Slavery's Ghost
Title | Slavery's Ghost PDF eBook |
Author | Richard Follett |
Publisher | JHU Press |
Total Pages | 128 |
Release | 2011-11 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1421402351 |
President Abraham Lincoln freed millions of slaves in the South in 1863, rescuing them, as history tells us, from a brutal and inhuman existence and making the promise of freedom and equal rights. This is a moment to celebrate and honor, to be sure, but what of the darker, more troubling side of this story? Slavery’s Ghost explores the dire, debilitating, sometimes crushing effects of slavery on race relations in American history. In three conceptually wide-ranging and provocative essays, the authors assess the meaning of freedom for enslaved and free Americans in the decades before and after the Civil War. They ask important and challenging questions: How did slaves and freedpeople respond to the promise and reality of emancipation? How committed were white southerners to the principle of racial subjugation? And in what ways can we best interpret the actions of enslaved and free Americans during slavery and Reconstruction? Collectively, these essays offer fresh approaches to questions of local political power, the determinants of individual choices, and the discourse that shaped and defined the history of black freedom. Written by three prominent historians of the period, Slavery’s Ghost forces readers to think critically about the way we study the past, the depth of racial prejudice, and how African Americans won and lost their freedom in nineteenth-century America.
Tales from the Haunted South
Title | Tales from the Haunted South PDF eBook |
Author | Tiya Miles |
Publisher | UNC Press Books |
Total Pages | 175 |
Release | 2015-08-12 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1469626349 |
In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.
Black Ghost of Empire
Title | Black Ghost of Empire PDF eBook |
Author | Kris Manjapra |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Total Pages | 256 |
Release | 2022-04-19 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1982123478 |
The 1619 Project illuminated the ways in which every aspect of life in the United States was and is shaped by the existence of slavery. Black Ghost of Empire focuses on emancipation and how this opportunity to make right further codified the racial caste system--instead of obliterating it. To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts society today, we must not only look at what slavery was, but also the unfinished way it ended. One may think of "emancipation" as a finale, leading to a new age of human rights and universal freedoms. But in reality, emancipations everywhere were incomplete. In Black Ghost of Empire, acclaimed historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipation--explaining them in chronological order--along with the lasting impact these transitions had on formerly enslaved groups around the Atlantic. Beginning in 1770s and concluding in 1880s, different kinds of emancipation processes took place across the Atlantic world. These included the Gradual Emancipations of North America, the Revolutionary Emancipation of Haiti, the Compensated Emancipations of European overseas empires, the War Emancipation of the American South, and the Conquest Emancipations that swept across Sub-Saharan Africa. Tragically, despite a century of abolitions and emancipations, systems of social bondage persisted and reconfigured. We still live with these unfinished endings today. In practice, all the slavery emancipations that have ever taken place reenacted racial violence against Black communities, and reaffirmed commitment to white supremacy. The devil lurked in the details of the five emancipation processes, none of which required atonement for wrongs committed, or restorative justice for the people harmed. Manjapra shows how, amidst this unfinished history, grassroots Black organizers and activists have become custodians of collective recovery and remedy; not only for our present, but also for our relationship with the past. Timely, lucid, and crucial to our understanding of the ongoing "anti-mattering" of Black people, Black Ghost of Empire shines a light into the deep gap between the idea of slavery's end and its actual perpetuation in various forms--exposing the shadows that linger to this day.
Ghosts of Slavery
Title | Ghosts of Slavery PDF eBook |
Author | Jenny Sharpe |
Publisher | U of Minnesota Press |
Total Pages | 222 |
Release | 2003 |
Genre | Enslaved persons' writings |
ISBN | 9781452905075 |
Haunted Plantations
Title | Haunted Plantations PDF eBook |
Author | Geordie Buxton |
Publisher | Arcadia Publishing |
Total Pages | 134 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780738525013 |
A shackled West African tribe drags themselves off a slave ship while singing, drowning in a Georgia creek to avoid being sold. Mysterious letters from a long-ruined church near Mepkin Abbey solicit a man to join faith. A French teacher disappears from a school after marking final exams in blood. An Egyptian mummy triggers a heart attack in a city museum. These stories and more are wrenched from the gravest parts of America's past--real lives of people on plantations from Savannah and the coast of the Carolinas. Most deal with the hub of the East Coast slave trade, Charleston, South Carolina. All are richly illustrated with both historic and contemporary images. Dwelling in the affairs of plantation life is to tread the fires of emotionally raw history. Sifting through the folklore and legends, the old hushed embers of the south ignite once again in this collection. While these stories relate encounters with the supernatural, readers will find that what actually happened here doesn't always need a ghost to be disquieting.
Haunted Plantations
Title | Haunted Plantations PDF eBook |
Author | Geordie Buxton |
Publisher | Arcadia Publishing |
Total Pages | 136 |
Release | 2007-09-26 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1439614121 |
Chilling stories of the antebellum era, ranging from Savannah, Georgia to the Carolina coast, with photos included. Members of a shackled West African tribe drag themselves off a slave ship while singing, drowning in a Georgia creek to avoid being sold. Mysterious letters from a long-ruined church near Mepkin Abbey solicit a man to join the faith. A French teacher disappears from a school after marking final exams in blood. An Egyptian mummy triggers a heart attack in a city museum. These stories and more are wrenched from the gravest parts of America’s past—real lives of people on plantations from Savannah to Charleston and the coast of the Carolinas. Richly illustrated with both historic and contemporary images, most deal with the hub of the East Coast slave trade, Charleston, South Carolina. Sifting through folklore, legends, and emotionally raw history, these stories relate encounters with the supernatural—and reminds us that what actually happened here doesn’t always need a ghost to be disquieting.
The Political Economy of Slavery
Title | The Political Economy of Slavery PDF eBook |
Author | Eugene D. Genovese |
Publisher | Wesleyan University Press |
Total Pages | 371 |
Release | 2012-01-01 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0819575275 |
This classic study of antebellum Southern society demonstrates how slavery was the bedrock of the region’s social order and cultural identity. In The Political Economy of Slavery, Eugene Genovese argues that slavery gave the South a distinct class structure, political community, economy, ideology, and a set of psychological patterns. As a result, the South grew away from the rest of the nation and became increasingly unstable during the nineteenth century. The difficulties it faced—economic, political, moral, and ideological—constituted a fundamental antagonism between modern and premodern worlds. Southern slavery was the foundation on which rose a powerful social class which, in turn, dominated Southern society. While they constituted only a tiny portion of the white population, they were powerful enough to largely succeed at building a new—or rather rebuilding an old—civilization.