Mortimer and the Witches

Mortimer and the Witches

Author: Marie Carter

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2024-03-05

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1531506267

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The neglected histories of 19th-century NYC’s maligned working-class fortune tellers and the man who set out to discredit them Under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., humor writer Mortimer Thomson went undercover to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City’s tenements and slums. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified. In Mortimer and the Witches, author Marie Carter examines the lives of these marginalized fortune tellers while also detailing Mortimer Thomson’s peculiar and complicated biography. Living primarily in the poor section of the Lower East Side, nineteenth-century fortune tellers offered their clients answers to all questions in astrology, love, and law matters. They promised to cure ailments. They spoke of loved ones from beyond the grave. Yet Doesticks saw them as the worst of the worst evil-doers. His investigative reporting aimed to stop unsuspecting young women from seeking the corrupt soothsaying advice of these so-called clairvoyants and to expose the absurd and woefully inaccurate predictions of these “witches.” Marie Carter views these stories of working-class, immigrant women with more depth than Doesticks’s mocking articles would allow. In her analysis and discussion, she presents them as three-dimensional figures rather than the caricatures Doesticks made them out to be. What other professions at that time allowed women the kind of autonomy afforded by fortune-telling? Their eager customers, many of whom were newly arrived immigrants trying to navigate life in a new country, weren’t as naive and gullible as Doesticks made them out to be. They were often in need of guidance, seeking out the advice of someone who had life experience to offer or simply enjoying the entertainment and attention. Mortimer and the Witches offers new insight into the neglected histories of working-class fortune tellers and the creative ways that they tried to make a living when options were limited for them.


Watching Slavery

Watching Slavery

Author: Joe Lockard

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780820495415

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How did witnesses of slavery relate their experiences and what effect did their reports have? This book examines travel accounts, fictions, poetry, and legal texts to analyze direct and indirect encounters with slavery in the antebellum United States. It discusses the rhetorical politics of British and American, and black and white, observations of slavery. The discussion raises critical questions about the role of witness and its link with political action, both in antebellum and contemporary America.


Distant freedom

Distant freedom

Author: Andrew Pearson

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2016-03-31

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1781383855

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This book is a study of the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena and its role in the abolition of the slave trade.


The American Slave Coast

The American Slave Coast

Author: Ned Sublette

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2015-10-01

Total Pages: 621

ISBN-13: 161374823X

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American Book Award Winner 2016 The American Slave Coast offers a provocative vision of US history from earliest colonial times through emancipation that presents even the most familiar events and figures in a revealing new light. Authors Ned and Constance Sublette tell the brutal story of how the slavery industry made the reproductive labor of the people it referred to as "breeding women" essential to the young country's expansion. Captive African Americans in the slave nation were not only laborers, but merchandise and collateral all at once. In a land without silver, gold, or trustworthy paper money, their children and their children's children into perpetuity were used as human savings accounts that functioned as the basis of money and credit in a market premised on the continual expansion of slavery. Slaveowners collected interest in the form of newborns, who had a cash value at birth and whose mothers had no legal right to say no to forced mating. This gripping narrative is driven by the power struggle between the elites of Virginia, the slave-raising "mother of slavery," and South Carolina, the massive importer of Africans—a conflict that was central to American politics from the making of the Constitution through the debacle of the Confederacy. Virginia slaveowners won a major victory when Thomas Jefferson's 1808 prohibition of the African slave trade protected the domestic slave markets for slave-breeding. The interstate slave trade exploded in Mississippi during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, drove the US expansion into Texas, and powered attempts to take over Cuba and other parts of Latin America, until a disaffected South Carolina spearheaded the drive to secession and war, forcing the Virginians to secede or lose their slave-breeding industry. Filled with surprising facts, fascinating incidents, and startling portraits of the people who made, endured, and resisted the slave-breeding industry, The American Slave Coast culminates in the revolutionary Emancipation Proclamation, which at last decommissioned the capitalized womb and armed the African Americans to fight for their freedom.


The Claims of Kinfolk

The Claims of Kinfolk

Author: Dylan C. Penningroth

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780807854761

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Penningroth uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African-American family and community life from the heyday of plantation slavery to the "freedom generation" of the 1870s.


Slave Breeding

Slave Breeding

Author: Gregory D. Smithers

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0813059151

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For over two centuries, the topic of slave breeding has occupied a controversial place in the master narrative of American history. From nineteenth-century abolitionists to twentieth-century filmmakers and artists, Americans have debated whether slave owners deliberately and coercively manipulated the sexual practices and marital status of enslaved African Americans to reproduce new generations of slaves for profit. In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices. He argues that while social and economic historians have downplayed the significance of slave breeding, African Americans have refused to forget the violence and sexual coercion associated with the plantation South. By placing African American histories and memories of slave breeding within the larger context of America’s history of racial and gender discrimination, Smithers sheds much-needed light on African American collective memory, racialized perceptions of fragile black families, and the long history of racially motivated violence against men, women, and children of color.


I Will Wear No Chain!

I Will Wear No Chain!

Author: Christopher B. Booker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2000-09-30

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0313095124

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This volume traces the social history of African American men from the days of slavery to the present, focusing on their achievements, their changing image, and their role in American society. The author places the contemporary issue of Black men's disproportionate involvement with criminal justice within its social and historical context, while analyzing the most significant movements aiming to improve the status of Blacks in our society. The book's main thesis is that an ever-changing, yet ever-present, process of criminalization has entrapped Black men throughout history, thus creating a major barrier to their collective development. The topics discussed include the role of Blacks in the Civil War, Booker T. Washington, the Civil Rights movement, and the Million Man March.