Not Slave Not Free

Since its publication in 1978, Jay R. Mandle's The Roots of Black Poverty has come to be seen as a landmark publication in the study of the political economy of the postbellum South. In Not Slave, Not Free, Mandle substantially revises and updates his earlier work in light of significant new research. The new edition provides an enhanced historical perspective on the African American economic experience since emancipation. Not Slave, Not Free focuses first on rural southern society before World War II and the role played by African Americans in that setting. The South was the least developed part of the United States, a fact that Mandle considers fundamental in accounting for the poverty of African Americans in the years before the War. At the same time, however, the concentration of the black labor force in plantation work significantly retarded the South's economic growth. Tracing the postwar migration of blacks from the South, Mandle shifts attention to the problems and opportunities that confronted African Americans in cities. He shows how occupational segregation and income growth accelerated this migration. Instrumental to an understanding of the history of the political economy of the United States, this book also directs readers and policymakers to the central issues confronting African Americans today.

Commanding a vast historiography of slavery and emancipation, Aline Helg reveals as never before how significant numbers of enslaved Africans across the entire Western Hemisphere managed to free themselves hundreds of years before the formation of white-run abolitionist movements. Her sweeping view of resistance and struggle covers more than three centuries, from early colonization to the American and Haitian revolutions, Spanish American independence, and abolition in the British Caribbean. Helg not only underscores the agency of those who managed to become "free people of color" before abolitionism took hold but also assesses in detail the specific strategies they created and utilized. While recognizing the powerful forces supporting slavery, Helg articulates four primary liberation strategies: flight and marronage; manumission by legal document; military service, for men, in exchange for promised emancipation; and revolt—along with a willingness to exploit any weakness in the domination system. Helg looks at such actions at both individual and community levels and in the context of national and international political movements. Bringing together the broad currents of liberal abolitionism with an original analysis of forms of manumission and marronage, Slave No More deepens our understanding of how enslaved men, women, and even children contributed to the slow demise of slavery.

Shares the stories of Wallace Turnage and John Washington, former slaves who, in the midst of chaos during the Civil War, escaped to the North and lived to tell about their experiences.

Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. This book explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical changes demanded by industrialization and rapid social change in Britain. Abolition posed problems to which colonial expansion provided the answer, intimately linking the end of slavery to systematic colonization and Indigenous dispossession. By defining slavery in the Caribbean as the opposite of freedom, a lasting impact of abolition was to relegate other forms of oppression to lesser status, or to deny them. Through the shared concerns of abolitionists, slave-owners, and colonizers, a plastic ideology of ‘free labour’ was embedded within post-emancipation imperialist geopolitics, justifying the proliferation of new forms of unfree labour and defining new racial categories. The celebration of abolition has overshadowed post-emancipation continuities and transformations of slavery that continue to shape the modern world.

With a fresh interpretation of African American resistance to kidnapping and pre–Civil War political culture, Blind No More sheds new light on the coming of the Civil War by focusing on a neglected truism: the antebellum free states experienced a dramatic ideological shift that questioned the value of the Union. Jonathan Daniel Wells explores the cause of disunion as the persistent determination on the part of enslaved people that they would flee bondage no matter the risks. By protesting against kidnappings and fugitive slave renditions, they brought slavery to the doorstep of the free states, forcing those states to recognize the meaning of freedom and the meaning of states’ rights in the face of a federal government equally determined to keep standing its divided house. Through these actions, African Americans helped northerners and westerners question whether the constitutional compact was still worth upholding, a reevaluation of the republican experiment that would ultimately lead not just to Civil War but to the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery. Wells contends that the real story of American freedom lay not with the Confederate rebels nor even with the Union army but instead rests with the tens of thousands of self-emancipated men and women who demonstrated to the Founders, and to succeeding generations of Americans, the value of liberty.

This carefully crafted ebook: "Slavery: Not Forgiven, Never Forgotten" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Memoirs Narrative of Frederick Douglass 12 Years a Slave The Underground Railroad Up From Slavery Willie Lynch Letter Confessions of Nat Turner Narrative of Sojourner Truth Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl History of Mary Prince Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom Thirty Years a Slave Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green The Life of Olaudah Equiano Behind The Scenes Harriet: The Moses of Her People Father Henson's Story of His Own Life 50 Years in Chains Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave Story of Mattie J. Jackson A Slave Girl's Story From the Darkness Cometh the Light Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy Narrative of Joanna Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped in a 3x2 Feet Box Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley Buried Alive (Behind Prison Walls) For a Quarter of a Century Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain Novels Oroonoko Uncle Tom's Cabin Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Heroic Slave Slavery's Pleasant Homes Our Nig Clotelle Marrow of Tradition Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man A Fool's Errand Bricks Without Straw Imperium in Imperio The Hindered Hand Historical Documents The History of Abolition of African Slave-Trade History of American Abolitionism Pictures of Slavery in Church and State Life, Last Words and Dying Speech of Stephen Smith Who Was Executed for Burglary Report on Charge of Aiding and Abetting in the Rescue of a Fugitive Slave Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act Emancipation Proclamation (1863) Gettysburg Address XIII Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865) Civil Rights Act of 1866 XIV Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1868) Reconstruction Acts (1867-1868) ...