With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for "a day of publick thanksgiving" to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the ensuing century, black leaders built on this foundation and constructed a distinctive and vibrant tradition through their celebrations of the end of slavery in New York State, the British West Indies, and eventually the United States as a whole. In this revealing study, Mitch Kachun explores the multiple functions and contested meanings surrounding African American emancipation celebrations from the abolition of the slave trade to the fiftieth anniversary of U.S. emancipation. Excluded from July Fourth and other American nationalist rituals for most of this period, black activists used these festivals of freedom to encourage community building and race uplift. Kachun demonstrates that, even as these annual rituals helped define African Americans as a people by fostering a sense of shared history, heritage, and identity, they were also sites of ambiguity and conflict. Freedom celebrations served as occasions for debate over black representations in the public sphere, struggles for group leadership, and contests over collective memory and its meaning. Based on extensive research in African American newspapers and oration texts, this book retraces a vital if often overlooked tradition in African American political culture and addresses important issues about black participation in the public sphere. By illuminating the origins of black Americans' public commemorations, it also helps explain why there have been increasing calls in recent years to make the "Juneteenth" observance of emancipation an American -- not just an African American -- day of commemoration.

"Festival of Freedom, the sixth volume in the series MeOtzar HoRav, consists of ten essays on Passover and the Haggadah drawn from the treasure trove left by the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, widely known as "the Rav." For Rabbi Soloveitchik, the Passover Seder is not simply a formal ritual or ceremonial catechism. Rather, the Seder night is "endowed with a unique and fascinating quality, exalted in its holiness and shining with a dazzling beauty." It possesses profound experiential and intellectual dimensions, both of them woven into the fabric of halakhic performance. Its central mitzvah, sippur yetzi'at Mitzrayim, recounting the exodus, is extraordinarily multifaceted, entailing study and teaching, storytelling and symbolic performance, thanksgiving and praise." --Book Jacket.

Born out of an engagement with anti-racist feminist struggles as women of color from the Global South, Feminist Freedom Warriors (FFW) is a project showcasing cross-generational histories of feminist activism addressing economic, anti-racist, social justice, and anti-capitalist issues across national borders. This feminist reader is a companion to the FFW video archive project that is currently available online. Using text and images, the book presents short narratives from the women featured in the FFW project and illustrates the intersecting struggles for justice in the fight against oppression. These are stories of sister-comrades, whose ideas, words, actions, and visions of economic and social justice continue to inspire a new generation of women activists.

Dr. SookDeos book shows the relevance of the past to the present by using the case study of Trinidad that highlights the crippling disadvantages that accrue to any people experiencing segregation, no matter the era or system of government. The study challenges notions of free labor, caste and free immigration, especially as it applied to the Caribbean region at the end of slavery and Emancipation (1838) in the British Empire. One thread of commonality with more radical studies of the past is that colonialism perpetuated a caste society similar to the one experienced under slavery. In Trinidad, this was true not only in labor but in education and even when the authorities responded to mass festivals and other freedoms. Such a study is prescient and relevant today, where opportunities for healthy race and economic relations within nations such as Trinidad were lost. This has been to the detriment of national growth and development in all aspects of Trinidads life. The irony for the East Indians arriving in nineteenth-century Trinidad was that if some of them had left the worst features of caste-ism behind, they were entering another rigidly caste-structured society in the New World. The ostensibly free British citizens of India, coveted as substitutes for slaves after Emancipation, had the historical destiny to contribute to the free labor system in Trinidad, but they paid a heavy cost. In general studies of the island nation, Indo-Trinidadian indenture is separated from labor history; this author sees a continuum of many labor regimes including slavery, peonage, indenture of many stripes, and free labor. The US has unearthed evidence in the 1990s that new forms of indented immigration continue in our time. When East Indian history is written as part of Caribbean labor history, we see a story of courage, of pre-industrial people learning how to organize and demand human rights, to survive and make progress with the slowly increasingly opportunities of capitalism. This work reveals much about transitions in society generally, and about the transition from slavery to free labor more specifically. That transition is, for Trinidad, a summary of the daily struggles of laboring adults and children who succeeded as "immigrants" against unimaginable odds. A largely illiterate, male population - ill-prepared for western, multi-racial societies -anonymous behind studies that focus on numerous regulations, platitudes, gross statistics and averages come to life in this study. This study humanizes "caste" and "outcaste" groups who knew nothing of Trinidad and it shows what indenture contracts meant in the "East Indians" day to day life on Trinidads plantations. Many Indians who did not succumb during the three-month voyage from British India to British Trinidad, died of poor health and diet on the plantations, or after expulsion from the estates when they could no longer work, some were found dying on the roads. Individual deaths on ships, beatings and whipping of indented workers and leaders, medical and food inadequacies (on Walkinshaws Estate in 1846), abuse of indented laborers, their wives and children are connected with real people and names. Especially damning of British-sponsored indenture was its relegating of Indians to pass-carrying prisoners of an anachronistic apartheid state; Indians became the largest sub-group of prisoners allegedly for violating rules that were unfair or hard to understand. The untruths told Indians about high wages at nearby "farms" and outright abductions of men and women, and capricious extension of "contracts" are juxtaposed with other contemporaneous labor migrations. In other words, Portuguese, Chineseand free African indented migration to Trinidad occured at this very moment in time, yet Indians were probably the most abused single group. SookDeos study connects this to the "spirit of the times" where colonial elites and pla

In this selection of thirty of Rudolf Steiner's most important lectures on the Festivals, he identifies and illumines the true meaning behind Christmas, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost, and Michaelmas, emphasizing both their inner-spiritual and outer-cosmic aspects. He shows that the Festivals are not merely the commemoration of mighty historical events or truths within the Christian tradition, but are in themselves - each year - spiritual events, manifesting in seasonal and natural rhythms, which carry a significance that grows and deepens with the developing of human evolution.

Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals; Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process.