Wanton Slave

Download or read book Wanton Slave written by Evelyn Rogers and published by Evelyn Rogers. This book was released on 1990 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dark Work written by Christy Clark-Pujara and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction—that North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.

Download or read book People Without Rights written by Andrew Fede and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in September 1992, the book traces the nature and development of the fundamental legal relationships among slaves, masters, and third parties. It shows how the colonial and antebellum Southern judges and legislators accommodated slaverye(tm)s social relationships into the common law, and how slave law evolved in different states over time in response to social political, economic, and intellectual developments. The book states that the law of slavery in the US South treated slaves both as people and property. It reconciles this apparent contradiction by demonstrating that slaves were defined in the law as items of human property without any legal rights. When the lawmakers recognized slaves as people, they burdened slaves with added legal duties and disabilities. This epitomized in legal terms slaverye(tm)s oppressive social relationships. The book also illustrates how cases in which the lawmakers recognized slaves as people legitimized slaverye(tm)s inhumanity. References in the law to the legal humanity of people held as slaves are shown to be rhetorical devices and cruel ironies that regulated the relative rights of the slavese(tm) owners and other free people that were embodied in people held as slaves. Thus, it is argued that it never makes sense to think of slave legal rights. This was so even when the lawmakers regulated the individual masterse(tm) rights to treat their slaves as they wished. These regulations advanced policies that the lawmakers perceived to be in the public interest within the context of a slave society.

Download or read book African Kings and Black Slaves written by Herman L. Bennett and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-09-10 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with Africa As early as 1441, and well before other European countries encountered Africa, small Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels were plying the coast of West Africa, where they conducted business with African kingdoms that possessed significant territory and power. In the process, Iberians developed an understanding of Africa's political landscape in which they recognized specific sovereigns, plotted the extent and nature of their polities, and grouped subjects according to their ruler. In African Kings and Black Slaves, Herman L. Bennett mines the historical archives of Europe and Africa to reinterpret the first century of sustained African-European interaction. These encounters were not simple economic transactions. Rather, according to Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics. Bennett unearths the ways in which Africa's kings required Iberian traders to participate in elaborate diplomatic rituals, establish treaties, and negotiate trade practices with autonomous territories. And he shows how Iberians based their interpretations of African sovereignty on medieval European political precepts grounded in Roman civil and canon law. In the eyes of Iberians, the extent to which Africa's polities conformed to these norms played a significant role in determining who was, and who was not, a sovereign people—a judgment that shaped who could legitimately be enslaved. Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new depiction of the diasporic identities that had implications for slaves' experiences in the Americas.

Download or read book At the Limits of Memory written by Nicola Frith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflects on contemporary commemorative practices relating to the history of slavery and the slave trade, questioning how they function in relationship to other, less memorialized histories of exploitation such as indentured and forced labor.

Download or read book Unwelcome Americans written by Ruth Wallis Herndon and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In eighteenth-century America, no centralized system of welfare existed to assist people who found themselves without food, medical care, or shelter. Any poor relief available was provided through local taxes, and these funds were quickly exhausted. By the end of the century, state and national taxes levied to help pay for the Revolutionary War further strained municipal budgets. In order to control homelessness, vagrancy, and poverty, New England towns relied heavily on the "warning out" system inherited from English law. This was a process in which community leaders determined the legitimate hometown of unwanted persons or families in order to force them to leave, ostensibly to return to where they could receive care. The warning-out system alleviated the expense and responsibility for the general welfare of the poor in any community, and placed the burden on each town to look after its own. But homelessness and poverty were problems as onerous in early America as they are today, and the system of warning out did little to address the fundamental causes of social disorder. Ultimately the warning-out system gave way to the establishment of general poorhouses and other charities. But the documents that recorded details about the lives of those who were warned out provide an extraordinary—and until now forgotten—history of people on the margin. Unwelcome Americans puts a human face on poverty in early America by recovering the stories of forty New Englanders who were forced to leave various communities in Rhode Island. Rhode Island towns kept better and more complete warning-out records than other areas in New England, and because the official records include those who had migrated to Rhode Island from other places, these documents can be relied upon to describe the experiences of poor people across the region. The stories are organized from birth to death, beginning with the lives of poor children and young adults, followed by families and single adults, and ending with the testimonies of the elderly and dying. Through meticulous research of historical records, Herndon has managed to recover voices that have not been heard for more than two hundred years, in the process painting a dramatically different picture of family and community life in early New England. These life stories tell us that those who were warned out were predominantly unmarried women with or without children, Native Americans, African Americans, and destitute families. Through this remarkable reconstruction, Herndon provides a corrective to the narratives of the privileged that have dominated the conversation in this crucial period of American history, and the lives she chronicles give greater depth and a richer dimension to our understanding of the growth of American social responsibility.

Download or read book Without a Tear written by Mark H. Bernstein and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Without a Tear Mark H. Bernstein begins with one of our most common and cherished moral beliefs: that it is wrong to intentionally and gratuitously inflict harm on the innocent. Over the course of the book, he shows how this apparently innocuous commitment requires that we drastically revise many of our most common practices involving nonhuman animals. Most people who write about our ethical obligations concerning animals base their arguments on emotional appeals or contentious philosophical assumptions; Bernstein, however, argues from reasons but carries little theoretical baggage. He considers the issues in a religious context, where he finds that Judaism in particular has the resources to ground moral obligations to animals. Without a Tear also makes novel use of feminist ethics to add to the case for drawing animals more closely into our ethical world. Bernstein details the realities of factory farms, animal-based research, and hunting fields, and contrasting these chilling facts with our moral imperatives clearly shows the need for fundamental changes to some of our most basic animal institutions. The tightly argued, provocative claims in Without a Tear will be an eye-opening experience for animal lovers, scholars, and people of good faith everywhere.