The Memories Of Slavery Complete Collection

While the memorialization of slavery has generated an impressive number of publications, relatively few studies deal with this subject from a transnational, transdisciplinary and transracial standpoint. As a historical phenomenon that crossed borders and traversed national communities and ethnic groups producing alliances that did not overlap with received identities, slavery as well as its memory call for comparative investigations that may bring to light aspects obscured by the predominant visibility of US-American and British narratives of the past. This study addresses the memory of slavery from a transnational perspective. It brings into dialogue texts and practices from the transatlantic world, offering comparative analyses which interlace the variety of memories emerging in diverse national contexts and fields of study and shed light on the ways local countermemories have interacted with and responded to hegemonic narratives of slavery. The inclusion of Brazil and the French, English, and Spanish Caribbean alongside the United States and Europe, and the variety of investigative approaches-ranging from cinema, popular culture and visual culture studies to anthropology and literary studies-expand the current understanding of the slave past and how it is reimagined today. This fascinating book brings freshness to the topic by considering objects of investigation which have so far remained marginal in the academic debate, such as heroic memorials, civic landscape, white family sagas, Young Adult literature of slavery, Latin American telenovelas and filmic narrations within and beyond Hollywood. What emerges is a multifarious set of memories, which keep changing according to generation, race, gender, nation and political urgency and indicate the advancing of a dynamic, mobilized memorialization of slavery willing to move beyond mourning towards a more militant stand for justice. This is an important book for those interested in African American, American, and Latin American studies and working across literature, cinema, visual arts, and public culture. It will also be useful to public official and civil servants interested in the question of slavery and its present memory.

This unique collection consists of the most influential narratives of former slaves, including numerous recorded testimonies, life stories and original photos of former slaves long after Civil War: Recorded Life Stories of Former Slaves from 17 different US States Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 12 Years a Slave (Solomon Northup) The Underground Railroad Harriet Jacobs: The Moses of Her People Up From Slavery (Booker T. Washington) The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of Slave! The Confessions of Nat Turner Narrative of Sojourner Truth The History of Mary Prince Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (William & Ellen Craft) Thirty Years a Slave (Louis Hughes) Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano Behind The Scenes: 30 Years a Slave & 4 Years in the White House (Elizabeth Keckley) Father Henson's Story of His Own Life (Josiah Henson) Fifty Years in Chains (Charles Ball) Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman (Austin Steward) Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (L. S. Thompson) A Slave Girl's Story (Kate Drumgoold) From the Darkness Cometh the Light (Lucy A. Delaney) Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, a Slave in the United States of America Narrative of Joanna Life of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped in a 3x2 Feet Box Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley Buried Alive Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain Documents: The History of the Abolition of African Slave-Trade History of American Abolitionism from 1787-1861 Pictures of Slavery in Church and State Report of the Proceedings at the Examination of Charles G. Davis, Esq., on the Charge of Aiding and Abetting in the Rescue of a Fugitive Slave Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act Emancipation Proclamation Gettysburg Address XIII Amendment Civil Rights Act of 1866 XIV Amendment ...

This book offers a first-person perspective on the institution of slavery in America, providing powerful, engaging interviews from the WPA slave narrative collection that enable readers to gain a true sense of the experience of enslavement. Today's students understandably have a hard time imagining what life for slaves more than 150 years ago was like. The best way to communicate what slaves experienced is to hear their words directly. The material in this concise single-volume work illuminates the lives of the last living generation of enslaved people in the United States—former slaves who were interviewed about their experiences in the 1930s. Based on more than 2,000 interviews, the transcriptions of these priceless interviews offer primary sources that tell a diverse and powerful picture of life under slavery. The book explores seven key topics—childhood, marriage, women, work, emancipation, runaways, and family. Through the examination of these subject areas, the interviews reveal the harsh realities of being a slave, such as how slave women were at the complete mercy of the men who operated the places where they lived, how nearly every enslaved person suffered a beating at some point in their lives, how enslaved families commonly lost relatives through sale, and how enslaved children were taken from their parents to care for the children of slaveholders. The thematic organizational format allows readers to easily access numerous excerpts about a specific topic quickly and enables comparisons between individuals in different locations or with different slaveholders to identify the commonalities and unique characteristics within the system of slavery.

By comparing a diversity of documents including letters by slaves, free people of colour and planters, as well as literary works, royal decrees and court cases, Catherine Reinhardt untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that shaped the collective memory of slaves and free coloureds.

“A fascinating collection of essays” by eminent historians exploring how we teach, remember, and confront the history and legacy of American slavery (Booklist Online). In recent years, the culture wars have called into question the way America’s history of slavery is depicted in books, films, television programs, historical sites, and museums. In the first attempt to examine the historiography of slavery, this unique collection of essays looks at recent controversies that have played out in the public arena, with contributions by such noted historians as Ira Berlin, David W. Blight, and Gary B. Nash. From the cancellation of the Library of Congress’s “Back of the Big House” slavery exhibit at the request of the institution’s African American employees, who found the visual images of slavery too distressing, to the public reaction to DNA findings confirming Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, Slavery and Public History takes on contemporary reactions to the fundamental contradiction of American history—the existence of slavery in a country dedicated to freedom—and offers a bracing analysis of how Americans choose to remember the past, and how those choices influence our politics and culture. “Americans seem perpetually surprised by slavery—its extent (North as well as South), its span (over half of our four centuries of Anglo settlement), and its continuing influence. The wide-ranging yet connected essays in [this book] will help us all to remember and understand.” —James W. Loewen, author of Sundown Towns

This book focusses on the several forms of reconstructing the slave past in the present. The recent emergence of the memory of slavery allows those who are or who claim to be descendents of slaves to legitimize their demand for recognition and for reparations for past wrongs. Some reparation claims encompass financial compensation, but very often they express the need for memorialization through public commemoration, museums, and monuments. In some contexts, presentification of the slave past has helped governments and the descendants of former masters and slave merchants to formulate public apologies. For some, expressing repentance is not only a means to erase guilt but also a way to gain political prestige. The authors analyse different aspects of the recent phenomenon of memorializing slavery, especially the practices employed to stage the slave past in both public and private spaces. The essays present memory and oblivion as part of the same process; they discuss reconstructions of the past in the present at different public and private levels through historiography, photography, exhibitions, monuments, memorials, collective and individual discourses, cyberspace, religion and performance. By offering a comparative perspective on the United States and West Africa, as well as on Western Europe, South America, and the Caribbean, the chapters offer new possibilities to explore the resurgence of the memory of slavery as a transnational movement in our contemporary world.

This eBook has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. "My own observation of the real condition of the people of our Slave States, gave me ... an impression that the cotton monopoly in some way did them more harm than good; and although the written narration of what I saw was not intended to set this forth, upon reviewing it for the present publication, I find the impression has become a conviction."He argued that slavery had made the slave states inefficient (a set amount of work took 4 times as long in Virginia as in the North) and backward both economically and socially.Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom was published during the first six months of the American Civil War at the suggestion of Olmsted's English publisher. To this he wrote a new introduction in which he stated explicitly his views on the effect of slavery on the economy and social conditions of the southern states.