A Narrative of Events of the Life of J. H. Banks, an Escaped Slave, from the Cotton State, Alabama, in America (Dodo Press)

A Narrative of Events of the Life of J. H. Banks, an Escaped Slave, from the Cotton State, Alabama, in America (Dodo Press)

Author: J. W. C. Pennington

Publisher:

Published: 2009-12

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 9781409985631

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James William Charles Pennington (1809-1870) was an African American orator, minister, and abolitionist. Pennington was born a slave in Washington County, Maryland. After escaping to Littlestown, Pennsylvania, Pennington moved to New York in 1828. A blacksmith by trade, he settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and audited classes at Yale Divinity School from 1834 to 1839, becoming the first black man to attend classes at Yale. He was subsequently ordained and became a teacher, abolitionist, and author. He wrote The Origin and History of the Colored People in 1841, which has been called the first history of African Americans, and a slave narrative in 1850, The Fugitive Blacksmith. In 1849 the University of Heidelberg awarded him an honorary doctorate of divinity.


The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

Author: Daina Ramey Berry

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2017-01-24

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0807047635

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This “must-read for anyone interested in understanding American history” reframes how we think about slavery, reparations, 19th-century medical education—and the value of life and death (Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton). “A brilliant resurrection of the forgotten people who gave their lives to build our country.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than 10 years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, 19th-century medical education, and the value of life and death.


Black Shakespeare

Black Shakespeare

Author: Ian Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-09-29

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1009224123

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Race may dominate everyday speech, media headlines and public policy, yet still questions of racialized blackness and whiteness in Shakespeare are resisted. In his compelling new book Ian Smith addresses the influence of systemic whiteness on the interpretation of Shakespeare's plays. This far-reaching study shows that significant parts of Shakespeare's texts have been elided, misconstrued or otherwise rendered invisible by readers who have ignored the presence of race in early modern England. Bringing the Black American intellectual tradition into fruitful dialogue with European thought, this urgent interdisciplinary work offers a deep, revealing and incisive analysis of individual plays, including Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. Demonstrating how racial illiteracy inhibits critical practice, Ian Smith provides a necessary anti-racist alternative that will transform the way you read Shakespeare.


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.


Slavery on Trial

Slavery on Trial

Author: Jeannine Marie DeLombard

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0807887730

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America's legal consciousness was high during the era that saw the imprisonment of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, the execution of slave revolutionary Nat Turner, and the hangings of John Brown and his Harpers Ferry co-conspirators. Jeannine Marie DeLombard examines how debates over slavery in the three decades before the Civil War employed legal language to "try" the case for slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media. Discussing autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, a scandal narrative about Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist speech by Henry David Thoreau, sentimental fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a proslavery novel by William MacCreary Burwell, DeLombard argues that American literature of the era cannot be fully understood without an appreciation for the slavery debate in the courts and in print. Combining legal, literary, and book history approaches, Slavery on Trial provides a refreshing alternative to the official perspectives offered by the nation's founding documents, legal treatises, statutes, and judicial decisions. DeLombard invites us to view the intersection of slavery and law as so many antebellum Americans did--through the lens of popular print culture.


James W.C. Pennington

James W.C. Pennington

Author: Herman E. Thomas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-23

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1317730631

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The story of James W.C. Pennington who was a former slave, then a Yale scholar, minister, and international leader of the Antebellum abolitionist movement. He escaped from slavery aged 19 in 1827 and soon became one of the leading voices against slavery before the Civil War. In 1837 he was ordained as a priest after studying at Yale and was soon traveling all over the world as an anti-slavery advocate.


Divided Hearts

Divided Hearts

Author: Richard J. M. Blackett

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2000-12-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780807126455

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Divided Hearts explores the passionate political strife that raged in Britain as a result of the American Civil War. Moving beyond Mary Ellison's 1972 landmark regional study of Lancashire cotton workers' reactions, R. J. M. Blackett opens the subject to a new, wider transatlantic context of influence and undertakes a deftly researched and written sociological, intellectual, and political examination of who in Britain supported the Union, who the Confederacy, and why. The American Civil War had a profound effect on Britain's political culture; no other event during that period -- not in Poland, Hungary, Italy, or British colonies -- compared. Blackett argues that the traditional historiographical assessments of British partisanship along class and economic lines must be reevaluated in light of the nature and changing contours of transatlantic abolitionist connections, the ways in which nationalism framed the debate, and the effect that race -- among other issues -- exerted over the British public's perception of conditions in America. Divided Hearts presents a compelling and innovative thesis, one sure to engage scholars in many fields of history.


Buried Lives

Buried Lives

Author: Michele Lise Tarter

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0820341207

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Buried Lives offers the first critical examination of the experience of imprisonment in early America. These interdisciplinary essays investigate several carceral institutions to show how confinement shaped identity, politics, and the social imaginary both in the colonies and in the new nation. The historians and literary scholars included in this volume offer a complement and corrective to conventional understandings of incarceration that privilege the intentions of those in power over the experiences of prisoners. Considering such varied settings as jails, penitentiaries, almshouses, workhouses, floating prison ships, and plantations, the contributors reconstruct the struggles of people imprisoned in locations from Antigua to Boston. The essays draw upon a rich array of archival sources from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War, including warden logs, petitions, execution sermons, physicians' clinical notes, private letters, newspaper articles, runaway slave advertisements, and legal documents. Through the voices, bodies, and texts of the incarcerated, Buried Lives reveals the largely ignored experiences of inmates who contested their subjection to regimes of power.


Civil Wars, Civil Beings, and Civil Rights in Alabama's Black Belt

Civil Wars, Civil Beings, and Civil Rights in Alabama's Black Belt

Author: Bertis D. English

Publisher: University Alabama Press

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 0817320695

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Reconstruction politics and race relations between freed blacks and the white establishment in Perry County, Alabama In his fascinating, in-depth study, Bertis D. English analyzes why Perry County, situated in the heart of a violence-prone subregion of Alabama, enjoyed more peaceful race relations and less bloodshed than several neighboring counties. Choosing an atypical locality as central to his study, English raises questions about factors affecting ethnic disturbances in the Black Belt and elsewhere in Alabama. He also uses Perry County, which he deems an anomalous county, to caution against the tendency of some scholars to make sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregions. English contends Perry County was a relatively tranquil place with a set of extremely influential African American businessmen, clergy, politicians, and other leaders during Reconstruction. Together with egalitarian or opportunistic white citizens, they headed a successful campaign for black agency and biracial cooperation that few counties in Alabama matched. English also illustrates how a significant number of educational institutions, a high density of African American residents, and an unusually organized and informed African American population were essential factors in forming Perry County’s character. He likewise traces the development of religion in Perry, the nineteenth-century Baptist capital of Alabama, and the emergence of civil rights in Perry, an underemphasized center of activism during the twentieth century. This well-researched and comprehensive volume illuminates Perry County’s history from the various perspectives of its black, interracial, and white inhabitants, amplifying their own voices in a novel way. The narrative includes rich personal details about ordinary and affluent people, both free and unfree, creating a distinctive resource that will be useful to scholars as well as a reference that will serve the needs of students and general readers.