Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware from the Colonial Period to 1810

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2014-01-06 07:07Z by Steven

Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware from the Colonial Period to 1810

Genealogical Publishing Company
2000
392 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806350424

Paul Heinegg

As he did for Free Blacks in North Carolina and Virginia, Paul Heinegg has reconstructed the history of the free African American communities of Maryland and Delaware by looking at the history of their families.

Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware is a new work that will intrigue genealogists and historians alike. First and foremost, Mr. Heinegg has assembled genealogical evidence on more than 300 Maryland and Delaware black families (naming nearly 6,000 individuals), with copious documentation from the federal censuses of 1790-1810 and colonial sources consulted at the Maryland Hall of Records, county archives, and other repositories. No work that we know of brings together so much information on colonial African Americans except Mr. Heinegg’s earlier volume on Virginia and North Carolina. The author offers documentation proving that most of these free black families descended from mixed-race children who were the progeny of white women and African American men. While some of these families would claim Native American ancestry, Mr. Heinegg offers evidence to show that they were instead the direct descendants of mixed-race children.

Colonial Maryland laws relating to marriages between offspring of African American and white partners carried severe penalties. For example, one 18th-century statute threatened a white mother with seven years of servitude and promised to bind her mixed-race offspring until the age of thirty-one. Mr. Heinegg shows that, despite these harsh laws, several hundred child-bearing relationships in Delaware and Maryland took place over the colonial period as evidenced directly from the public record. Maryland families, in particular, which comprise the preponderance of those studied, also had closer relationships with the surrounding slave population than did their counterparts in Delaware, Virginia, or North Carolina. Mr. Heinegg recounts the circumstances under which a number of these freedmen were able to become landowners. Some Maryland families, however, including a number from Somerset County, chose to migrate to Delaware or Virginia, where the opportunities for land ownership were greater.

Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware is a work that will be sought after for its commentary on social history as for its genealogical content and methodology. No collection of African American history or genealogy can be without it.

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Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820 (Fifth Edition)

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, United States, Virginia on 2014-01-06 06:58Z by Steven

Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820 (Fifth Edition)

Genealogical Publishing Company
2005
2 volumes; 1355 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806352800

Paul Heinegg

The third edition of Paul Heinegg’s Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia was awarded the American Society of Genealogists’ prestigious Donald Lines Jacobus Award for the best work of genealogical scholarship published between 1991 and 1994. This fifth edition is Heinegg’s most ambitious effort yet to reconstruct the history of the free African-American communities of Virginia and the Carolinas by looking at the history of their families.

Published in two volumes, and 300 pages longer than the fourth edition, Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820 consists of detailed genealogies of 600 free black families that originated in Virginia and migrated to North and/or South Carolina from the colonial period to about 1820. The families under investigation represent nearly all African Americans who were free during the colonial period in Virginia and North Carolina. Like its immediate predecessor, the fifth edition traces the branches of a number of African-American families living in South Carolina, where original source materials for this period are much scarcer than in the two states to its north. Researchers will find the names of the more than 10,000 African Americans encompassed by Mr. Heinegg’s genealogies conveniently located in the full-name index at the back of the second volume.

Mr. Heinegg’s findings are the outgrowth of 20 years of research in some 1,000 manuscript volumes, including colonial and early national period tax records, colonial parish registers, 1790-1810 census records, wills, deeds, Free Negro Registers, marriage bonds, Revolutionary pension files, newspapers, and more. The author furnishes copious documentation for his findings and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

A work of extraordinary breadth and detail, Free African Americans is of great importance to social historians as well as genealogists. The fifth edition traces many families who were covered in previous editions back to their 17th- and 18th-century roots (families like those of humanitarian Ralph Bunch, former NAACP president Benjamin Chavis, and tennis stars Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson, that would go on to fame or fortune). Providing copious documentation for his findings and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, Mr. Heinegg shows that most of these families were the descendants of white servant women who had had children by slaves or free African Americans, not the descendants of slave owners. He dispels a number of other myths about the origins and status of free African Americans, such as the “mysterious” origins of the Lumbees, Melungeons, and other such marginal groups, and demonstrates conclusively that many free African-American families in colonial North Carolina and Virginia were landowners.

The two volumes include the following family surnames: Abel, Acre, Adams, Africa, Ailstock, Alford, Allen, Alman, Alvis, Ampey, Ancel, Anderson, Andrews, Angus, Archer, Armfield, Armstrong, Arnold, Artis, Ashberry, Ashby, Ashe, Ashton, Ashworth, Atkins, Aulden, Avery, Bailey, Baine, Baker, Balkham, Ball, Baltrip, Banks, Bannister, Barber, Bartly/Bartlett, Bass, Bates, Battles, Bazden, Bazmore, Beckett, Bee, Bell, Bennett, Berry, Beverly, Bibbens, Bibby, Biddie, Bing, Bingham, Binns, Bizzell, Black, Blake, Blango, Blanks, Blizzard, Blue, Bolton, Bond, Boon, Booth, Bosman, Bow, Bowden, Bowers, Bowles, Bowman, Bowmer, Bowser, Boyd, Brady, Branch, Brandican, Brandon/Branham, Braveboy, Braxton, Britt, Brogdon, Brooks, Brown, Bruce, Brumejum, Bryan, Bryant, Bugg, Bullard, Bunch, Bunday, Burden, Burke, Burkett, Burnett, Burrell, Busby, Busy, Butler, Byrd, Cane, Cannady, Carter, Cary, Case, Cassidy, Causey, Cauther, Chambers, Chandler, Chapman, Charity, Chavis, Church, Churchwell, Churton, Clark, Cobb, Cockran, Cole, Coleman, Collins, Combess, Combs, Conner, Cook, Cooley, Cooper, Copeland, Copes, Corn, Cornet, Cornish, Cotanch, Cousins, Cox, Coy, Craig, Crane, Cuff, Cuffee, Cumbo, Cunningham, Curle, Curtis, Custalow, Cuttillo, Cypress, Dales, Davenport, Davis, Day, Dean, Deas, Debrix, Demery, Dempsey, Dennis, Dennum, Derosario, Dixon, Dobbins, Dolby, Donathan, Douglass, Dove, Drake, Drew, Driggers, Dring, Driver, Drury, Duncan, Dungee, Dungill, Dunlop, Dunn, Dunstan, Durham, Dutchfield, Eady, Easter, Edgar, Edge, Edwards, Elliott, Ellis, Elmore, Epperson, Epps, Evans, Fagan, Faggott, Farrar, Farthing, Ferrell, Fielding, Fields, Findley, Finnie, Fletcher, Flood, Flora, Flowers, Fortune, Fox, Francis, Francisco, Franklin, Frazier, Freeman, Frost, Fry, Fullam, Fuller, Fuzmore, Gallimore, Gamby, Garden, Gardner, Garner, Garnes, George, Gibson, Gilbert, Gillett, Godett, Goff, Goldman, Gordon, Gowen, Grace, Graham, Grant, Grantum, Graves, Gray, Grayson, Gregory, Grice, Griffin, Grimes, Groom, Groves, Guy, Gwinn, Hackett, Hagins, Hailey, Haithcock, Hall, Hamilton, Hamlin, Hammond, Hanson, Harden, Harmon, Harris, Harrison, Hartless, Harvey, Hatcher, Hatfield/Hatter, Hawkins, Hawley, Haws, Haynes, Hays, Hearn, Heath, Hedgepeth, Hewlett, Hewson, Hickman, Hicks, Hill, Hilliard, Hitchens, Hiter, Hobson, Hodges, Hogg, Hollinger, Holman, Holmes, Holt, Honesty, Hood, Hoomes, Horn, Howard, Howell, Hubbard, Huelin, Hughes, Humbles, Hunt, Hunter, Hurley, Hurst, Ivey, Jackson, Jacobs, James, Jameson, Jarvis, Jasper, Jeffery, Jeffries, Jenkins, Johns, Johnson, Joiner, Jones, Jordan, Jumper, Keemer, Kelly, Kendall, Kent, Kersey, Key/ Kee, Keyton, King, Kinney, Knight, Lamb, Landum, Lang, Lansford, Lantern, Lawrence, Laws, Lawson, Lee, Lephew, Lester, Lett, Leviner, Lewis, Lighty, Ligon, Lively, Liverpool, Locklear, Lockson, Locus/Lucas, Logan, Longo, Lowry, Lugrove, Lynch, Lyons, Lytle, McCarty, McCoy, McDaniel, McIntosh, Maclin, Madden, Mahorney, Manly, Mann, Manning, Manuel, Marshall, Martin, Mason, Matthews, Mayo, Mays, Meade, Mealy, Meekins, Meggs, Melvin, Miles, Miller, Mills, Milton, Mitchell, Mitchum, Mongom, Monoggin, Month, Moore, Mordick, Morgan, Morris, Mosby, Moses, Moss, Mozingo, Muckelroy, Mumford, Munday, Muns, Murray, Murrow, Nash, Neal, Newsom, Newton, Nicholas, Nickens, Norman, Norris, Norton, Norwood, Nutts, Oats, Okey, Oliver, Otter, Overton, Owen, Oxendine, Page, Pagee, Palmer, Parker, Parr, Parrot, Patrick, Patterson, Payne, Peavy, Peacock, Pendarvis, Pendergrass, Perkins, Peters, Pettiford, Phillips, Pickett, Pierce, Pinn, Pittman, Pitts, Plumly, Poe, Pompey, Portions, Portiss, Powell, Powers, Poythress, Press, Price, Prichard, Proctor, Pryor, Pugh, Pursley, Rains, Ralls, Randall, Ranger, Rann, Raper, Ratcliff, Rawlinson, Redcross, Redman, Reed, Reeves, Revell, Reynolds, Rich, Richardson, Rickman, Ridley, Roberts, Robins, Robinson, Rogers, Rollins, Rosario, Ross, Rouse, Rowe, Rowland, Ruff, Ruffin, Russell, Sample, Sampson, Sanderlin, Santee, Saunders, Savoy, Sawyer, Scott, Seldon, Sexton, Shaw, Shepherd, Shoecraft, Shoemaker, Silver, Simmons, Simms, Simon, Simpson, Sisco, Skipper, Slaxton, Smith, Smothers, Sneed, Snelling, Soleleather, Sorrell, Sparrow, Spelman, Spiller, Spriddle, Spruce, Spurlock, Stafford, Stephens, Stewart, Stringer, Sunket, Swan, Sweat, Sweetin, Symons, Taborn, Talbot, Tann, Tate, Taylor, Teague, Teamer, Thomas, Thompson, Timber, Toney, Tootle, Toulson, Toyer, Travis, Turner, Tyler, Tyner, Tyre, Underwood, Valentine, Vaughan, Vena/Venie, Verty, Vickory, Viers, Walden, Walker, Wallace, Warburton, Warrick, Waters, Watkins, Weaver, Webb, Webster,Weeks, Welch, Wells, West, Wharton, Whistler, White, Whitehurst, Wiggins, Wilkins, Wilkinson, Williams, Willis, Wilson, Winborn, Winn, Winters, Wise, Womble, Wood, Wooten, Worrell, Wright, and Young.

Free African Americans ranks as the greatest achievement in black genealogy of this generation! No collection of African-American genealogy or social history is complete without this two-volume work.

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A True History Full of Romance: Mixed Marriages and Ethnic Identity in Dutch Art, News Media, and Popular Culture (1883-1955)

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Communications/Media Studies, Europe, History, Media Archive, Monographs on 2013-12-31 17:21Z by Steven

A True History Full of Romance: Mixed Marriages and Ethnic Identity in Dutch Art, News Media, and Popular Culture (1883-1955)

Amsterdam University Press
2012-04-02
184 pages
Soft Cover ISBN: 9789089644251

Marga Altena, Historian of Visual Culture

This important study about ethnically mixed marriages in the Netherlands of the 1883-1955 period offers a compelling overview on the nature and experience of ethnicity from a wide range of scholarly perspectives.

Drawing from exhaustive research in the Netherlands, Europe and the Americas, Altena offers illuminating new insights into mixed-marriage families as they were depicted in the arts and in news media; and how the families themselves in turn reacted to, and influenced those images. The author focuses on well-documented individuals and shows how they gained a coherent voice in Dutch culture. Altena attributes to them conscious agency in their own self-presentation, rather than just viewing them as victims of racial prejudice.

A timely contribution to the debate surrounding ethnicity and integration in Dutch society, this work demonstrates how that process was mediated by the various agencies, while placing special emphasis on the marginal groups within central news media as crucial in the opinion making.

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Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United States on 2013-12-27 01:23Z by Steven

Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner

University of West Virginia Press
March 2013
288 pages
Hardcover (Jacketed) ISBN: 978-1-935978-60-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935978-61-9
ePub ISBN: 978-1-935978-62-6
PDF ISBN: 978-1-935978-95-4

Foreword by:

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies
Louisiana State University

Edited by:

Jean Lee Cole, Associate Professor of English
Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore

In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper The Christian Recorder, the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, D.C., and later, as one of the Union army’s first black chaplains.

In the halls of Congress, Turner witnessed the debates surrounding emancipation and black enlistment. As army chaplain, Turner dodged “grape” and cannon, comforted the sick and wounded, and settled disputes between white southerners and their former slaves. He was dismayed by the destruction left by Sherman’s army in the Carolinas, but buoyed by the bravery displayed by black soldiers in battle. After the war ended, he helped establish churches and schools for the freedmen, who previously had been prohibited from attending either.

Throughout his columns, Turner evinces his firm belief in the absolute equality of blacks with whites, and insists on civil rights for all black citizens. In vivid, detailed prose, laced with a combination of trenchant commentary and self-deprecating humor, Turner established himself as more than an observer: he became a distinctive and authoritative voice for the black community, and a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. After Reconstruction failed, Turner became disillusioned with the American dream and became a vocal advocate of black emigration to Africa, prefiguring black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Here, however, we see Turner’s youthful exuberance and optimism, and his open-eyed wonder at the momentous changes taking place in American society.

Well-known in his day, Turner has been relegated to the fringes of African American history, in large part because neither his views nor the forms in which he expressed them were recognized by either the black or white elite. With an introduction by Jean Lee Cole and a foreword by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

Table of Contents

  • Editor’s Note
  • Foreword, Aaron Sheehan-Dean
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: “I have seen war wonders”: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner
  • Chapter 1. Emancipation and Enlistment (March 22, 1862–April 18, 1863)
  • Chapter 2. The Siege of Petersburg (June 25, 1864–December 17, 1864)
  • Chapter 3. Fort Fisher (Jan. 7, 1865–Feb. 18, 1865)
  • Chapter 4. Freeing Slaves, Meeting Sherman (Feb, 25, 1865–June 10, 1865)
  • Chapter 5. Roanoke Island (June 24, 1865–August 5, 1865)
  • About the Authors
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Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge

Posted in Autobiography, Books, History, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, United States, Women on 2013-12-26 04:01Z by Steven

Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge

West Virginia University Press
December 2013
160 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-935978-24-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935978-23-7
ePub ISBN: 978-1-935978-25-1
PDF ISBN: 978-1-938228-64-3

Original Text by Frances Harriet Whipple (1805-1878) with Elleanor Eldridge (1794-1862)

Edited by:

Joycelyn K. Moody, Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature and Professor of English
University of Texas, San Antonio

Elleanor Eldridge, born of African and US indigenous descent in 1794, operated a lucrative domestic services business in nineteenth century Providence, Rhode Island. In defiance of her gender and racial background, she purchased land and built rental property from the wealth she gained as a business owner. In the 1830s, Eldridge was defrauded of her property by a white lender. In a series of common court cases as defendant and plaintiff, she managed to recover it through the Rhode Island judicial system. In order to raise funds to carry out this litigation, her memoir, which includes statements from employers endorsing her respectable character, was published in 1838. Frances Harriet Whipple, an aspiring white writer in Rhode Island, narrated and co-authored Eldridge’s story, expressing a proto-feminist outrage at the male “extortioners” who caused Eldridge’s loss and distress.

With the rarity of Eldridge’s material achievements aside, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge forms an exceptional antebellum biography, chronicling Eldridge’s life from her birth. Because of Eldridge’s exceptional life as a freeborn woman of color entrepreneur, it constitutes a counter-narrative to slave narratives of early 19th-century New England, changing the literary landscape of conventional American Renaissance studies and interpretations of American Transcendentalism.

With an introduction by Joycelyn K. Moody, this new edition contextualizes the extraordinary life of Elleanor Eldridge—from her acquisition of wealth and property to the publication of her biography and her legal struggles to regain stolen property. Because of her mixed-race identity, relative wealth, local and regional renown, and her efficacy in establishing a collective of white women patrons, this biography challenges typical African and indigenous women’s literary production of the early national period and resituates Elleanor Eldridge as an important cultural and historical figure of the nineteenth century.

Read the original text from 1838 here.

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Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family

Posted in Books, Judaism, Media Archive, Monographs, Religion on 2013-12-20 21:52Z by Steven

Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family

Beacon Press
2013-10-22
264 pages
5.5″ X 8.5″ inches
Cloth ISBN: 978-080701319-9

Susan Katz Miller

A book on the growing number of interfaith families raising children in two religions

Susan Katz Miller grew up with a Jewish father and Christian mother, and was raised Jewish. Now in an interfaith marriage herself, she is one of the growing number of Americans who are boldly electing to raise children with both faiths, rather than in one religion or the other (or without religion). In Being Both, Miller draws on original surveys and interviews with parents, students, teachers, and clergy, as well as on her own journey, to chronicle this controversial grassroots movement.

Almost a third of all married Americans have a spouse from another religion, and there are now more children in Christian-Jewish interfaith families than in families with two Jewish parents. Across the country, many of these families are challenging the traditional idea that they must choose one religion. In some cities, more interfaith couples are raising children with “both” than Jewish-only. What does this mean for these families, for these children, and for religious institutions?

Miller argues that there are distinct benefits for families who reject the false choice of “either/or” and instead embrace the synergy of being both. Reporting on hundreds of parents and children who celebrate two religions, she documents why couples make this choice, and how children appreciate dual-faith education. But often families who choose both have trouble finding supportive clergy and community. To that end, Miller includes advice and resources for interfaith families planning baby-welcoming and coming-of-age ceremonies, and seeking to find or form interfaith education programs. She also addresses the difficulties that interfaith families can encounter, wrestling with spiritual questions (“Will our children believe in God?”) and challenges (“How do we talk about Jesus?”). And finally, looking beyond Judaism and Christianity, Being Both provides the first glimpse of the next interfaith wave: intermarried Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist couples raising children in two religions.

Being Both is at once a rousing declaration of the benefits of celebrating two religions, and a blueprint for interfaith families who are seeking guidance and community support.

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Before the Windrush: Race Relations in 20th-Century Liverpool

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, United Kingdom on 2013-12-17 23:02Z by Steven

Before the Windrush: Race Relations in 20th-Century Liverpool

Liverpool University Press
March 2014
288 pages
16 black and white illustrations, 1 colour illustrations, 1 maps
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846319679
Paperback ISBN: 9781781380000

John Belchem, Emeritus Professor of History
University of Liverpool

Long before the arrival of the ‘Empire Windrush’ after the Second World War, Liverpool was widely known for its polyglot population, its boisterous ‘sailortown’ and cosmopolitan profile of transients, sojourners and settlers. Regarding Britain as the mother country, ‘coloured’ colonials arrived in Liverpool for what they thought to be internal migration into a common British world. What they encountered, however, was very different. Their legal status as British subjects notwithstanding, ‘coloured’ colonials in Liverpool were the first to discover: ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’.

Despite the absence of significant new immigration, despite the high levels of mixed dating, marriages and parentage, and despite pioneer initiatives in race and community relations, black Liverpudlians encountered racial discrimination, were left marginalized and disadvantaged and, in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots of 1981, the once proud ‘cosmopolitan’ Liverpool stood condemned for its ‘uniquely horrific’ racism.

‘Before the Windrush’ is a fascinating study that enriches our understanding of how the empire ‘came home’. By drawing attention to Liverpool’s mixed population in the first half of the twentieth century and its approach to race relations, this book seeks to provide historical context and perspective to debates about Britain’s experience of empire in the twentieth century.

Contents

  • List of Tables
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Preface
  • Introduction: ‘The most disturbing case of racial disadvantage in the United Kingdom’
  • 1. Edwardian cosmopolitanism
  • 2. Riot, miscegenation and inter-war depression
  • 3. War-time hospitality and the colour bar
  • 4. Repatriation, reconstruction and post-war race relations
  • 5. Race relations in the 1950s
  • 6. 1960s: race and youth
  • 7. The failure of community relations
  • 8. ‘It took a riot’
  • Sources consulted
  • Index
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Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature

Posted in Books, Law, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-12-17 22:41Z by Steven

Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature

Duke University Press
January 2014
176 pages
3 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5595-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5581-6

Karla FC Holloway, James B. Duke Professor of English; Professor of Law; Professor of Women’s Studies
Duke University

In Legal Fictions, Karla FC Holloway both argues that U.S. racial identity is the creation of U.S. law and demonstrates how black authors of literary fiction have engaged with the law’s constructions of race since the era of slavery. Exploring the resonance between U.S. literature and U.S. jurisprudence, Holloway reveals Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage as stories about personhood and property, David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as structured by evidence law, and Nella Larsen’s Passing as intimately related to contract law. Holloway engages the intentional, contradictory, and capricious constructions of race embedded in the law with the same energy that she brings to her masterful interpretations of fiction by U.S. writers. Her readings shed new light on the many ways that black U.S. authors have reframed fundamental questions about racial identity, personhood, and the law from the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries. Legal Fictions is a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinching look at the implications of that claim.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • Introduction: Bound by Law
    • Intimate Intersectionalities—Scalar Reflections
    • Public Fictions, Private Facts
    • Simile as Precedent
    • Property, Contract, and Evidentiary Values
  • 1. The Claims of Property: On Being and Belonging
    • The Capital in Question
    • Imagined Liberalism
    • Mapping Racial Reason
    • Being in Place: Landscape, Never Inscape
  • 2. Bodies as Evidence (of Things Not Seen)
    • Secondhand Tales and Hearsay
    • Black Legibility—Can I Get a Witness?
    • Trying to Read Me
  • 3. Composing Contract
    • “A novel-like tenor”
    • Passing and Protection
    • A Secluded Colored Neighborhood
  • Epilogue. When and Where “All the Dark-Glass Boys” Enter
  • A Contagion of Madness
  • Notes
  • References
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
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A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-12-16 01:53Z by Steven

A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America

Basic Books
2013-12-10
384 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780465036707

Jacqueline Jones, Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History
University of Texas, Austin

In 1656, a Maryland planter tortured and killed an enslaved man named Antonio, an Angolan who refused to work in the fields. Three hundred years later, Simon P. Owens battled soul-deadening technologies as well as the fiction of “race” that divided him from his co-workers in a Detroit auto-assembly plant. Separated by time and space, Antonio and Owens nevertheless shared a distinct kind of political vulnerability; they lacked rights and opportunities in societies that accorded marked privileges to people labeled “white.”

An American creation myth posits that these two black men were the victims of “racial” discrimination, a primal prejudice that the United States has haltingly but gradually repudiated over the course of many generations. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of Antonio, Owens, and four other African Americans to illustrate the strange history of “race” in America. In truth, Jones shows, race does not exist, and the very factors that we think of as determining it— a person’s heritage or skin color—are mere pretexts for the brutalization of powerless people by the powerful. Jones shows that for decades, southern planters did not even bother to justify slavery by invoking the concept of race; only in the late eighteenth century did whites begin to rationalize the exploitation and marginalization of blacks through notions of “racial” difference. Indeed, race amounted to a political strategy calculated to defend overt forms of discrimination, as revealed in the stories of Boston King, a fugitive in Revolutionary South Carolina; Elleanor Eldridge, a savvy but ill-starred businesswoman in antebellum Providence, Rhode Island; Richard W. White, a Union veteran and Republican politician in post-Civil War Savannah; and William Holtzclaw, founder of an industrial school for blacks in Mississippi, where many whites opposed black schooling of any kind. These stories expose the fluid, contingent, and contradictory idea of race, and the disastrous effects it has had, both in the past and in our own supposedly post-racial society.

Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the pernicious fiction that has shaped four centuries of American history.

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Jim Beckwourth: Black Mountain Man and War Chief of the Crows

Posted in Biography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2013-12-14 21:17Z by Steven

Jim Beckwourth: Black Mountain Man and War Chief of the Crows

University of Oklahoma Press
1980
264 pages
5.5″ x 8.25″
Paperback ISBN: 9780806115559

Elinor Wilson

Dismissed as a “gaudy liar” by most historians and often discredited by writers who deprecated his mixed blood, James Pierson Beckwourth was one of the giants of the early West, certainly deserving to rank alongside Kit Carson, Bill Williams, Louis Vasquez, and Jim Bridger.

Sometime around 1800 James Beckwourth was born a slave in Frederick County, Virginia, the natural son of Sir Jennings Beckwith and a slave girl. In 1810 Sir Jennings moved with his family to the wilderness of St. Louis, Missouri, where Jim was educated and eventually apprenticed to a blacksmith. His father recorded a Deed of Emancipation in his name on three different occasions, sending young Jim out into the world with his blessings.

Jim Beckwourth’s apprenticeship as a fur trapper was served with General William Ashley’s grueling 1824 winter expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Except for a short stint as an army scout during the Seminole campaign, Jim spent the remainder of his long, eventful life in the West, dying among the Crow Indians whom he loved. He was fur trapper, trader, scout war chief of the Crow Nation, explorer, hotelkeeper, dispatch carrier, storekeeper, prospector, Indian agent for the Cheyennes—in short, a mountain man extraordinaire.

In his old age Beckwourth dictated an autobiography to T.D. Bonner, a man more interested in making money with Jim’s adventures than in accurately recording his life. Beckwourth was later disparaged because of the inaccuracies that crept into Bonner’s account.

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