By Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s Freedom’s Seekers offers a bold and innovative intervention into the study of emancipation as a transnational phe-nomenon and serves as an important contribution to our understanding of the remaking of the nineteenth-century Atlantic Americas. Drawing on decades of research into slave and emancipation societies, Kerr-Ritchie is attentive … Continued
By João José Reis (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) and Marcus J. M. de Carvalho This book, written in six hands by specialists in the history of slavery in Brazil, reconstructs the busy biography of Rufino José Maria and makes a comprehensive analysis of the historical context of Brazil and Africa in the 19th century. Born in … Continued
Edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) and Reginald H. Pitts First published in 1859, Our Nig is an autobiographical narrative that stands as one of the most important accounts of the life of a black woman in the antebellum North. In the story of Frado, a spirited black girl who is abused and overworked as … Continued
By Scott E. Casper (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon brilliantly restores the lives and contributions of African Americans to the legacy of Mount Vernon. Digging beneath the well-known stories of George Washington and the era of America's birth, Scott E. Casper recovers the remarkable history of Sarah Johnson, who spent more than fifty years … Continued
White Americans did not expect blacks to participate in Reconstruction-era debates. Blacks thought otherwise. Black citizenship depended on the status of the Confederate states. After the Civil War, were the Confederate states conquered lands, frontier territories, or states in good standing? The recalcitrance of white Southerners opened Republicans to extending full citizenship to the formerly … Continued
Slaves held in the Confederacy weakened the Southern war effort in a variety of ways and in so doing played a vital role in obtaining their own freedom and in expanding the aims of the war to include not only restoring the Union but also abolishing slavery.