Civil Rights History course.
Great analysis of black empowerment.......2001-01-19
This book traces the rise and fall of SNCC:the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. At the time Carson wrote it, it was one of the few books on the Civil Rights Movement that didn't focus on Martin Luther King and SCLC, and as such provided a welcome addition, even corrective, to the mainstream narrative of the movement. It is also a brilliant analysis of the dynamics of a reform movement and the tensions between leader centered and group centered styles of leadership. The analysis of Bob Moses and his approach to grass roots empowerment is right on target and provides a whole new way for thinking about Freedom Summer and organizing in Mississippi. This book is not for the fainthearted--its academic prose is dense at times and details can be a little confusing for those unfamiliar with SNCC personnel, hence four stars and not five. Nonetheless, it's worth taking time with, and I assign this book regularly for upper level directed studies and recommend it to students for research papers. Whether or not SNCC's achievements were compromised by the antics of former members in the 80s and 90s, Carson's book is a great analysis of its formation, tactics, and dissolution.
SNCC Comes Full Circle.......1999-04-26
In Struggle recounts the progression of the SNCC from its early days of assimilationism and conventional middle class values, through its radical and militant period, its separatist and provocative period, and then back again into conventionalism and low-level activism. Many SNCC members during its radical period, debated whether the victim should become the executioner. Instead, the victim becomes part of the system, such as Marion Barry's accession to the mayor's office in Washington, D.C. And the idealism of the movement went out the window as well, when in the 1990s much more mundane pursuits took over Barry's life, including crack cocaine and prostitutes. One reason for the winding-down of the SNCC may stem from the conditions that spawned it. Under an oppressive system of the Jim Crow South, the SNCC had a common enemy to fight, and clear goals to achieve. Once the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been passed, and subsequent advances were made at the legislative level, the goals and mission became less clear and less defined. Now that so much had been achieved, the SNCC began to fight amongst itself as each faction attempted to secure ever smaller slices of the revolutionary pie. The cautious liberalism of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations proved fatal to the more ambitious fervor of the SNCC; the legislation acted almost as a safety valve, relieving the pressure that had encouraged the formation of the SNCC. SNCC students were, in their heyday, overcompensating for all the resentment they had from being historically marginalized and held down. SNCC members had discovered their voice and used it passionately, but once people started listening to them, SNCC found itself in the position of not knowing what to say.
Book Description
Through courtroom dramas from 1865 to 1920, Recasting American Liberty offers a dramatic reconsideration of the critical role railroads, and their urban counterpart, streetcars, played in transforming the conditions of individual liberty at the dawn of the 20th century. The three-part narrative, focusing on the law of accidental injury, nervous shock, and racial segregation in public transit, captures Americans' journey from a cultural and legal ethos celebrating manly independence and autonomy to one that recognized and sought to protect the individual against the corporate power, modern technology and modern urban space.
Customer Reviews:
Review of Recasting American Liberty (E.J. Chaput).......2007-01-24
With the keen judgment for which she is so well known within law and society circles, Barbara Young Welke has produced a compelling and engaging work centering on the restructuring of the notions of liberty in the American polity from the end of the Civil War to the Progressive Era that will attract a wide audience. "The era of steadfast commitment to American ingenuity and independence," according to Welke, "was replaced by the era of ordered liberty, liberty assured through restraint" (4). It was through the injuries that women often suffered alighting from trains and streetcars that "the transition from an outmoded ethos of a nation of free men to one that recognized the reality of human vulnerability" occurred (124). Those familiar with her seminal articles, "When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855-1914" (winner of the ASLH Surrency Prize) and "Unreasonable Women: Gender and the Law of Accidental Injury, 1870-1920" will be deeply satisfied with this monograph that couples her earlier analysis of gender, race, and class with the development of the modern regulatory movement. Thoughtfully argued and gracefully written, Recasting American Liberty is a valuable contribution to the Cambridge University Press Historical Studies in American Law and Society series which includes works from many outstanding scholars such as Tony Freyer, Andrew Cohen, Michael Grossberg, and David Rabban. Welke's analysis forces the historical community to reconsider the ordering of social relations, institutions, individual identity, and power arrangements within American society. As Welke notes, "Railroads and streetcars transformed accidental injury from unconnected, individual events into a shared American experience, a shared discourse of injury, suffering, and human vulnerability" (80). Welke brings historical depth and philosophical perspective to her narrative and, as a result, truly furthers the understanding of the law of accidental injury, the law of nervous shock, and the law of racial segregation. The traditional subsidy and economic theories of tort law that dominate legal literature say little about "whether individual liberty was increased or decreased by the methods companies adopted to prevent alighting injuries: enclosed cars, gates, pneumatic doors, and limited, marked stops" (105). Recasting American Liberty thoroughly enriches the literature surrounding the impact of the railroads on American society.
Average customer rating:
- Well Researched History of the "Republic" of Jones
- The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War
|
The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War
Victoria E. Bynum
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0807826367
Release Date: 2000-12-08 |
Book Description
Between late 1863 and mid-1864, an armed band of Confederate deserters battled Confederate cavalry in the Piney Woods region of Jones County, Mississippi. Calling themselves the Knight Company after their captain, Newton Knight, they set up headquarters in the swamps of the Leaf River, where, legend has it, they declared the Free State of Jones.
The story of the Jones County rebellion is well known among Mississippians, and debate over whether the county actually seceded from the state during the war has smoldered for more than a century. Adding further controversy to the legend is the story of Newt Knight's interracial romance with his wartime accomplice, Rachel, a slave. From their relationship there developed a mixed-race community that endured long after the Civil War had ended, and the ambiguous racial identity of their descendants confounded the rules of segregated Mississippi well into the twentieth century.
Victoria Bynum traces the origins and legacy of the Jones County uprising from the American Revolution to the modern civil rights movement. In bridging the gap between the legendary and the real Free State of Jones, she shows how the legend--what was told, what was embellished, and what was left out--reveals a great deal about the South's transition from slavery to segregation; the racial, gender, and class politics of the period; and the contingent nature of history and memory.
Customer Reviews:
Well Researched History of the "Republic" of Jones.......2002-08-06
I have always wondered exactly what happened in Jones County, Mississippi, during the recent unpleasantness, and after reading The Free State of Jones, now I know. Often billed as the county that seceded from the Confederacy, the author provides an excellent local history of Southwest Mississippi from the early 1800s to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. The author begins with the immigrants to Mississippi territory, mainly from the Carolinas. Excellent maps of migration routes and the early counties in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi are included. During the Civil War, a band of 100 or so deserters from Confederate military service hid in Jones County, where the soil did not promote large commercial planting, and few individuals owned slaves. While there was never a formal act of secession from the Confederacy by the county government of Jones, the band of deserters did fight fourteen skirmishes with Confederate troops between 1863 and 1865, and many locals were sympathethic, either because they were relatives, they didn't like the relatively strong central Confederate government, or Confederate troops misbehaved by stealing from their small farms. Many of the band deserted because the felt the war was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight"--especially after the "20 Negro Law" was passed exempting slaveowners with 20 or more slaves from Confederate military service. The author also goes into the mixed racial family of the leader of the band of deserters, Newt Knight, who survived until 1922. There are few places to read the details of this interesting micro-history within the Confederacy. Ms. Bynum's thoroughly researched book encompasses the whole story, and is worth the effort of delving into such a detailed local history.
The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War.......2001-10-02
Ms. Bynum provides a well researched and written account of the lifestyles and circumstandes of the people of Jones County, MS, leading up to the Civil War. Her research takes us back into North and South Carolina, prior to 1800, and follows the families of early Jones County settlers. She goes into details, explaining the different economic, cultural, and religious factors that served to mold the life of the everyday Jones County citizen.
The Free State of Mississippi... is a must read for anyone whith roots in Jones Co., MS, as well as for anyone who is simply interested in deep South History.
Book Description
By examining how ordinary Virginia citizens grappled with the vexing problem of slavery in a society dedicated to universal liberty, Eva Sheppard Wolf broadens our understanding of such important concepts as freedom, slavery, emancipation, and race in the early years of the American republic. She frames her study around the moment between slavery and liberty—emancipation—shedding new light on the complicated relations between whites and blacks in a slave society. Wolf argues that during the post-Revolutionary period, white Virginians understood both liberty and slavery to be racial concepts more than political ideas. Through an in-depth analysis of archival records, particularly those dealing with manumission between 1782 and 1806, she reveals how these entrenched beliefs shaped both thought and behavior. In spite of qualms about slavery, white Virginians repeatedly demonstrated their unwillingness to abolish the institution. The manumission law of 1782 eased restrictions on individual emancipation and made possible the liberation of thousands, but Wolf discovers that far fewer slaves were freed in Virginia than previously thought. Those who were emancipated posed a disturbing social, political, and even moral problem in the minds of whites. Where would ex-slaves fit in a society that could not conceive of black liberty? As Wolf points out, even those few white Virginians who proffered emancipation plans always suggested sending freed slaves to some other place. Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 led to a public debate over ending slavery, after which discussions of emancipation in the Old Dominion largely disappeared as the eastern slaveholding elite tightened its grip on political power in the state. This well-informed and carefully crafted book outlines important and heretofore unexamined changes in whites' views of blacks and liberty in the new nation. By linking the Revolutionary and antebellum eras, it shows how white attitudes hardened during the half-century that followed the declaration that "all men are created equal." AUTHOR BIO: Eva Sheppard Wolf is an assistant professor of history at San Francisco State University.
Book Description
In 1804 French Saint-Domingue became the independent nation of Haiti after the only successful slave uprising in world history. When the Haitian Revolution broke out, the colony was home to the largest and wealthiest free population of African descent in the New World. Before Haiti explains the origins of this free colored class, exposes the ways its members both supported and challenged slavery, and examines how they created their own New World identity in the years from 1760 to 1804.
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- Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
- Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children
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