USEM HIST 21791/AFST 13184: Slavery and Freedom in the United States

Women and Slavery offers readers an opportunity to examine the establishment, growth, and evolution of slavery in the United States as it impacted women-enslaved and free, African American and white, wealthy and poor, northern and southern. The primary documents-including newspaper articles, broadsides, cartoons, pamphlets, speeches, photographs, memoirs, and editorials-are organized thematically and represent cultural, political, religious, economic, and social perspectives on this dark and complex period in American history.

Slavery remains one of the United States' most troubling failings and its complexities have shaped American ideas about race, economics, politics, and the press since the first days of settlement. Brian Gabrial's The Press and Slavery in America, 1791-1859 examines those intersections at times when the nation and the institution of slavery were most stressed, namely when slavesrevolted or conspired to revolt. Such events frightened white, slave-owning society to its core and forced public discussions about slavery at times when supporters of the peculiar institution preferred them to be silent. Gabrial closely reads the mainstream press during the antebellum years, identifying shifts in public opinion about slavery and changes in popular constructions of slaves and other black Americans, a group voiceless and nearly invisible in the nation's major newspapers. He reveals how political intransigence rooted in racism and economics set the country on a perilous trajectory toward rebellion and self-destruction. This volume examines news accounts of five major slave rebellions or conspiracies: Gabriel Prosser's 1800 Virginia slave conspiracy; the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt; Denmark Vesey's 1822 slave conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina; Nat Turner's 1831 Southampton County, Virginia, slave revolt; and John Brown's 1859 Harper's Ferry raid. Gabrial situates these stories within a historical and contextual framework that juxtaposes the transformation of the press into a powerful mass media with the growing politicaldivide over slavery, illustrating how two American cultures, both asserting claims to founding America, devolved into enemies over slavery. What the nineteenth century press reveals in this book are discourses--ways of thinking and expression--that have retained resonance in contemporary race relations and American politics. They connect to ideas about the press and technology, changing journalistic practice, and, importantly, the destruction wrought by the dysfunction of the nation's political parties.

Focusing on slave narratives from the Atlantic world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this interdisciplinary collection of essays suggests the importance--even the necessity--of looking beyond the iconic and ubiquitous works of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. In granting sustained critical attention to writers such as Briton Hammon, Omar Ibn Said, Juan Francisco Manzano, Nat Turner, and Venture Smith, among others, this book makes a crucial contribution not only to scholarship on the slave narrative but also to our understanding of early African American and Black Atlantic literature. The essays explore the social and cultural contexts, the aesthetic and rhetorical techniques, and the political and ideological features of these noncanonical texts. By concentrating on earlier slave narratives not only from the United States but from the Caribbean, South America, and Latin America as well, the volume highlights the inherent transnationality of the genre, illuminating its complex cultural origins and global circulation.

The era from 1830 to 1910 witnessed massive transformations in how people lived, worked, thought about themselves, and struggled to live and thrive. It also witnessed the birth of economic and political institutions that still shape our world. America's population grew more than ten-fold. The country expanded to the Pacific coast and then out into the Pacific itself. Civil warfare erupted. Three centuries of slavery ended. Native peoples were suppressed and remanded to reservations. Massive waves of immigrants from Europe and Asia arrived. From an agricultural society with a weak central government, the US became an urban and industrial society in which government assumed a greater and greater role in the framing of social and economic life. A Nation Without Borders's signature achievement is to place this history in a wholly new light, by capturing the tensions and contradictions between nation and empire. His new interpretations include the fact that slavery was national not sectional, that Jim Crow racism initially emerged in the Northeast and Midwest, that "sectionalism" was less a fact of politics than an important political construct in the battle over slavery's future, and that the principle struggle of the period was not between the North and South but rather between the Northeast and the Mississippi Valley for control of the continent and hemisphere. Hahn's strikingly original thesis resets the familiar framework of that of a country expanding from colony. He shows how, the United States had, from its colonial origins and birth as a union, significant imperial ambitions on the continent and in the hemisphere, and that the United States only became a nation, a nation-state - as many others did - in the midst of a massive political and military struggle in the 1860s. A nation is understood to have clearly defined borders, which delineate sovereignty and belonging. Empires, though they may expand and contract, lack real borders; they are more about vectors, claims, and alliances. By 1910, as the "long" nineteenth century came to a close, the United States stood as one of the most formidable empires on the globe.