Author: G. Ward Hubbs Publisher: University of Alabama Press ISBN: 0817318607 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Examines the life stories and perspectives about freedom in relation to the figures depicted in an infamous Reconstruction-era political cartoon
Author: Justin A. Nystrom Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801899974 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
We often think of Reconstruction as an unfinished revolution. Justin A. Nystrom’s original study of the aftermath of emancipation in New Orleans takes a different perspective, arguing that the politics of the era were less of a binary struggle over political supremacy and morality than they were about a quest for stability in a world rendered uncertain and unfamiliar by the collapse of slavery. Commercially vibrant and racially unique before the Civil War, New Orleans after secession and following Appomattox provides an especially interesting case study in political and social adjustment. Taking a generational view and using longitudinal studies of some of the major political players of the era, New Orleans after the Civil War asks fundamentally new questions about life in the post–Civil War South: Who would emerge as leaders in the prostrate but economically ambitious city? How would whites who differed over secession come together over postwar policy? Where would the mixed-race middle class and newly freed slaves fit in the new order? Nystrom follows not only the period’s broad contours and occasional bloody conflicts but also the coalition building and the often surprising liaisons that formed to address these and related issues. His unusual approach breaks free from the worn stereotypes of Reconstruction to explore the uncertainty, self-doubt, and moral complexity that haunted Southerners after the war. This probing look at a generation of New Orleanians and how they redefined a society shattered by the Civil War engages historical actors on their own terms and makes real the human dimension of life during this difficult period in American history.
Author: Tera W. Hunter Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674893085 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.
Author: Kevin M. Levin Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469653273 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans' gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.
Author: Heather Andrea Williams Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807882658 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade. Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.
Author: Tom Huntington Publisher: Stackpole Books ISBN: 0811708136 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
A historian's investigation of the life and times of Gen. George Gordon Meade to discover why the hero of Gettysburg has failed to achieve the status accorded to other generals of the conflict.
Author: Jonathan A. Noyalas Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 0813072670 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
The African American experience in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction This book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the Black experience in the region until now. Correcting previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better there than in other parts of the South, Jonathan Noyalas demonstrates the strong hold of slavery in the region. He explains that during the war, enslaved and free African Americans navigated a borderland that changed hands frequently—where it was possible to be in Union territory one day, Confederate territory the next, and no-man’s land another. He shows that the region’s enslaved population resisted slavery and supported the Union war effort by serving as scouts, spies, and laborers, or by fleeing to enlist in regiments of the United States Colored Troops. Noyalas draws on untapped primary resources, including thousands of records from the Freedmen’s Bureau and contemporary newspapers, to continue the story and reveal the challenges African Americans faced from former Confederates after the war. He traces their actions, which were shaped uniquely by the volatility of the struggle in this region, to ensure that the war’s emancipationist legacy would survive. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller
Author: Ruby West Jackson Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society ISBN: 0870209957 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
First published in 2007, the groundbreaking book Finding Freedom provided the first narrative account of the life of Joshua Glover, the freedom seeker who was famously broken out of jail by thousands of Wisconsin abolitionists in 1854. This paperback edition reframes Glover’s story with a new foreword from historian Christy Clark-Pujara. Employing original research, authors Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald chronicle Glover's days as an enslaved person in St. Louis, his violent capture and escape in Milwaukee, his journey on the Underground Railroad, and his thirty-three years of freedom in rural Canada. While the catalytic “Glover incident” captured national attention—pitting the state of Wisconsin against the Supreme Court and adding fuel to the pre–Civil War fire—the primary focus is on the ordinary citizens, both Black and white, with whom Joshua Glover interacted. A bittersweet story of bravery and compassion, Finding Freedom provides the first full picture of the man for whom so many fought and around whom so much history was made.
Author: Gordon C. Rhea Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807176575 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Stephen Atkins Swails is a forgotten American hero. A free Black in the North before the Civil War began, Swails exhibited such exemplary service in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry that he became the first African American commissioned as a combat officer in the United States military. After the war, Swails remained in South Carolina, where he held important positions in the Freedmen’s Bureau, helped draft a progressive state constitution, served in the state senate, and secured legislation benefiting newly liberated Black citizens. Swails remained active in South Carolina politics after Reconstruction until violent Redeemers drove him from the state. After Swails died in 1900, state and local leaders erased him from the historical narrative. Gordon C. Rhea’s biography, one of only a handful for any of the nearly 200,000 African Americans who fought in the Civil War or figured prominently in Reconstruction, restores Swails’s remarkable legacy. Swails’s life story is a saga of an indomitable human being who confronted deep-seated racial prejudice in various institutions but nevertheless reached significant milestones in the fight for racial equality, especially within the military. His is an inspiring story that is especially timely today.
Author: Jim Downs Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199908788 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.
Author: G. Ward Hubbs
Author: Justin A. Nystrom
Author: Tera W. Hunter
Author: Kevin M. Levin
Author: Heather Andrea Williams
Author: Tom Huntington
Author: Jonathan A. Noyalas
Author: Ruby West Jackson
Author: Gordon C. Rhea
Author: Jim Downs