Aiming for Pensacola

Aiming for Pensacola
Author: Matthew J. Clavin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2015-10-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674088255

In the decades before the Civil War, the small number of slaves who managed to escape bondage almost always made their way northward along the secret routes and safe havens known as the Underground Railroad. Offering a new perspective on this standard narrative, Matthew Clavin recovers the story of fugitive slaves who sought freedom by—paradoxically—sojourning deeper into the American South toward an unlikely destination: the small seaport of Pensacola, Florida. Geographically and culturally, across decades of rule by a succession of powers—Spain, Great Britain, and the United States—Pensacola occupied an isolated position on the margins of antebellum Southern society. Yet as neighboring Gulf Coast seaports like New Orleans experienced rapid population growth and economic development based on racial slavery, Pensacola became known for something else: as an enclave of diverse, free peoples of European, African, and Native American descent. Farmers, laborers, mechanics, soldiers, and sailors learned to cooperate across racial lines and possessed no vested interest in maintaining slavery or white supremacy. Clavin examines how Pensacola’s reputation as a gateway to freedom grew in the minds of slaves and slaveowners, and how it became a beacon for fugitives who found northern routes to liberation inaccessible. The interracial resistance to slavery that thrived in Pensacola in the years before the Civil War, Clavin contends, would play a role in demolishing the foundations of Southern slavery when that fateful conflict arrived.

The Battle of Negro Fort

The Battle of Negro Fort
Author: Matthew J. Clavin
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1479837334

The dramatic story of the United States’ destruction of a free and independent community of fugitive slaves in Spanish Florida In the aftermath of the War of 1812, Major General Andrew Jackson ordered a joint United States army-navy expedition into Spanish Florida to destroy a free and independent community of fugitive slaves. The result was the Battle of Negro Fort, a brutal conflict among hundreds of American troops, Indian warriors, and black rebels that culminated in the death or re-enslavement of nearly all of the fort’s inhabitants. By eliminating this refuge for fugitive slaves, the United States government closed an escape valve that African Americans had utilized for generations. At the same time, it intensified the subjugation of southern Native Americans, including the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles. Still, the battle was significant for another reason as well. During its existence, Negro Fort was a powerful symbol of black freedom that subverted the racist foundations of an expanding American slave society. Its destruction reinforced the nation’s growing commitment to slavery, while illuminating the extent to which ambivalence over the institution had disappeared since the nation’s founding. Indeed, four decades after declaring that all men were created equal, the United States destroyed a fugitive slave community in a foreign territory for the first and only time in its history, which accelerated America’s transformation into a white republic. The Battle of Negro Fort places the violent expansion of slavery where it belongs, at the center of the history of the early American republic.

Africans in the Old South

Africans in the Old South
Author: Randy J. Sparks
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674495160

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.

The Commons of Pensacola

The Commons of Pensacola
Author: Amanda Peet
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2014-08-25
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0822231204

Judith has been divested of her assets and forced to leave her luxurious New York life after her husband's Wall Street scam became headline news. When her daughter Becca and Becca's filmmaker boyfriend pay Judith a visit to the one-bedroom condo Judith now occupies in Pensacola, Florida, everyone's motives are called into question. How will past and present circumstances inform how this family moves into the future?

Exiles at Home

Exiles at Home
Author: Shirley Elizabeth Thompson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674023512

New Orleans has always captured our imagination as an exotic city in its racial ambiguity and pursuit of les bons temps. Despite its image as a place apart, the city played a key role in nineteenth-century America as a site for immigration and pluralism, the quest for equality, and the centrality of self-making. In both the literary imagination and the law, creoles of color navigated life on a shifting color line. As they passed among various racial categories and through different social spaces, they filtered for a national audience the meaning of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution of 1804, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and de jure segregation. Shirley Thompson offers a moving study of a world defined by racial and cultural double consciousness. In tracing the experiences of creoles of color, she illuminates the role ordinary Americans played in shaping an understanding of identity and belonging.

Why White Liberals Fail

Why White Liberals Fail
Author: Anthony J. Badger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674242343

Anthony Badger explains why liberal campaigns for race-neutral economic policies failed to win over white Southerners. When federal programs did not deliver the economic benefits that white Southerners expected, the appeal of biracial politics was supplanted by the values-based lure of conservative Republicans.

Making Foreigners

Making Foreigners
Author: Kunal M. Parker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2015-09-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107030218

This book connects the history of immigration with histories of Native Americans, African Americans, women, the poor, Latino/a Americans and Asian Americans.

Students of the Dream

Students of the Dream
Author: Ruth Carbonette Yow
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674971906

For decades, Marietta High was the flagship public school of a largely white suburban community in Cobb County, Georgia, just northwest of Atlanta. Today, as the school’s majority black and Latino students struggle with high rates of poverty and low rates of graduation, Marietta High has become a symbol of the wave of resegregation that is sweeping white students and students of color into separate schools across the American South. Students of the Dream begins with the first generations of Marietta High desegregators authorized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling and follows the experiences of later generations who saw the dream of integration fall apart. Grounded in over one hundred interviews with current and former Marietta High students, parents, teachers, community leaders, and politicians, this innovative ethnographic history invites readers onto the key battlegrounds—varsity sports, school choice, academic tracking, and social activism—of Marietta’s struggle against resegregation. Well-intentioned calls for diversity and colorblindness, Ruth Carbonette Yow shows, have transformed local understandings of the purpose and value of school integration, and not always for the better. The failure of local, state, or national policies to stem the tide of resegregation is leading activists—students, parents, and teachers—to reject traditional integration models and look for other ways to improve educational outcomes among African American and Latino students. Yow argues for a revitalized commitment to integration, but one that challenges many of the orthodoxies—including colorblindness—inherited from the mid-twentieth-century civil rights struggle.

I'm a Dead Man

I'm a Dead Man
Author: Sgt. Mike Simmons
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-05-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781737109815

They were after him and he knew it. He said to his brother, "I'm a dead man. They're going to kill me. It's about that thing that happened in Dallas, but I have run as far as I am going to run." The next morning, he was found lying in a pool of his own blood.Hank Killam was from Pensacola, Florida. After a Burglary arrest and flight from the state, he ended up in Dallas, Texas in November 1963. Killam encountered both Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of shooting JFK, and Jack Ruby, Oswald's assassin. After JFK's assassination, Hank, running for his life, returned home, only to be followed and killed.

The Fighting Rabbis

The Fighting Rabbis
Author: Albert I. Slomovitz
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2001-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0814798063

The Fighting Rabbis details the compelling history of Jewish military chaplains from their first service during the Civil War to the first female Jewish chaplain and the rabbinic role in Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm. Rabbi Slomovitz, himself a Navy chaplain, opens a window onto the fieldwork, religious services, counseling, and dramatic battlefield experiences of Jewish military chaplains throughout our nation's history.