The “unforgettable” novel from the Newbery Medal–winning author tells the true story of a runaway slave whose capture and trial set off abolitionist riots (Kirkus Reviews). Anthony Burns is a runaway slave who has just started to build a life for himself in Boston. Then his former owner comes to town to collect him. Anthony won’t go willingly, though, and people across the city step forward to make sure he’s not taken. Based on the true story of a man who stood up against the Fugitive Slave Law, Hamilton’s gripping account follows the battle in the streets and in the courts to keep Burns a citizen of Boston—a battle that is the prelude to the nation’s bloody Civil War.
Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston--and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect, it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation. In a searching cultural analysis, Albert J. von Frank draws us into the drama and the consequences of the case. He introduces the individuals who contended over the fate of the barely literate twenty-year-old runaway slave--figures as famous as Richard Henry Dana Jr., the defense attorney, as colorful as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Bronson Alcott, who led a mob against the courthouse where Burns was held, and as intriguing as Moncure Conway, the Virginia-born abolitionist who spied on Burns's master. The story is one of desperate acts, even murder--a special deputy slain at the courthouse door--but it is also steeped in ideas. Von Frank links the deeds and rhetoric surrounding the Burns case to New England Transcendentalism, principally that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His book is thus also a study of how ideas relate to social change, exemplified in the art and expression of Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, and others. Situated at a politically critical moment--with the Whig party collapsing and the Republican arising, with provocations and ever hotter rhetoric intensifying regional tensions--the case of Anthony Burns appears here as the most important fugitive slave case in American history. A stirring work of intellectual and cultural history, this book shows how the Burns affair brought slavery home to the people of Boston and brought the nation that much closer to the Civil War.
Chronicles the case of a runaway slave who was tracked to Boston by his owner. Compellingly details the struggle over his fate and how that became a focal point for national controversy. Reveals how the case became one of the most dramatic and widely publicized events in the long-running conflict over the issue of fugitive slaves.
Burns was a slave who escaped to Boston in 1854, was arrested at the instigation of his owner, and whose trial caused a furor between abolitionists and those determined to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts.
Anthony Burns was a Baptist preacher and fugitive slave who in 1850 was arrested in Boston & eventually returned to his native Virginia despite the protests of abolitionists. This volume portrays the explosive atmosphere in the United States in the years immediately before the civil war.
Today's modern Rails applications have lots of moving parts. Make sure your next production deployment goes smoothly with this hands-on book, which guides you through the entire production process. You'll set up scripts to install and configure all the software your servers need, including your application code. Once you're in production, you'll learn how to set up systems to monitor your application's health, gather metrics so you can stop problems before they start, and fix things when they go wrong.Deploying Rails takes you on a expertly guided tour of the current best practices in Rails deployment and management. You'll find in-depth explanations on effectively running a Rails app by leveraging popular open source tools such as Puppet, Capistrano, and Vagrant. Then you'll go beyond deployment and learn how to use Ganglia and Nagios to monitor your application's health and gather metrics so you can head off problems before they happen.You'll start out by building your own virtual environment by writing scripts to provision a production server with Vagrant and Puppet. Then you'll leverage the popular Rails deployment tool Capistrano to deploy an application into this infrastructure. Once the app is live, you'll monitor your application's health with Nagios, and configure Ganglia to collect system metrics. Finally, you'll see how to keep your data backed up, recover data when things go wrong, tame your log files, and use Puppet to automate everything along the way.Whether you're a Rails developer who wants a better understanding of the needs of a production Rails system, if you're a system administrator who wants to manage a Rails application, or if you're bridging the gap between development and operations, this book will be your roadmap to successful production deployment and maintenance, whether your application has ten users or ten million users.What You Need:The exercises and examples are most suited to a computer running some Unix variant, such as Mac OS X or Linux. But a Windows machine running Linux in a VirtualBox virtual machine is also sufficient. We'll show you how to set up a local virtual machine for your deployments; you won't need a dedicated server to hone your deployment skills. We expect you to have a basic familiarity with the Ruby programming language, the Ruby on Rails framework, and the Unix command line.
THE VIVID, SCANDAL-FILLED STORY OF A SHREWD, RAGS-TO-RICHES MILLIONAIRESS AND THE RUTHLESS POLITICIAN WHO PURSUED HER, TOLD AGAINST THE EFFERVESCENT BACKDROP OF AMERICA’S GOLDEN CITY—SAN FRANCISCO. San Francisco, until the mid-1940s, was a city that lived by its own rules, fast and loose. Formed by the gold rush and destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, it served as a pleasure palace for the legions of men who sought their fortunes in the California foothills. For the women who followed, their only choice was to support, serve, or submit. Inez Burns was different. She put everyone to shame with her dazzling, calculated, stone-cold ambition. Born in the slums of San Francisco to a cigar-rolling alcoholic, Inez transformed herself into one of California’s richest women, becoming a notorious powerbroker, grand dame, and iconoclast. A stunning beauty with perfumed charm, she rose from manicurist to murderess to millionaire, seducing one man after another, bearing children out of wedlock, and bribing politicians and cops along the way to secure her place in the San Francisco firmament. Inez ruled with incandescent flair. She owned five hundred hats and a closet full of furs, had two small toes surgically removed to fit into stylish high heels, and had two ribs excised to accentuate her hourglass figure. Her presence was defined by couture dresses from Paris, red-carpet strutting at the San Francisco Opera, and a black Pierce-Arrow that delivered her everywhere. She threw outrageous parties on her sprawling, eight-hundred-acre horse ranch, a compound with servants, cooks, horse groomers, and trainers, where politicians, judges, attorneys, Hollywood moguls, and entertainers gamboled over silver fizzes. Inez was adored by the desperate women who sought her out—and loathed by the power-hungry men who plotted to destroy her. During a time when women risked their lives with predatory practitioners lurking in back alleys, Inez and her team of women, clad in crisp, white nurse’s uniforms, worked night and day in her elegantly appointed clinic, performing fifty thousand of the safest, most hygienic abortions available during a time when even the richest wives, Hollywood stars, and mistresses had few options when they found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. Inez’s illegal business bestowed upon her power and influence—until a determined politician by the name of Edmund G. (Pat) Brown—the father of current California Governor Jerry Brown—used Inez to catapult his nascent career to national prominence. In The Audacity of Inez Burns, Stephen G. Bloom, the author of the bestselling Postville, reveals a jagged slice of lost American history. From Inez’s riveting tale of glamour and tragedy, he has created a brilliant, compulsively readable portrait of an unforgettable woman during a moment when America’s pendulum swung from compassion to criminality by punishing those who permitted women to control their own destinies.
In the early nineteenth century, Rochester, New York, and St. Catharines, Canada West, were the last stops on the Niagara branch of the Underground Railroad. Both cities handled substantial fugitive slave traffic and were logical destinations for the settlement of runaways because of their progressive stance on social issues including abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and temperance. Moreover, these urban centers were home to sizable free Black communities as well as an array of individuals engaged in the abolitionist movement, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Anthony Burns, and Hiram Wilson. dann j. Broyld’s Borderland Blacks explores the status and struggles of transient Blacks within this dynamic zone, where the cultures and interests of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the African Diaspora overlapped. Blacks in the two cities shared newspapers, annual celebrations, religious organizations, and kinship and friendship ties. Too often, historians have focused on the one-way flow of fugitives on the Underground Railroad from America to Canada when in fact the situation on the ground was far more fluid, involving two-way movement and social collaborations. Black residents possessed transnational identities and strategically positioned themselves near the American-Canadian border where immigration and interaction occurred. Borderland Blacks reveals that physical separation via formalized national barriers did not sever concepts of psychological memory or restrict social ties. Broyld investigates how the times and terms of emancipation affected Blacks on each side of the border, including their use of political agency to pit the United States and British Canada against one another for the best possible outcomes.
