BiblioVault - Books about Slaves -

The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil
Rebecca Scott, Seymour Drescher, Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, George Reid Andrews, and Robert Levine
Duke University Press, 1988
Library of Congress HT1128.A29 1988 | Dewey Decimal 326.0981

In May 1888 the Brazilian parliament passed, and Princess Isabel (acting for her father, Emperor Pedro II) signed, the lei aurea, or Golden Law, providing for the total abolition of slavery. Brazil thereby became the last “civilized nation” to part with slavery as a legal institution. The freeing of slaves in Brazil, as in other countries, may not have fulfilled all the hopes for improvement it engendered, but the final act of abolition is certainly one of the defining landmarks of Brazilian history.
The articles presented here represent a broad scope of scholarly inquiry that covers developments across a wide canvas of Brazilian history and accentuates the importance of formal abolition as a watershed in that nation’s development.

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Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas
Allen C. Guelzo, with a Foreword by Michael Lind
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Library of Congress E457.2.G875 2009 | Dewey Decimal 973.7092

Despite the most meager of formal educations, Lincoln had a tremendous intellectual curiosity that drove him into the circle of Enlightenment philosophy and democratic political ideology. And from these, Lincoln developed a set of political convictions that guided him throughout his life and his presidency. This compilation of ten essays from Lincoln scholar Allen C. Guelzo uncovers the hidden sources of Lincoln’s ideas and examines the beliefs that directed his career and brought an end to slavery and the Civil War.

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Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity
Crispin Sartwell
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Library of Congress PS366.A35S27 1998 | Dewey Decimal 810.9896073

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X—their words speak firmly, eloquently, personally of the impact of white America on the lives of African-Americans. Black autobiographical discourses, from the earliest slave narratives to the most contemporary urban raps, have each in their own way gauged and confronted the character of white society. For Crispin Sartwell, as philosopher, cultural critic, and white male, these texts, through their exacting insights and external perspective, provide a rare opportunity, a means of glimpsing and gaining access to contents and core of white identity.

There is, Sartwell contends, a fundamental elusiveness to that identity. Whiteness defines itself as normative, as a neutral form of the human condition, marking all other forms of identity as "racial" or "ethnic" deviations. Invisible to itself, white identity seeks to define its essence over and against those other identities, in effect defining itself through opposition and oppression. By maintaining fictions of black licentiousness, violence, and corruption, white identity is able to cast itself as humane, benevolent, and pure; the stereotype fabricates not only the oppressed but the oppressor as well. Sartwell argues that African-American autobiography perceives white identity from a particular and unique vantage point; one that is knowledgeable and intimate, yet fundamentally removed from the white world and thus unencumbered by its obfuscating claims to normativity.

Throughout this provocative work, Sartwell steadfastly recognizes the many ways in which he too is implicated in the formulation and perpetuation of racial attitudes and discourse. In Act Like You Know, he challenges both himself and others to take a long, hard look in the mirror of African-American autobiography, and to find there, in the light of those narratives, the visible features of white identity.

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Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831
Michael Mullin
University of Illinois Press, 1992
Library of Congress E443.M85 1992 | Dewey Decimal 973.0496

Extensive archival and anecdotal sources support Michael Mullin's description of slavery as it was practiced in tidewater Virginia, on the rice coast of the Carolinas, and in Jamaica and Barbados. Drawing upon case histories, Mullin offers new and definitive information about how African's met and often overcame the challenges and deprivations of their new lives through religion, family life, and economic strategies.

"Africa in America is more than another account of slave resistance and accommodation. It is a brilliant and provocative work of historical anthropology and a synthetic account of slavery that firmly places the subject in a comparative and long-term context. . . . Mullin's three-part chronology of resistance and rebellion is attractive in its simplicity and flexibility." -- James D. Rice, Southern Historian

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The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People
Kenneth F. Kiple
Duke University Press, 1988
Library of Congress RA442.A37 1988 | Dewey Decimal 614.427308996073

David Eltis has observed that "in terms of immigration, America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the 19th century." The unwilling African immigrants were not spread evenly across the Americas; the overwhelming majority arrived in tropical and subtropical "plantation America" with the result that the disease and nutritional environments of this region also became extensions of Africa. While the implications of disease ecology for world history have been examined, and the details of the "Colombian exchange" of plants and pathogens between Europe and the Americas studied, we have no comparable study of the "African exchange."
The essays in this volume form the cutting edge of biohistorical research that promises to rewrite the story of humankind's past in significant ways.

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Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic World
Randy J. Sparks
Harvard University Press, 2016
Library of Congress E185.615.S695 2016 | Dewey Decimal 305.896073075

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, and its toll in lives damaged or destroyed is incalculable. Most of those stories are lost to history, making the few that can be reconstructed critical to understanding the trade in all its breadth and variety. Randy J. Sparks examines the experiences of a range of West Africans who lived in the American South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arrived on American shores.

The subjects of Africans in the Old South include Elizabeth Cleveland Hardcastle, the mixed-race daughter of an African slave-trading family who invested in South Carolina rice plantations and slaves, passed as white, and integrated herself into the Lowcountry planter elite; Robert Johnson, kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery in Georgia, who later learned English, won his freedom, and joined the abolition movement in the North; Dimmock Charlton, who bought his freedom after being illegally enslaved in Savannah; and a group of unidentified Africans who were picked up by a British ship in the Caribbean, escaped in Mobile’s port, and were recaptured and eventually returned to their homeland.

These exceptional lives challenge long-held assumptions about how the slave trade operated and who was involved. The African Atlantic was a complex world characterized by constant movement, intricate hierarchies, and shifting identities. Not all Africans who crossed the Atlantic were enslaved, nor was the voyage always one-way.

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American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation
Matthew Pratt Guterl
Harvard University Press, 2013
Library of Congress E449.G98 2008 | Dewey Decimal 306.3620975

How did slave-owning Southern planters make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era? Matthew Pratt Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers. He traces the links that bound them to the wider fraternity of slaveholders in Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere, and charts their changing political place in the hemisphere.Through such figures as the West Indian Confederate Judah Benjamin, Cuban expatriate Ambrosio Gonzales, and the exile Eliza McHatton, Guterl examines how the Southern elite connected—by travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquest—with the communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world. He analyzes why they invested in a vision of the circum-Caribbean, and how their commitment to this broader slave-owning community fared. From Rebel exiles in Cuba to West Indian apprenticeship and the Black Codes to the “labor problem” of the postwar South, this beautifully written book recasts the nineteenth-century South as a complicated borderland in a pan-American vision.

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America's War: Talking about the Civil War and Emancipation on Their 150th Anniversaries
American Library Association
American Library Association, 2012
Library of Congress E464.A45 2012 | Dewey Decimal 973.7

The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold
Claude Meillassoux
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Library of Congress HT1321.M4513 1991 | Dewey Decimal 306.362096

This controversial examination of precolonial African slavery looks at the various social systems that made slavery on such a scale possible and argues that the institutions of slavery were far more complex and pervasive than previously suspected.

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An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States
Lauren F. Klein
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
Library of Congress GT2853.U5K59 2020 | Dewey Decimal 394.120973

A groundbreaking synthesis of food studies, archival theory, and early American literature

There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, An Archive of Taste reveals how a focus on eating allows us to rethink the nature and significance of aesthetics in early America, as well as of its archive.

Lauren F. Klein considers eating and early American aesthetics together, reframing the philosophical work of food and its meaning for the people who prepare, serve, and consume it. She tells the story of how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enlightenment worldview. Klein offers richly layered accounts of the enslaved men and women who cooked the meals of the nation’s founders and, in doing so, directly affected the development of our national culture—from Thomas Jefferson’s emancipation agreement with his enslaved chef to Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cookbook, the first African American–authored culinary text.

The first book to examine the gustatory origins of aesthetic taste in early American literature, An Archive of Taste shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States.

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