Taking Liberty

When I was four and my daddy left, I cried, but I understood. He had become part of the Gone. Oney Judge is a slave. But on the plantation of Mount Vernon, the beautiful home of George and Martha Washington, she is not called a slave. She is referred to as a servant, and a house servant at that -- a position of influence and respect. When she rises to the position of personal servant to Martha Washington, her status among the household staff -- black or white -- is second to none. She is Lady Washington's closest confidante and for all intents and purposes, a member of the family -- or so she thinks. Slowly, Oney's perception of her life with the Washingtons begins to crack as she realizes the truth: No matter what it's called, it's still slavery and she's still a slave. Oney must make a choice. Does she stay where she is -- comfortable, with this family that has loved her and nourished her and owned her since the day she was born? Or does she take her liberty -- her life -- into her own hands, and like her father, become one of the Gone? Told with immense power and compassion, Taking Liberty is the extraordinary true story of one young woman's struggle to take what is rightfully hers.

Machine generated contents note: Introduction: how settlers gained self-government and indigenous people (almost) lost it; Part I.A Four-Cornered Contest: British Government, Settlers, Missionaries and Indigenous Peoples: 1. Colonialism and catastrophe: 1830; 2. 'Another new world inviting our occupation': colonisation and the beginnings of humanitarian intervention, 1831-1837; 3. Settlers oppose indigenous protection: 1837-1842; 4. A colonial conundrum: settler rights versus indigenous rights, 1837-1842; 5. Who will control the land? Colonial and imperial debates 1842-1846; Part II. Towards Self-Government: 6. Who will govern the settlers? Imperial and settler desires, visions, utopias, 1846-1850; 7. 'No place for the sole of their feet': imperial-colonial dialogue on Aboriginal land rights, 1846-1851; 8. Who will govern Aboriginal people? Britain transfers control of Aboriginal policy to the colonies, 1852-1854; 9. The dark side of responsible government? Britain and indigenous people in the self-governing colonies, 1854-1870; Part III. Self-Governing Colonies and Indigenous People, 1856-c.1870: 10. Ghosts of the past, people of the present: Tasmania; 11. 'A refugee in our own land': governing Aboriginal people in Victoria; 12. Aboriginal survival in New South Wales; 13. Their worst fears realised: the disaster of Queensland; 14. A question of honour in the colony that was meant to be different: Aboriginal policy in South Australia; Part IV. Self-Government for Western Australia: 15. 'A little short of slavery': forced Aboriginal labour in Western Australia 1856-1884; 16. 'A slur upon the colony': making Western Australia's unusual constitution, 1885-1890; Conclusion.

A remarkable, sparkling historical novel by the author of A Catch of Consequence.

At last a history that explains how indigenous dispossession and survival underlay and shaped the birth of Australian democracy. The legacy of seizing a continent and alternately destroying and governing its original people shaped how white Australians came to see themselves as independent citizens. It also shows how shifting wider imperial and colonial politics influenced the treatment of indigenous Australians, and how indigenous people began to engage in their own ways with these new political institutions. It is, essentially, a bringing together of two histories that have hitherto been told separately: one concerns the arrival of early democracy in the Australian colonies, as white settlers moved from the shame and restrictions of the penal era to a new and freer society with their own institutions of government; the other is the tragedy of indigenous dispossession and displacement, with its frontier violence, poverty, disease and enforced regimes of mission life.

A forceful and landmark defence of individual rights, Taking Rights Seriously is one of the most important political philosophical works of the last 50 years.

In The Liberty to Take Fish, Thomas Blake Earle offers an incisive and nuanced history of the long American Revolution, describing how aspirations to political freedom coupled with the economic imperatives of commercial fishing roiled relations between the young United States and powerful Great Britain. The American Revolution left the United States with the "liberty to take fish" from the waters of the North Atlantic. Indispensable to the economic health of the new nation, the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks, the Bay of Fundy, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence quickly became symbols of American independence in an Atlantic world dominated by Great Britain. The fisheries issue was a near-constant concern in American statecraft that impinged upon everything, from Anglo-American relations, to the operation of American federalism, and even to the nature of the marine environment. Earle explores the relationship between the fisheries and the state through the Civil War era when closer ties between the United States and Great Britain finally surpassed the contentious interests of the fishing industry on the nation's agenda. The Liberty to Take Fish is a rich story that moves from the staterooms of Washington and London to the decks of fishing schooners and into the Atlantic itself to understand how ordinary fishermen and the fish they pursued shaped and were, in turn, shaped by those far-off political and economic forces. Earle returns fishing to its once-central place in American history and shows that the nation of the nineteenth century was indeed a maritime one.

Winner of the PROSE Award An NRC Handelsblad Best Book of the Year “Ambitious and impressive...At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever.” —The Nation “Helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning...This deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization.” —Publishers Weekly “Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough “Brings remarkable clarity to a big and messy subject...New insights and hard-hitting conclusions about the resistance to democracy make this essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of our current dilemmas.” —Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters For centuries people in the West identified freedom with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. The equation of liberty with restraints on state power—what most people today associate with freedom—was a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking. So what triggered this fateful reversal? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of Western thinking about freedom, Annelien de Dijn argues that this was not the natural outcome of such secular trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the French and American Revolutions. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries who created our modern democracies—it was first conceived by their critics and opponents. De Dijn shows that far from following in the path of early American patriots, today’s critics of “big government” owe more to the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.