Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery PDF Download

Author: Barbara McCaskill
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820348325
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
The spectacular 1848 escape of William and Ellen Craft (1824-1900; 1826-1891) from slavery in Macon, Georgia, is a dramatic story in the annals of American history. Ellen, who could pass for white, disguised herself as a gentleman slaveholder; William accompanied her as his "master's" devoted slave valet; both traveled openly by train, steamship, and carriage to arrive in free Philadelphia on Christmas Day. In Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery, Barbara McCaskill revisits this dual escape and examines the collaborations and partnerships that characterized the Crafts' activism for the next thirty years: in Boston, where they were on the run again after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law; in England; and in Reconstruction-era Georgia. McCaskill also provides a close reading of the Crafts' only book, their memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in 1860. Yet as this study of key moments in the Crafts' public lives argues, the early print archive--newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, legal documents--fills gaps in their story by providing insight into how they navigated the challenges of freedom as reformers and educators, and it discloses the transatlantic British and American audiences' changing reactions to them. By discussing such events as the 1878 court case that placed William's character and reputation on trial, this book also invites readers to reconsider the Crafts' triumphal story as one that is messy, unresolved, and bittersweet. An important episode in African American literature, history, and culture, this will be essential reading for teachers and students of the slave narrative genre and the transatlantic antislavery movement and for researchers investigating early American print culture.

Author: William Craft
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340804
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
In 1848 William and Ellen Craft made one of the most daring and remarkable escapes in the history of slavery in America. With fair-skinned Ellen in the guise of a white male planter and William posing as her servant, the Crafts traveled by rail and ship--in plain sight and relative luxury--from bondage in Macon, Georgia, to freedom first in Philadelphia, then Boston, and ultimately England. This edition of their thrilling story is newly typeset from the original 1860 text. Eleven annotated supplementary readings, drawn from a variety of contemporary sources, help to place the Crafts’ story within the complex cultural currents of transatlantic abolitionism.

Author: Barbara McCaskill
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820347248
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
The spectacular 1848 escape of William and Ellen Craft (1824-1900; 1826-1891) from slavery in Macon, Georgia, is a dramatic story in the annals of American history. Ellen, who could pass for white, disguised herself as a gentleman slaveholder; William accompanied her as his "master's" devoted slave valet; both traveled openly by train, steamship, and carriage to arrive in free Philadelphia on Christmas Day. In Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery, Barbara McCaskill revisits this dual escape and examines the collaborations and partnerships that characterized the Crafts' activism for the next thirty years: in Boston, where they were on the run again after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law; in England; and in Reconstruction-era Georgia. McCaskill also provides a close reading of the Crafts' only book, their memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in 1860. Yet as this study of key moments in the Crafts' public lives argues, the early print archive--newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, legal documents--fills gaps in their story by providing insight into how they navigated the challenges of freedom as reformers and educators, and it discloses the transatlantic British and American audiences' changing reactions to them. By discussing such events as the 1878 court case that placed William's character and reputation on trial, this book also invites readers to reconsider the Crafts' triumphal story as one that is messy, unresolved, and bittersweet. An important episode in African American literature, history, and culture, this will be essential reading for teachers and students of the slave narrative genre and the transatlantic antislavery movement and for researchers investigating early American print culture.

Author: C. Riley Snorton
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452955859
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018 Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2018 Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018 Winner of Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction 2018 Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s access to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don’t Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.

Author: Benjamin Fagan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820355933
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child's hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front. The essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of this pivotal period. The collection proceeds chronologically, providing a nuanced history by highlighting the multiple meanings an assorted group of writers and readers discerned from the same set of circumstances. In so doing, this volume assembles contingent and fractured visions of the Civil War, but its differing perspectives also reveal a set of overlapping concerns. A number of essays focus in particular on African American engagements with visual culture. The collection also emphasizes the role that women played in making, disseminating, or interpreting wartime images. While every essay explores the relationship between image and word, several contributions focus on the ways in which Civil War images complicate an understanding of canonical writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.

Author: Richard Beck
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1620327775
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
According to Hebrews, the Son of God appeared to "break the power of him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil--and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death." What does it mean to be enslaved, all our lives, to the fear of death? And why is this fear described as "the power of the devil"? And most importantly, how are we--as individuals and as faith communities--to be set free from this slavery to death?In another creative interdisciplinary fusion, Richard Beck blends Eastern Orthodox perspectives, biblical text, existential psychology, and contemporary theology to describe our slavery to the fear of death, a slavery rooted in the basic anxieties of self-preservation and the neurotic anxieties at the root of our self-esteem. Driven by anxiety--enslaved to the fear of death--we are revealed to be morally and spiritually vulnerable as "the sting of death is sin." Beck argues that in the face of this predicament, resurrection is experienced as liberation from the slavery of death in the martyrological, eccentric, cruciform, and communal capacity to overcome fear in living fully and sacrificially for others.

Author: Lorraine McConaghy
Publisher: V. Ethel Willis White Books
ISBN: 9780295997100
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Free Boy is the story of a 13-year-old slave who escaped from Washington Territory to freedom in Canada on the West's underground railroad. When James Tilton came to Washington Territory as surveyor-general in the 1850s he brought with his household young Charles Mitchell, a slave he had likely received as a wedding gift from a Maryland cousin. The story of Charlie's escape in 1860 on a steamer bound for Victoria and the help he received from free blacks reveals how national issues on the eve of the Civil War were also being played out in the West. Written with young adults in mind, the authors provide the historical context to understand the lives of both Mitchell and Tilton and the time in which the events took place. The biography explores issues of race, slavery, treason, and secession in Washington Territory, making it both a valuable resource for teachers and a fascinating story for readers of all ages. A V Ethel Willis White Book

Author: Alicia K. Jackson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496835182
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Owned by his father, Isaac Harold Anderson (1835–1906) was born a slave but went on to become a wealthy businessman, grocer, politician, publisher, and religious leader in the African American community in the state of Georgia. Elected to the state senate, Anderson replaced his white father there, and later shepherded his people as a founding member and leader of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church. He helped support the establishment of Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, where he subsequently served as vice president. Anderson was instrumental in helping freed people leave Georgia for the security of progressive safe havens with significantly large Black communities in northern Mississippi and Arkansas. Eventually under threat to his life, Anderson made his own exodus to Arkansas, and then later still, to Holly Springs, Mississippi, where a vibrant Black community thrived. Much of Anderson’s unique story has been lost to history—until now. In The Recovered Life of Isaac Anderson, author Alicia K. Jackson presents a biography of Anderson and in it a microhistory of Black religious life and politics after emancipation. A work of recovery, the volume captures the life of a shepherd to his journeying people, and of a college pioneer, a CME minister, a politician, and a former slave. Gathering together threads from salvaged details of his life, Jackson sheds light on the varied perspectives and strategies adopted by Black leaders dealing with a society that was antithetical to them and to their success.

Author: William L. Andrews
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190908394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
"The distinction among slaves is as marked, as the classes of society are in any aristocratic community. Some refusing to associate with others whom they deem to be beneath them, in point of character, color, condition, or the superior importance of their respective masters." Henry Bibb, fugitive slave, editor, and antislavery activist, stated this in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1849). In William L. Andrews's magisterial study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than 60 mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slave narrators disclosed class-based reasons for violence that broke out between "impudent," "gentleman," and "lady" slaves and their resentful "mean masters." Andrews's far-reaching book shows that status and class played key roles in the self- and social awareness and in the processes of liberation portrayed in the narratives of the most celebrated fugitives from U.S. slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Noting that the majority of the slave narrators came from the higher echelons of the enslaved, Andrews also pays close attention to the narratives that have received the least notice from scholars, those from the most exploited class, the "field hands." By examining the lives of the most and least acclaimed heroes and heroines of the slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers' advantage, but at other times fueling pride, aspiration, and a sense of just deserts among some of the enslaved that could be satisfied by nothing less than complete freedom. The culmination of a career spent studying African American literature, this comprehensive study of the antebellum slave narrative offers a ground-breaking consideration of a unique genre of American literature.

Author: Hannah-Rose Murray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108805132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
During the nineteenth century and especially after the Civil War, scores of black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Moses Roper and Ellen Craft travelled to England, Ireland, Scotland, and parts of rural Wales to educate the public on slavery. By sharing their oratorical, visual, and literary testimony to transatlantic audiences, African American activists galvanised the antislavery movement, which had severe consequences for former slaveholders, pro-slavery defenders, white racists, and ignorant publics. Their journeys highlighted not only their death-defying escapes from bondage but also their desire to speak out against slavery and white supremacy on foreign soil. Hannah-Rose Murray explores the radical transatlantic journeys formerly enslaved individuals made to the British Isles, and what light they shed on our understanding of the abolitionist movement. She uncovers the reasons why activists visited certain locations, how they adapted to the local political and social climate, and what impact their activism had on British society.