Rambles Of A Runaway From Southern Slavery

Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery tells of an extraordinary life in and out of slavery in the United States and Canada. Born Elijah Turner in the Virginia Tidewater, circa 1810, the author eventually procured freedom papers from a man he resembled and took the man’s name, Henry Goings. His life story takes us on an epic journey, traveling from his Virginia birthplace through the cotton kingdom of the Lower South, and upon his escape from slavery, through Tennessee and Kentucky, then on to the Great Lakes region of the North and to Canada. His Rambles show that slaves were found not only in fields but also on the nation’s roads and rivers, perpetually in motion in massive coffles or as solitary runaways. A freedom narrative as well as a slave narrative, this compact yet detailed book illustrates many important developments in antebellum America, such as the large-scale forced migration of enslaved people from long-established slave societies in the eastern United States to new settlements on the cotton frontier, the political-economic processes that framed that migration, and the accompanying human anguish. Goings’s life and reflections serve as important primary documents of African American life and of American national expansion, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This edition features an informative and insightful introduction by Calvin Schermerhorn.

Six years after Elijah's marriage, Joseph Smith died leaving his estate to his young widow. Two years later, when it appeared Mrs. Smith was going to move to Mississippi, Elijah decided to run away. He assumed the name of "Henry Goings," whose "free paper" he had purchased previously for $15, and fled North, leaving his wife behind.

Introduces the essential history of slavery from the American Revolution to post-Civil War Reconstruction in twelve thematic chapters.

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave is the first fugitive slave narrative in American history. Because Grimes wrote and published his narrative on his own, without deference to white editors, publishers, or sponsors, his Life has an immediacy, candor, and no-holds-barred realism unparalleled in the famous antebellum slave narratives of the period. This edition of Grimes's autobiography represents a historic partnership between noted scholar of the African American slave narrative, William L. Andrews, and Regina Mason, Grimes's great-great-great-granddaughter. Their extensive historical and genealogical research has produced an authoritative, copiously annotated text that features pages from an original Grimes family Bible, transcriptions of the 1824 correspondence that set the terms for the author's self-purchase in Connecticut (nine years after his escape from Savannah, Georgia), and many other striking images that invoke the life and times of William Grimes.

The South played a prominent role in early American history, and its position was certainly strong and proud except for the "peculiar institution" of slavery. Thus, it drew away from the rest of an expanding nation, and in 1861 declared secession and developed a Confederacy... that ultimately lost the war. Indeed, for some time it was occupied. Thus, the South has a very mixed legacy, with good and bad aspects, and sometimes the two of them mixed. Which only enhances the need for a careful and balanced approach. This can be found in the Historical Dictionary of the Old South, which first traces its history from colonial times to the end of the Civil War in a substantial chronology. Particularly interesting is the introduction, which analyzes the rise and the fall, the good and the bad, as well as the middling and indifferent, over nigh on two centuries. The details are filled in very amply in over 600 dictionary entries on the politics, economy, society and culture of the Old South. An ample bibliography directs students and researchers toward other sources of information.

On May 1, 1866, a minor exchange between white Memphis city police and a group of black Union soldiers quickly escalated into murder and mayhem. Changes wrought by the Civil War and African American emancipation sent long-standing racial, economic, cultural, class, and gender tensions rocketing to new heights. For three days, a mob of white men roamed through South Memphis, leaving a trail of blood, rubble, and terror in their wake. By May 3, at least forty-six African American men, women, and children and two white men lay dead. An unknown number of black people had been driven out of the city. Every African American church and schoolhouse lay in ruins, homes and businesses burglarized and burned, and at least five women had been raped. As a federal military commander noted in the days following, “what [was] called the ‘riot’” was “in reality [a] massacre” of extended proportions. It was also a massacre whose effects spread far beyond Memphis, Tennessee. As the essays in this collection reveal, the massacre at Memphis changed the trajectory of the post–Civil War nation. Led by recently freed slaves who refused to be cowed and federal officials who took their concerns seriously, the national response to the horror that ripped through the city in May 1866 helped to shape the nation we know today. Remembering the Memphis Massacre brings this pivotal moment and its players, long hidden from all but specialists in the field, to a public that continues to feel the effects of those three days and the history that made them possible.

Providing chronologies of important events, historical narratives from the first settlement to the present, and biographies of major figures, this work offers readers an unseen look at the history of racism from the perspective of individual states. From the initial impact of European settlement on indigenous populations to the racial divides caused by immigration and police shootings in the 21st century, each American state has imposed some form of racial restriction on its residents. The United States proclaims a belief in freedom and justice for all, but members of various minority racial groups have often faced a different reality, as seen in such examples as the forcible dispossession of indigenous peoples during the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow laws' crushing discrimination of blacks, and the manifest unfairness of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Including the District of Columbia, the 51 entries in these two volumes cover the state-specific histories of all of the major minority and immigrant groups in the United States, including African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. Every state has had a unique experience in attempting to build a community comprising multiple racial groups, and the chronologies, narratives, and biographies that compose the entries in this collection explore the consequences of racism from states' perspectives, revealing distinct new insights into their respective racial histories.

Exploring the culture and media of the Americas, this handbook places particular emphasis on collective and intertwined experiences and focuses on the transnational or hemispheric dimensions of cultural flows and geocultural imaginaries that shape the literature, arts, media and other cultural expressions in the Americas. The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas charts the pervasive, asymmetrical flows of cultural products and capital and their importance in the development of the Americas. The volume offers a comprehensive understanding of how inter-American communication is constituted, framed and structured, and covers the artistic and political dimensions that have shaped literature, art and popular culture in the region. Forty-six chapters cover a range of inter-American key concepts and dynamics, divided into two parts: Literature and Music deals with inter-American entanglements of artistic expressions in the Western Hemisphere, including music, dance, literary genres and developments. Media and Visual Cultures explores the inter-American dimension of media production in the hemisphere, including cinema and television, photography and art, journalism, radio, digital culture and issues such as freedom of expression and intellectual property. This multidisciplinary approach will be of interest to a broad array of academic scholars and students in history, sociology, political science; and cultural, postcolonial, gender, literary, globalization and media studies.