Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (Classic Reprint)

Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (Classic Reprint)

Author: Honorary Professor of Philosophy and Member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization James Williams

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-05-18

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 9780259525363

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Excerpt from Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama The cardinal principle of slavery, that a. Slave is not to be ranked among sentient beings, but among things, as afi' article of property, a chattel personal, obtains as undoubted law, in all the slave states. (judge Stroud's sketch of Slave Laws, p. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.


Narrative of James Williams

Narrative of James Williams

Author: James Williams

Publisher:

Published: 1837

Total Pages: 109

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book contains the memoir of James Williams, an American slave who was for several years a driver on a cotton plantation in Alabama.


Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave

Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave

Author: Hank Trent

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0807151033

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The American Anti-Slavery Society originally published Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave in 1838 to much fanfare, describing it as a rare slave autobiography. Soon thereafter, however, southerners challenged the authenticity of the work and the society retracted it. Abolitionists at the time were unable to defend the book; and, until now, historians could not verify Williams's identity or find the Alabama slave owners he named in the book. As a result, most scholars characterized the author as a fraud, perhaps never even a slave, or at least not under the circumstances described in the book. In this annotated edition of Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Hank Trent provides newly discovered biographical information about the true author of the book -- an African American man enslaved in Alabama and Virginia. Trent identifies Williams's owners in those states as well as in Maryland and Louisiana. He explains how Williams escaped from slavery and then altered his life story to throw investigators off his track. Through meticulous and extensive research, Trent also reveals unknown details of James Williams's real life, drawing upon runaway ads, court cases, census records, and estate inventories never before linked to him or to the narrative. In the end, Trent proves that the author of the book was truly an enslaved man, albeit one who wrote a romanticized, fictionalized story based on his real life, which proved even more complex and remarkable than the story he told.


In the Shadow of the Gallows

In the Shadow of the Gallows

Author: Jeannine Marie DeLombard

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-07-24

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0812206339

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From Puritan Execution Day rituals to gangsta rap, the black criminal has been an enduring presence in American culture. To understand why, Jeannine Marie DeLombard insists, we must set aside the lenses of pathology and persecution and instead view the African American felon from the far more revealing perspectives of publicity and personhood. When the Supreme Court declared in Dred Scott that African Americans have "no rights which the white man was bound to respect," it overlooked the right to due process, which ensured that black offenders—even slaves—appeared as persons in the eyes of the law. In the familiar account of African Americans' historical shift "from plantation to prison," we have forgotten how, for a century before the Civil War, state punishment affirmed black political membership in the breach, while a thriving popular crime literature provided early America's best-known models of individual black selfhood. Before there was the slave narrative, there was the criminal confession. Placing the black condemned at the forefront of the African American canon allows us to see how a later generation of enslaved activists—most notably, Frederick Douglass—could marshal the public presence and civic authority necessary to fashion themselves as eligible citizens. At the same time, in an era when abolitionists were charging Americans with the national crime of "manstealing," a racialized sense of culpability became equally central to white civic identity. What, for African Americans, is the legacy of a citizenship grounded in culpable personhood? For white Americans, must membership in a nation built on race slavery always betoken guilt? In the Shadow of the Gallows reads classics by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, George Lippard, and Edward Everett Hale alongside execution sermons, criminal confessions, trial transcripts, philosophical treatises, and political polemics to address fundamental questions about race, responsibility, and American civic belonging.


Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South

Author: David Stefan Doddington

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-07-12

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1108334997

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South demonstrates the significance of internal divisions, comparison, and conflict in shaping gender and status in slave communities of the American South. David Stefan Doddington seeks to move beyond unilateral discussions of slave masculinity, and instead demonstrates how the repressions of slavery were both personal and political. Rather than automatically support one another against an emasculatory white society, Doddington explores how enslaved people negotiated identities in relation to one another, through comparisons between men and different forms of manhood held up for judgment. An examination of the framework in which enslaved people crafted identities demonstrates the fluidity of gender as a social and cultural phenomenon that defied monolithic models of black masculinity, solidarity, and victimization. Focusing on work, authority, honor, sex, leisure, and violence, this book is a full-length treatment of the idea of 'masculinity' among slave communities of the Old South.


Affect and Power

Affect and Power

Author: David J. Libby

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9781578067695

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan published his groundbreaking work White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and opened up new avenues for thinking about sex, slavery, race, and religion in American culture. Over the course of a forty-year career at the University of California and the University of Mississippi, he continued to write about these issues and to train others to think in new ways about interactions of race, gender, faith, and power. Written by former students of Jordan, these essays are a tribute to the career of one of America's great thinkers and perhaps the most influential American historian of his generation. The book visits historical locales from Puritan New England and French Louisiana to nineteenth-century New York and Mississippi, all the way to Harlem swing clubs and college campuses in the twentieth century. In the process, authors listen to the voices of abolitionists and white supremacists, preachers and politicos, white farm women and black sorority sisters, slaves, and jazz musicians. Each essay represents an important contribution to the collection's larger themes and at the same time illustrates the impact Jordan exerted on the scholarly life of each author. Collectively, these pieces demonstrate the attentiveness to detail and sensitivity to sources that are hallmarks of Jordan's own work. David J. Libby, San Antonio, Texas, is the author of Slavery and Frontier Mississippi: 1720-1835 (University Press of Mississippi). Paul Spickard, Santa Barbara, California, is the co-editor of Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence and the author of Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. Susan Ditto, Oxford, Mississippi, is the associate editor of Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.


Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Author: Frederick Douglass

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2001-02-08

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0300163398

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The powerful story of slavery that has become a classic of American autobiography, in an authoritative edition “This edition is the most valuable teaching tool on slavery and abolition available today. It is exceptional.”—Nancy Hewitt, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Rutgers University The autobiography of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, is widely regarded as a classic of American nineteenth-century history, of African-American studies, and of literature. In 1845, just seven years after his escape from slavery, the young Douglass published this powerful account of his life as a slave and his triumph over oppression. The book, which marked the beginning of Douglass’s career as an impassioned writer, journalist, and orator for the abolitionist cause, reveals the terrors he faced as a slave, the brutalities of his owners and overseers, and his harrowing escape to the North. This edition of the book, based on the authoritative text that appears in Yale University Press’s multivolume edition of the Frederick Douglass Papers, is the only edition of Douglass’s Narrative designated as an Approved Text by the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions. It includes a chronology of Douglass’s life, a thorough introduction by the eminent Douglass scholar John Blassingame, historical notes, and reader responses to the first edition of 1845. “None so dramatically as Douglass integrated both the horror and the great quest of the African-American experience into the deep stream of American autobiography. He advanced and extended that tradition and is rightfully designated one of its greatest practitioners.”—John W. Blassingame, from the introduction