End Of Slavery Research Articles

On Lincoln’s “Instrumentality” to End Slavery: Meditation on the Divine Will and the Emancipation Proclamation

On Lincoln’s “Instrumentality” to End Slavery: Meditation on the Divine Will and the Emancipation Proclamation

Why We Need a Long View of Abolition to End the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Drawing on experiential, literary and historical narratives, this article connects the long history shaping the school-to-prison-pipeline to the contemporary experiences of Black youth in today’s educational system. It maps abolitionism from its origins as a movement to end slavery through the ongoing Black freedom struggles that have challenged state and vigilante violence throughout the eras of Jim Crow and Civil Rights to today’s efforts to dismantle the prison state. By situating the criminalization of African American education from our nation’s founding until the present with particular focus on the post Brown years, the article stresses how policies that funded policing over education persisted through liberal and conservative administrations. This longer and broader historical approach to school discipline should help teachers, school administrators and policy makers devise anti-racist teaching practices that can resist the seemingly unyielding and ever adaptable strictures of white supremacy, most recently evidenced in the attacks on “Critical Race Theory,” “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” initiatives and so-called “wokism.” By listening to how those who have been enslaved and incarcerated regarded education, I join a chorus of voices suggesting how we might structure our pedagogical choices as a fugitive practice that looks for solutions outside the institution and imagines as yet unthought of alternatives to the ways punishment is incorporated into today’s public education.

In between lived life and a social policy agenda: the Global South social question from the inside (Brazil)

This article aims to demonstrate how gender, class, and race are intertwined at the micro level, addressing the interaction of lived life and social policy, through biographical interviews, in Brazil. Less interested in the analysis of inequalities per se, this article focuses on the way black, elderly, poor, female heads of families, living in urban neighbourhoods, manage to subjectively resignify objective domination. The in-depth biographical approach reveals the (re)construction of their subjectivity, defining personal sacrifice as a form of protagonism (agency) and empowerment. This process of resignification occurs by exchanging the unit of experience they relate to, from the individual to the family unit. It engages with social policies (social assistance, public health, and social housing) implemented by the latest Labour Party’s term of office (2003–2016). These policies are based on the role of women as responsible for the family unit. The focus on subjectivity, in different Brazilian metropoles, challenges the production of conformed neoliberal selves, in this case of women, within a specific Global South context, marked by historically high levels of inequality and informal work, since the formal end of slavery.

Prison Abolitionism and the Liberal Imagination

Abstract One of the most controversial political demands to emerge from the mass protests of the summer of 2020 was the abolition of police departments and prisons. This review article takes stock of the rationale behind prison abolitionism and of the philosopher Tommie Shelby's The Idea of Prison Abolition, a recent effort to initiate a dialogue between Angela Davis, the intellectual vanguard of contemporary abolitionists, and Shelby's own style of liberal political philosophy in the tradition of John Rawls. Although it shares a name with the successful nineteenth century movement to end slavery, today's abolitionists have much broader and far-reaching aims. The antislavery movement claimed to be bringing liberal society in line with liberalism's own values by abolishing chattel slavery, but Shelby's argument reaffirms that the prison, for its part, actually has a deep conceptual and historical compatibility with liberalism. Prison abolitionists, conscious of the connections between liberalism and incarceration, therefore, level their attacks not only at imprisonment but against liberal society as a whole. The close entwinement of liberalism and incarceration and deep disagreements about the meaning of basic terms like reform and criminality mean that long-term collaboration between liberals and abolitionists is probably unrealistic, both theoretically and politically.

Making Marriages at the ‘End of Slavery’: Religion, Identity, and Law in the Early Colonial French Soudan

ABSTRACT This article examines how formerly enslaved people in the early colonial French Soudan (today Mali) negotiated and contested the meanings of marriage at the ‘end of slavery’. Because the abolition of slavery in this region was unexpected, no one knew what the legal rules for marriages between emancipated slaves should look like after it occurred. But formerly enslaved people made their opinions known. This piece examines how former slaves’ ideas about marriage clashed and converged, drawing primarily on one exceptionally detailed marriage annulment dispute from a nascent Catholic community called Patyana. Doing so, it illustrates how emancipated slaves went through inchoate processes of forging new identities in slavery’s wake by migrating, changing their names, and converting to new religions, including Christianity and Islam. Bringing these complex identities before legal adjudicators, former slaves determined the meanings of marriage in a time and place marked by great legal ambiguity.

Ending slavery in imperial peripheries: Ottoman abolitionist policy in Trablusgarp and Benghazi provinces (1857–1911)

When Istanbul prohibited the trade of enslaved Africans in 1857, the Ottoman local authorities expanded efforts to curb human trafficking throughout the imperial realm. These endeavours also included Libya, which lies at the frontiers of the Greater Sahara, a major slave-raiding zone in the nineteenth century. The historiography devoted to modern Libya maintains that the Porte took action to curb slavery only in response to British pressure. In this article, I seek to situate the prohibition of human trade in Libya within the larger scope of the end of slavery in the imperial realm. I argue that the Ottomans conducted an abolitionist policy in Libya that was embedded in the reforms undertaken in these peripheral provinces, namely, to foster the Porte’s sovereignty at its imperial frontier. I further argue that the enslaved population gained agency in the manumission process and in their integration into Ottoman society after their liberation. This bottom-up approach to the end of human bondage reveals the entanglement of old and new patterns of manumission in the era of abolition as well as the social integration of these emancipated slaves into Ottoman society during the Reform period.

Partial Iconoclasm: John Witherspoon's Presbyterian (Political) Theology and Slavery

The Reformed and Presbyterian traditions, characterized by their iconoclasm and anti-idolatry, stress the importance of rejecting false gods and idolatry, with a political theology that allows for critique of unjust authorities. Yet, there's a dichotomy in how leaders like Witherspoon applied these principles, as they criticized oppressive systems while simultaneously benefiting from the oppression of enslaved Black individuals. With respect to ending slavery, Witherspoon and other Presbyterian leaders in Princeton during the Revolutionary period adopted a strategy of gradualism, aiming for incremental changes towards the end of slavery. However, their approach often seemed inconsistent, advocating for immediate disruptive change against British rule but taking a more moderate stance on slavery and race. An in-depth theological and historical analysis of figures like Witherspoon provides insights into their complex legacies and the broader Reformed tradition's stance on slavery, race, and political upheaval.

Latent and explicit mnemonic communities on social media: studying digital memory formation through hashtag co-occurrence analysis

Abstract This article explores the nature and dynamics of mnemonic communities within the context of social media platforms and proposes to identify mnemonic communities using hashtag co-occurrence analysis. The article distinguishes between ‘explicit’ and ‘latent’ mnemonic communities, arguing that while some digital mnemonic communities may exhibit characteristics of offline communities, others exist latently as discursive spaces or semiospheres without direct awareness. On platforms like Instagram, hashtags function as semiotic markers, but also as user-chosen indexes to the content. As hashtags link the social and semantic aspects of community formation, hashtag co-occurrence analysis offers a robust framework for understanding and mapping these communities. This method allows to detect and analyse patterns of hashtag use that suggest the presence of networked community structures that may not be apparent or conscious to the social media users themselves. Additionally, a metric is introduced for determining the degree of ‘latentness’ of communities that quantifies the cohesion within communities compared to their external connections. The article demonstrates this approach by applying hashtag co-occurrence analysis to a dataset of Instagram posts tagged with #Juneteenth, a popular hashtag used to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. It identifies 87 mnemonic communities that reflect the diversity and complexity of how platforms facilitate memory-sharing practices and the role of semiotic markers in forming (latent) mnemonic networks.

A post-colonial reading of Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on slavery and its aftermaths

This article develops a postcolonial and comparative reading of Tocqueville’s writings on slavery. It argues, first, that Tocqueville analyzed the ending of slavery as a revolutionary social transformation involving changes in laws, social relations and mores, and second, that he employed the same analytical framework consistently to discuss processes of abolition in the United States and in the French Caribbean Islands. In the United States the process of abolition of slavery was deepening rather than ending racist prejudices, racial segregation and hatred between the black and the white populations. This would, so Tocqueville predicted, undermine democracy in America. In the plantation colonies he believed the French could draw lessons from the English experiences when organizing the abolition process. Only when legal changes and changes in mores developed in tandem there could be economic and political stability in the aftermath of slavery. This would allow the French to end slavery peacefully, which he deemed necessary if they intended to continue exploiting the colonies. The article argues that Tocqueville demonstrated a deep and critical understanding of the reprehensible, long-lasting role of anti-black racism and slavery in barring the emergence of democratic cultures based on equal standing and integration across racial difference. Yet, he combined this critical perspective on racist slavery with an accepted defense of European supremacy and with a sense of pessimism about the possibilities for Africans to ever become capable of self-government.

Delineation of Slavery in Selected Literature of Nepal

Slavery stands as the cultural practice, norms and values where one class entice, persuade and force another class to assist, work and Labor for the benefits of the former. It was a common practice in the world when people were not aware about their rights. Empowerment of people resulted the end of slavery in most of the countries. Slavery was eradicated from Nepal in 1981 B. S. by Rana Prime minister Chandra Shumsher Rana. It was just a legal declaration but it was a great challenge to end it practically. There were different types of slavery in the society. Kamaiya, Kamalari, Haruwa, Charuwa and Haliya traditions were prevalent in different parts of Nepal. This article explores the illustration of slavery in some selected literature of Nepal. This study analyses about how slavery is presented in the literature.

Culture training for strategic marketing : Case study of a Juneteenth block party

Juneteenth, the annual cultural celebration also known in the African American community as Emancipation Day, was made a national holiday in 2021. Today, the holiday that commemorates 19th June, 1865, the date when news of emancipation and the end of slavery finally reached enslaved peoples in the farthest reaches of America’s south-western states, is challenging companies and organisations to figure out how best to honour this shiny new and momentous holiday. And while many organisations struggle to get smart about this ‘new’ holiday, organisations that seek to understand the cultural ethos of the celebration — and their part in it — have demonstrated success. To better understand a successful campaign, this case study will examine how an event and training model with a block party theme succeeded in ‘getting Juneteenth right’ to create an informative, engaging and inspiring workplace initiative. The brand and shopper marketing agency extended the implementation of its agency-wide diversity, equity and inclusion reorientation strategy to include its Juneteenth celebration. Taking this cultureforward approach, the agency sought to educate, inform and enlist its own employees in a uniquely authentic way to build cross-cultural knowledge to strategy, creative, media and retail marketing for its list of Fortune 500 clients, including EJ Gallo, Procter & Gamble and White Castle.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Paul D. Escott. The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North.

In The Worst Passions of Human Nature, distinguished historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction Paul D. Escott argues cogently and convincingly that while the conflict resulted in the end of slavery and progressive changes that had seemed all but impossible to most observers before the transformative events of the war, the national commitment to white supremacy was so powerful that this limited the potential for change and progress even during this seemingly revolutionary period. While the Democratic party remained united in its commitment to white racial superiority and racist attacks on African Americans and attempts to protect or promote their civil rights, the Republican party’s newfound commitment to emancipation during the war did not bring about widespread support for full equality of the races among either the party’s leaders or rank-and-file voters. Escott carefully examines the northern press in the form of newspapers, journals, and books, as well as other primary sources, providing a very broad evidentiary base for his claims. His essential argument is at odds with some modern historiography that sees the Civil War as a high point for Americans’ embrace of the fundamental national ideals of freedom and equality. Escott, like Gary Gallagher in The Union War (2011), sees white northerners during the war as embracing, or at least accepting, emancipation as a war measure fit and necessary to restore the Union, as Abraham Lincoln explained it. He provides strong evidence, however, that the northern press and leaders (including Lincoln) still generally advocated the removal of African Americans from the country following the end of slavery, perhaps southward to the Caribbean or Latin America. And if such colonization efforts proved impractical, as they soon did, Republicans generally assured wary and racist northern voters that African Americans would stay in the southern states and labor in some subordinate role there and, thus, would not enter northern states or communities in significant numbers. The deeply rooted racist attitudes of white northerners, including most Republicans, made a commitment to racial egalitarianism unachievable in the mid-nineteenth century. What the devout abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison referred to as the “worst passions of human nature” provided a powerful and nearly immovable barrier to the embrace of full equality that he devoted decades of his life to achieving, but which remained ultimately elusive.

William Warren Rogers Jr. Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874.

In this new study, Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, William Warren Rogers Jr. argues that with the end of slavery, political conflict in the state became a struggle to define the place of African Americans in the new order of things. He deftly analyzes conflicts over education, railroad financing, and other internal improvements, but it was the race “problem” that ultimately shaped the contours of partisanship during the period. Before emancipation, there had been no question about white domination of Alabama, and even the poorest of whites enjoyed rights, political and otherwise, denied the enslaved and the small number of free African Americans. After the war, how white domination might be restored was, to say the least, an open question. As across the south, Rogers argues, most white Alabamians hoped to sharply limit the citizenship rights of Blacks. In the months immediately following the war, political leaders feared that President Andrew Johnson might impose the transformative plan of Reconstruction many congressional Republicans had been demanding. Johnson, however, soon announced a plan that left the fate of freed people largely in the hands of former enslavers. Alabama joined other southern states in producing constitutions that fulfilled the Johnson plan’s requirements. Because the Johnson plan did not mandate Black enfranchisement, the election of the first government after the war was a typical all-white affair, and the first legislature convened under the new constitution did not disappoint its constituents. It quickly moved to approve measures that sought to reestablish white control of Black labor and define Blacks as second-class citizens. As Rogers clearly demonstrates, other than some expansion of educational opportunity for freed people thanks to the efforts of the American Missionary Association and other organizations, freedom fell far short of African Americans’ and their Republican allies’ expectations.

Deborah Willis. The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.

Readers interested in the Black freedom struggle of the nineteenth century will find Deborah Willis’s The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship a must read. While abolitionist portraiture and antislavery ephemera of the 1830s and 1840s have yielded some of the most iconic illustrations of the nineteenth century, this text reveals an equally robust image practice organized around Black soldiers, produced between 1860 and 1866, that continues to influence twenty-first century visualizations of Blacks in the military. Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by Willis and Barbara Krauthammer (2013) might be the closest comparison to Black Civil War Soldier in terms of revelations about African American engagements with the camera around the question of freedom. However, Black Civil War Soldier contributes to a larger historiographic project that insists the abolition of slavery was the central motive for fighting the Civil War. Critical works such as Thavolia Glymph’s Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2019) rebuff a larger swath of secondary scholarship organized around ideas about who fought and for what reasons. Yet Black Civil War Soldier is distinct in using photographs to assert the primacy of African Americans in the Civil War and freedom as their particular motivation for taking up arms. Willis organizes archival sources in ways that reveal the Black freedom struggle in visual media produced in a wartime context. By presenting readers with a vast collection of photographs, letters, diary writings, pension records, newspapers and contemporary art, Willis shows us that vision and visibility were of central importance to Black Civil War soldiers who fought to free loved ones and end the system of enslavement.

Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874

In this fine political history, William Warren Rogers Jr. contributes to our understanding of Reconstruction in Alabama. While it is not a full history of Reconstruction in the Cotton State, the book expertly explains how the struggle over political power animated the era. “Reconstruction shook Alabama to its core” (p. 3). The defeat of the Confederacy resulted in revolutionary change in Alabama politics, especially with the end of slavery. Rogers rightly places race and the struggle for civil rights at the center of his study. He deftly interweaves the issues of race into a deep analysis of other matters such as economics, education, and partisanship. The reader finds inspirational stories of success and achievement as well as the bitter fruits of disappointment and failure as African Americans experienced the realities of freedom and political power in the postwar period. While race is the central focus, the plot is the story of the Republican party in Alabama. A coalition of white Alabamians, African Americans, and northern transplants, the state's Republican party emerged in large part because of the refusal of Democrats to accept the push for racial equality. Democratic stubbornness led those whites who wanted to move forward on other issues (such as railroads and economic development) to join the freedmen and radicals who also sought civil rights and equality. Thus, the Republican organization was tenuous and subject to division from the outset. Meanwhile, Democratic resistance to Reconstruction only solidified and grew more powerful. Rogers does well showing the players involved, whatever side they were on.

Slavery and the Economic Lives of Women

Slavery and the Economic Lives of Women Emma Rothschild (bio) Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 320 pp. ISBN 9780300251838 (cl.). Claire Priest. Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 248 pp. ISBN 9780691241722 (cl.); 9780691185651 (ebook). Lorri Glover. Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 344 pp. ISBN 9780300236118 (cl.); 9780300255942 (ebook). Christine Walker. Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 336 pp. ISBN 9781469658797 (cl.); 9781469655277 (ebook). The domestic institution of slavery was a condition of women, men, and children. To be enslaved, for women and girls, was to be subject to the violence of forced reproduction, and, to an extreme extent, to sexual assault. It was to be confined, even more than the male enslaved, in the private space of the household or the home. To be the owner of the enslaved, for women, was to be subject to “the fatal poison of irresponsible power,” in the words that Frederick Douglass used to describe one of his many “mistresses.”1 The power of female owners or mistresses has been an anomaly in the historiography of American slavery. The “logic of female dependence” is part of the established history of the antebellum South, in which it was men who “had borne overwhelming responsibility for slavery’s daily management and perpetuation.”2 The dominion of mistresses called into question an enduring presumption that women were the objects and not the owners of power; or that they were (relatively) compassionate and un-violent, as a matter of occupational or evolutionary or neurobiological circumstance. The new historiography of women slave owners is a challenge to these reassuring stories. It shows that women were closely involved in the management of slavery and in the ownership of slaves. A history of economic life that has space for women—that takes seriously the sources in which women’s inheritance, credit, and market transactions were recorded—can even suggest that slavery was itself a peculiarly female institution. Women had a “deep economic interest and investment” in slavery, Stephanie Jones-Rogers writes in her remarkable book They Were Her Property: White Women as [End Page 157] Slave Owners in the American South; their relationship to property in the enslaved was “economic at its foundation” (xiii, xvii). In the decades preceding the end of slavery in the United States, women were actively involved in every aspect of the slave economy. Jones-Rogers is concerned, in particular, with non-elite women, the owners of—and traders in—small numbers of the enslaved. She draws on an impressive range of legal sources, including local Chancery Courts, and on a single, immense, complex source in the interviews with former slaves, some of them centenarians, conducted by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. The book is a depiction of the “financial knowledge” of the enslaved themselves and of their observations of the women by whom they were owned (97). The “liquidity” or “mobility” of property in the enslaved is at the heart of the story. The enslaved could be sold, “realized,” endowed, or given as gifts. Wealthy owners gave slaves to their infant daughters and as wedding presents. Slaves were sold to pay for a “daughter’s wedding dress”; one former enslaved person said of his owner that whenever “she wanted a dress, she would sell a slave” (18, 142). The possibility of being sold, which loomed over the life of every enslaved person, was an opportunity for the owners of slaves. One of the most dramatic moments in They Were Her Property is a story from 1865, after the end of slavery. Betty Jones recalled that her grandmother “ran seven miles to her mistress’s home,” “looked at her real hard,” and said, “You can’t put me in yo’ pocket now!” (183). The institution of coverture in Anglo-American common law, in which women at marriage were deemed to be “covered over” by their husbands, was a...

A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power by James Walvin

Walvin’s concise review of slavery in the Atlantic argues that slavery has transformed the West or, indeed, the world to the present day. Chapters in six sections include overviews of Iberian and northern European slave systems, examples from the Middle Passage, slave trade within Brazil and the United States, “managing slavery,” the campaign for freedom, and the argument about the world transformed by slavery—as seen through sugar, tobacco, servile labor, and plantation economies. Walvin’s purpose for writing the book was to restate the history of slavery in support of the discourse around Black Lives Matter.The book’s most original observations are signaled at the opening of the concluding chapter: “The furore which swept round the globe in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 brought slavery back into widespread public debate.” In Walvin’s words, “Critics everywhere were swift to point out that the origins of that injustice lay deep in the history of relations between Black and white … [and] the history of slavery” (331). As he suggests, public discourse turns to history when the issues become most painful and difficult.Walvin argues that the intensity of the reaction to Floyd’s death was reinforced by an earlier debate. “The 1619 Project,” a series published in New York Times Magazine, appeared in 2019 with the 400th anniversary of the delivery of African captives to Virginia.1 These essays, which reviewed U.S. history through the lens of slavery, prompted heated discussion among Americans of varied backgrounds, but they made virtually no reference to history outside the United States. Walvin argues, however, that this renewed interest in U.S. slavery ignited a global debate that linked police violence worldwide to reminders of social inequity, to statues of imperial generals, and to the wealth garnered by powerful families and institutions from the work of forced laborers.Having argued that statements about the past of slavery and inequality need to be updated, Walvin turns to the historical background underlying the explosion of Black Lives Matter. He begins with World War II, in which people from all over the world fought the Axis powers, after which the inhabitants of colonies were able to claim the rights of national citizens. He acknowledges that the U.S. civil-rights movement of that era performed a similar function: “In the USA, the reconstruction of the Black past lifted slavery out of its essentially regional setting.”Walvin’s perspective on the British Empire reaffirms the argument that the slavery/inequality debate is worldwide, not just American. Walvin shows how children born to immigrant parents in Europe found that their school curriculum did not address their family or national background. Educators had to address the issue of whether a history of Europe were even possible without looking at slavery. In ex-colonial countries, the inherited imperial school curriculum was inflected by a study of national rights and independence, relying on national scholars to explain the contrasts of wealth and poverty. Walvin mentions James and Williams for the Caribbean cases.2 In both the United States and overseas, expanding studies of slavery brought new disciplines to historical study—linguistics, archaeology, and expanded digital analysis.Walvin refers ambivalently to both West and world as the locus of slavery’s transformation. Thus, “for centuries, the Western world at large was inextricably entangled with slavery.” But his sense of the underlying dynamic is clear. The spreading realization of the global ubiquity of slavery and its effects begged two inescapable questions: “Why were we not told?” and “How had Europeans become the Lords of Human Kind?” (336, 343). In fact, preceding research, especially in the last fifty years, had deeply documented slavery. Evidence was plentiful, but many saw it as new. Such is the interplay of scholars and communities.Finally, given the insistent question of what would be a fair response to the end of slavery, Walvin addresses reparations, focusing especially on the website that reveals details of payments to British owners of slaves in the 1830s (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs). The discussion is evidently continuing. At the institutional level, banks and universities have made compensatory payments in recognition of their earlier profits from slavery. Walvin concludes the book with a rhetorical question: “Who could now deny that slavery matters?” (354).

Epistemological Allyship

Discussions about decolonising psychology now abound. A key perspective from which these commentaries have been written relates to a confrontation of the gatekeepers in global psychology. While this approach is valuable to end epistemological violence and other forms of injustice, it also ends up alienating influential scholars in hegemonic psychology who can magnify the impact of the decolonisation effort. In this article, I borrow from the anti-racism literature the concept of allyship to put forward a new concept of epistemological allyship (EA). I position EA to invite, but not to demand, support from and to provide guidance to gatekeepers who truly wish to support the decolonisation efforts. However, unlike the past experiences with ending slavery in which Black people were portrayed to or required to beg for freedom, this concept of EA is not to be understood in this light. Rather it should be understood to imply that while academics from the majority of the world (AMWs) are fighting their own epistemological battles, any helpful support is and should be welcome.

Wage-Earning Slaves: Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Wage-Earning Slaves: Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba