Belinda's Petition

Belinda's Petition
Author: Raymond A. Winbush
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 72
Release: 2009-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441514430

Ray Winbush compiles the most important cases of reparations made for the Transatlantic Slave Trade, highlighting Belinda?s Petition, the earliest attempt by an American African to seek payment for her 50 years of enslavement in the early United States. Africans 550-year struggle seeking to repair the long-term economic and mental damage of slavery is presented in this powerfully compelling book.

The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865

The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865
Author: Dickson D. Bruce
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813920672

From the earliest texts of the colonial period to works contemporary with Emancipation, African American literature has been a dialogue across color lines, and a medium through which black writers have been able to exert considerable authority on both sides of that racial demarcation. Dickson D. Bruce argues that contrary to prevailing perceptions of African American voices as silenced and excluded from American history, those voices were loud and clear. Within the context of the wider culture, these writers offered powerful, widely read, and widely appreciated commentaries on American ideals and ambitions. The Origins of African American Literature provides strong evidence to demonstrate just how much writers engaged in a surprising number of dialogues with society as a whole. Along with an extensive discussion of major authors and texts, including Phillis Wheatley's poetry, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Martin Delany's Blake, Bruce explores less-prominent works and writers as well, thereby grounding African American writing in its changing historical settings. The Origins of African American Literature is an invaluable revelation of the emergence and sources of the specifically African American literary tradition and the forces that helped shape it.

Notable Black American Women

Notable Black American Women
Author: Jessie Carney Smith
Publisher: VNR AG
Total Pages: 842
Release: 1992
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780810391772

Arranged alphabetically from "Alice of Dunk's Ferry" to "Jean Childs Young," this volume profiles 312 Black American women who have achieved national or international prominence.

Reasoning with Democratic Values 2.0, Volume 1

Reasoning with Democratic Values 2.0, Volume 1
Author: David E. Harris
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0807777072

The extensively updated and revised edition of Reasoning with Democratic Values 2.0 presents an engaging approach to teaching U.S. history that promotes critical thinking and social responsibility. In Volume 1, students investigate 20 significant historical episodes, arranged chronologically, beginning with the colonial era and ending with Reconstruction. A comprehensive Instructor’s Manual is also available for purchase. In Volume 1, students can grapple with such ethical dilemmas as: Should the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have granted reparation to the enslaved woman, Belinda Royall?Should Thomas Jefferson have freed his slaves?Should Juan Seguín have fought against the United States in the Mexican–American War?Should Robert E. Lee have accepted command of the Union Army? “A powerful approach to learning history. The lively and exciting true stories provide ample background to engage students in discussions of well-framed questions that are perennial and important.” —Diana Hess, dean, University of Wisconsin–Madison “Ethical reasoning is joined with historical reasoning—values with inquiry—in an array of well selected cases. This curriculum belongs in every U.S. history classroom.” —Walter C. Parker, University of Washington “Clearly organized and eminently balanced, these volumes will help students become citizens who can converse across their differences.” —Jonathan Zimmerman, University of Pennsylvania “These volumes will help build a deeper understanding of significant historical concepts and present wonderful opportunities to engage in critical thinking.” —Amy Bloom, J.D., social studies education consultant, Oakland Schools

In Dependence

In Dependence
Author: Jacqueline Beatty
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1479812153

Examines the role of the American Revolution in the everyday lives of women Patriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women’s rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years of history in three urban centers, Jacqueline Beatty illustrates the ways in which women in the revolutionary era asserted their status as dependents, demanding the protections owed to them as the assumed subordinates of men. In so doing, they claimed various forms of aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves and their female friends in the face of patriarchal assumptions about their powerlessness. Ultimately, women in the revolutionary era were able to advocate for themselves and express a relative degree of power not in spite of their dependent status, but because of it. Their varying degrees of success in using these methods, however, was contingent on their race, class, and socio-economic status, and the degree to which their language and behavior conformed to assumptions of Anglo-American femininity. In Dependence thus exposes the central paradoxes inherent in American women’s social, legal, and economic positions of dependence in the Revolutionary era, complicating binary understandings of power and weakness, of agency and impotence, and of independence and dependence. Significantly, the American Revolution provided some women with the language and opportunities in which to claim old rights—the rights of dependents—in new ways. Most importantly, In Dependence shows how women’s coming to consciousness as rights-bearing individuals laid the groundwork for the activism and collective petitioning efforts of later generations of American feminists.

Belonging

Belonging
Author: Gloria McCahon Whiting
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2024-08-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 151282450X

As winter turned to spring in the year 1699, Sebastian and Jane embarked on a campaign of persuasion. The two wished to marry, and they sought the backing of their community in Boston. Nothing, however, could induce Jane’s enslaver to consent. Only after her death did Sebastian and Jane manage to wed, forming a long-lasting union even though husband and wife were not always able to live in the same household. New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but this snippet of Jane and Sebastian’s story reminds us that it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most of whom were of African descent. In Belonging, Gloria McCahon Whiting tells the region’s early history from the perspective of the people, like Jane and Sebastian, who belonged to others and who struggled to maintain a sense of belonging among their kin. Through a series of meticulously reconstructed family narratives, Whiting traces the contours of enslaved people’s intimate lives in early New England, where they often lived with those who bound them but apart from kin. Enslaved spouses rarely were able to cohabit; fathers and their offspring routinely were separated by inheritance practices; children could be removed from their mothers at an enslaver’s whim; and people in bondage had only partial control of their movement through the region, which made more difficult the task of maintaining distant relationships. But Belonging does more than lay bare the obstacles to family stability for those in bondage. Whiting also charts Afro-New Englanders’ persistent demands for intimacy throughout the century and a half stretching from New England’s founding to the American Revolution. And she shows how the work of making and maintaining relationships influenced the region’s law, religion, society, and politics. Ultimately, the actions taken by people in bondage to fortify their families played a pivotal role in bringing about the collapse of slavery in New England’s most populous state, Massachusetts.

Love of Freedom

Love of Freedom
Author: Catherine Adams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2010-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199741786

They baked New England's Thanksgiving pies, preached their faith to crowds of worshippers, spied for the patriots during the Revolution, wrote that human bondage was a sin, and demanded reparations for slavery. Black women in colonial and revolutionary New England sought not only legal emancipation from slavery but defined freedom more broadly to include spiritual, familial, and economic dimensions. Hidden behind the banner of achieving freedom was the assumption that freedom meant affirming black manhood The struggle for freedom in New England was different for men than for women. Black men in colonial and revolutionary New England were struggling for freedom from slavery and for the right to patriarchal control of their own families. Women had more complicated desires, seeking protection and support in a male headed household while also wanting personal liberty. Eventually women who were former slaves began to fight for dignity and respect for womanhood and access to schooling for black children.

Academic Brands

Academic Brands
Author: Mario Biagioli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2022-07-21
Genre: Law
ISBN: 110889819X

The first comprehensive analysis of the emergence of academic brands, this book explores how the modern university is being transformed in an increasingly global economy of higher education where luxury is replacing access. More than just a sign of corporatization and privatization, academic brands provide a unique window on the university's concerns and struggles with conveying 'excellence' and reputation in a competitive landscape organized by rankings, while also capitalizing on its brand to generate revenue when state support dwindles. This multidisciplinary volume addresses topics including the uniqueness of academic brands, their role in the global brand economy of distinction, and their vulnerability to problematic social and political associations. By focusing on brands, the volume analyzes the tensions between the university's traditional commitment to public interest values – education, research, and the production of knowledge – and its increasingly managerial culture framed by corporate, private values. Available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Executing Race

Executing Race
Author: Sharon M. Harris
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2005
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0814209750

Executing Race examines the multiple ways in which race, class, and the law impacted women's lives in the 18th century and, equally important, the ways in which women sought to change legal and cultural attitudes in this volatile period. Through an examination of infanticide cases, Harris reveals how conceptualizations of women, especially their bodies and their legal rights, evolved over the course of the 18th century. Early in the century, infanticide cases incorporated the rhetoric of the witch trials. However, at mid-century, a few women, especially African American women, began to challenge definitions of "bastardy" (a legal requirement for infanticide), and by the end of the century, women were rarely executed for this crime as the new nation reconsidered illegitimacy in relation to its own struggle to establish political legitimacy. Against this background of legal domination of women's lives, Harris exposes the ways in which women writers and activists negotiated legal territory to invoke their voices into the radically changing legal discourse.

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English
Author: Sarah Eron
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 905
Release: 2024-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003845266

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.