Free Black Women Research Articles

An encounter with the divine: the extraordinary literacies of black girls and women in endarkened third spaces

The concept of “spirit-murder“ reminds us that the violence Black girls and women suffer in academic spaces travels beyond the mental and emotional; it manifests on a spiritual level as well. Consequently, spiritual healing is a priority for Black girls and women to traverse the world whole and worthy. This paper intends to first, theorize endarkened third spaces, sites fashioned to enact healing through the Divine and resistance against White supremacy. We, then, explore a set of extraordinary literacies—cleansing, language making, and sister circles—that prepare these endarkened third spaces as transient sites of spiritual rejuvenation. To examine these extraordinary literacies, both authors investigate their respective spiritual practices in the context of their roles as students, educators, and researchers in communion with each other. The authors commit to a joint self-study, using the methods of educational journey mapping, unstructured interviews, and Archaeology of SelfTM to elicit insights from their histories and present. Second, this paper considers what these endarkened third spaces and extraordinary literacies offer Black girls and women attempting to thrive in various academic spaces. We contend that practicing these extraordinary literacies build an endarkened third space that operate as a site to re-imagining and re-conceptualizing of self as being communicative with the present, ancestral past, and the greater Divine, which thus free Black girls and women to heal from the harms of the world.

The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg

With an introduction and a collection of fifteen chapters, Fischer and Grinberg have provided one of the most insightful and wide-ranging analyses of slavery, abolition, and its legacies in Brazil published to date. The editors’ introduction highlights three individuals who re-surface throughout the volume. Son of a wealthy landowner in the province (now state) of Pernambuco, Joaquim Nabuco (1813–1878) founded the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society in September 1880. That Society and Nabuco’s book Abolitionism (1883) helped to foment a movement that brought Brazilian slavery to an end in 1888. Nabuco denounced slavery’s impact on all sectors of Brazilian society, highlighting how it corrupted the rule of law and harmed economic development.From the same state of Pernambuco, Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) became one of Brazil’s most famous intellectuals of the twentieth century. Freyre’s depiction of beneficent slave owners and “racial democracy” in post-emancipation Brazil have been thoroughly debunked. Nevertheless, his descriptions of patriarchalism, family structure, sexuality, and race mixture remain hugely relevant.The third intellectual is Abdias do Nascimento (1914–2011), an African Brazilian from São Paulo. As activist, journalist, playwright, and professor, Nascimento relentlessly affirmed the contributions of Africans and their descendants to Brazilian society. By emphasizing Black resistance to enslavement and detailing the pervasive racism directed toward Blackness since the founding of the nation, Nascimento fueled controversial debates. Many of his initiatives became government policy, such as the revision of educational curricula to include diverse histories and affirmative action in employment. Nabuco’s critiques of institutions and economics, Freyre’s expansive social histories, and Nascimento’s studies of culture inspired research that is readily witnessed in The Boundaries of Freedom. Extended stays and experiences outside Brazil influenced all three of these men; several of the chapters address the theme of transnationalism.In a section entitled “On the Ethic of Silence,” Hebe Mattos comments on the book’s interdisciplinarity: “The theoretical references for this work [the collection of chapters] from E. P. Thompson’s cultural Marxism to the micro-historical methodologies of Fredrik Barth, emphasize the relational and political meanings of collective identity formation, as well as the relationship between normative structures and social agency” (317). Tying macro-histories (such as paternalism, plantation economies, class relations, and expanding capitalism) with micro-histories (such as slave flight, court appeals, day-by-day violence, labor conditions, and residential patterns), contributors shed light on silent histories and “precarious freedoms” during and after slavery. Quantitative methods provide evidence of the transport of enslaved children to the province of Pernambuco. Local legislation banned the purchase of goods produced by slaves and prevented access to taverns. “Subterranean structures” ensured the marginalization of female slaves and free Black women after emancipation. Free Black intellectuals, such as Teodoro Sampaio and André Rebouças, employed personal and professional skills to negotiate their way in hostile environments. Complex themes related to social agency and Black resistance emerge through contributors’ meticulous readings of original written documents and newspapers, as well as a close viewing of posters, paintings, and photographs located in archives large and small inside and outside Brazil.In a chapter describing relations between Brazil and Uruguay, Grinberg shows how tensions mounted pursuant to Uruguay’s emancipation decree of 1842. Slaves who crossed the border into Uruguay gained their freedom; they could not be re-enslaved if they returned to Brazil because of an 1831 Brazilian law that banned the importation of slaves to Brazil. Planters in the southernmost province of Rio Grande do Sul condemned their own government for failing to prevent slave flight and protect their property (ownership of slaves). Instead of following traditional approaches to the study of diplomacy, Grinberg points to the need to “forge a social history of international relations” (131). Such a plea, alongside the path-breaking insights shared in this volume, could not be more relevant.

The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans

After Eugene Macarty’s death in 1846, his white distant heirs sued Eulalie Mandeville, Eugene’s partner of fifty years and a free woman of color, for approximately $155,000. This article follows the trial that ensued, Macarty et al. v. Mandeville, a Louisiana civil suit that lasted two years, spanned more than 350 pages of written testimony and evidence, involved some of New Orleans’s leading families, and concerned one of the largest fortunes held by a free Black woman in antebellum America. By employing a close reading of a single lawsuit, this article shows that trial court records function as a form of archives in themselves and Black Americans both used and produced those archives. Reading a trial record as an archive, that is, for its very intentionality, careful and selective curation, and coproduction, reveals the myriad ways Black Americans collected, collated, preserved, and interacted with documents and therefore shaped the narratives the archives tell.

Epidemics of Ordinary Time

Epidemics of Ordinary Time Emily Waples (bio) 1793 It begins when a three-year-old girl, the daughter of a doctor, dies at her family's home in Philadelphia. Within a week, yellow fever infections have been reported throughout the city. "Tis a sickly time now in phila.," the diarist Elizabeth Drinker notes on August 15; "there has been an unusual number of funerals lately here." It begins when the first infected Aedes aegypti mosquito injects its virus-charged saliva into the body of its first susceptible host, stimulating the urban cycle of the disease. It begins with the circum-Atlantic slave trade, with the traffic in human bodies from Africa to North America and the Caribbean, with the Haitian Revolution and the scores of French colonizers who succumb to fever in what is then known as Saint-Domingue. It begins with violence, viral and imperial. Or, as the early republic's preeminent medical authority, Dr. Benjamin Rush, believes, it begins with some rotting coffee that has been left to fester in one of the city's wharves. The miasmatic theory of disease, postulated by Hippocrates around the fourth century BCE, understands sickness as caused by pestilential substances released into the atmosphere from the putrefaction of organic matter. This will remain the predominant explanation of disease causation until the emergence of germ theory at the end of the nineteenth century. Breath infects; air terrifies. As jaundiced and vomit-stained bodies are carted in carriages to the quarantine hospital at Bush Hill, or dropped in Potter's Field for eventual burial, the College of Physicians issues guidance on how to check the progress of the deadly epidemic. Among their eleven recommendations is a directive to "put a stop to the tolling of the bells." The near-constant death knells, the order implies, are inciting an anticipatory frenzy, marking the mortal motions of this "sickly time." Shutting down the sonic index of death's omnipresence will help. It is [End Page 214] about more than mental health: prevailing medical theory holds that the disease can be incited by fear itself. Meanwhile, some 20,000 Philadelphians—including George Washington and his government—flee the infected capital, abandoning their fellow citizens to the city's insalubrious atmospheres. It begins with chills and body aches, a slight fever, fatigue, nausea. In some cases, this is the worst of it; in some cases, it lasts only a few days. Others are not so lucky, experiencing symptoms of escalating severity: high fever, hemorrhage, hepatitis, shock, multisystem organ failure. Two symptoms in particular are unmistakable signifiers of the dreaded disease: the jaundice that gives it its name, and the telltale "black-vomit": an excretion, observers note, that looks peculiarly like coffee grounds. What they are seeing is in fact the dried blood that has accumulated in the stomachs of the sick. Rush's medical philosophy posits that all diseases, whatever their origin, ultimately wreak their havoc in the body by disordering the operation of the circulatory system. Accordingly, he champions venesection as the remedy to almost anything. He opens the veins of his countrymen until the cobblestone streets outside his shop are stained red. Emboldened by a racist scientific theory, he recruits free Black men and women to serve as nurses, declaring that their imagined immunity to the disease affords them a "noble opportunity" to demonstrate their gratitude, their worthiness for citizenship. But of course, they, too, sicken and die, joining the capital's mass graves, and Rush admits—too late—that he'd been "mistaken" on the matter of African immunity. In the end, the disease takes its leave inexplicably, or it seems. But the epidemic quite literally decimates the city. By the end of November, when the weather has cooled and the mosquitoes have died, 5,000 of the capital's 55,000 residents are dead too. But it is not the end. The fever will return, summer after summer, a curse without a cure. In the account he published the following year, Rush would reflect on the way the epidemic had altered his perception of the passage of time: it was, he noted, "uncommonly slow." This sense of deceleration lent him a novel perspective on...

Making Mary Ann Waters is a Free Black Woman : Critical Fabrication as Bibliographic Method

Making Mary Ann Waters is a Free Black Woman : Critical Fabrication as Bibliographic Method

At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C by Tamika Y. Nunley

Reviewed by: At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C by Tamika Y. Nunley Joseph P. Reidy (bio) At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. By Tamika Y. Nunley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 254. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95.) Tamika Nunley’s At the Threshold of Liberty examines African American women’s struggles to achieve freedom and equality in the District of Columbia during the nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, slavery framed these efforts; then, in very short order, everything changed. Nunley offers a character-rich account of ordinary women who persistently sought to escape oppressive circumstances. She views their actions as evidence of “self-making,” in which “enslaved women plotted, dreamed, imagined, and created ideas about themselves, as well as the people they knew, and the places in which they lived” (2). Present in the capital city from the beginning, enslaved women persistently sought to rise above the status of property and assert their [End Page 269] personhood, and in the process they made the district “a contested site of liberty” (39). Women’s overt demonstrations of self-making often challenged slavery directly. As early as 1815, the enslaved woman Ann Williams leaped from a second-floor window to avoid removal to Georgia. Three decades later, the sisters Mary and Emily Edmonson joined seventy-five other enslaved people in an ill-fated attempt to escape the city in the schooner Pearl, a case that won international notoriety. Freedom-seeking women also took to the courts, and Nunley’s account of their exploits reinforces the findings of such recent studies as Kelly Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (2017) and William Thomas III’s A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (2020). When successful, such actions dramatically changed the lives of plaintiffs and their families. The failures could have far-reaching implications, as the case of the sisters Priscilla and Mina Queen demonstrated. Claiming that the free status of their ancestor Mary Queen entitled them to freedom, they retained the services of Francis Scott Key, a veteran of such pleadings, including those of other descendants of Mary. The matter reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in 1813, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled inadmissible the “hearsay evidence” upon which the Queens asserted the free status of their progenitor (74). In one fell swoop, Marshall crushed the sisters’ dreams and those of countless other enslaved persons similarly situated. Between 1830 and 1850, as the district’s total Black population steadily grew from roughly nine thousand to almost fourteen thousand, the free portion soared from under five thousand to more than ten thousand. The free Black community’s growth resulted less from procreation than from self-purchase; once having scrimped and saved to achieve liberty, recipients guarded the prize carefully by creating tight networks of personal relationships and social institutions to protect their status. Nunley notes the importance of education in this effort, led by the pioneering work of Ann Marie Becraft, Sophia Browning, and Alethia Browning Tanner in the early decades of the nineteenth century. These women instilled in the daughters of families “with aspirations for social mobility” the necessary qualities of character, deportment, and responsibility (104). Students’ letters to the pioneering white educator Myrtilla Miner, whose Normal School for Colored Girls opened in 1851, reveal their commitments to “thrift, frugality, and hard work” and to “reform and uplift” in the public sphere (113). This quest for self-making, Nunley argues, encompassed enslaved as well as free Black women, as the example of Elizabeth Keckly illustrates. Having learned custom needlework while enslaved, she eventually [End Page 270] purchased her freedom and settled in Washington, where she became a sought-after dressmaker whose elite clientele included Varina Davis and Mary Todd Lincoln. The Civil War ushered in dramatic and lasting change. Virtually overnight, Washington became an armed camp, and the metaphorical “threshold of liberty” became an actual one. Nunley explores this transformation from two vantage points...

Rape and Mutiny at Fort Jackson: Black Laundresses Testify in Civil War Louisiana

Abstract The Black soldiers of the Fourth Regiment of the Native Guard (also known as the Corps d'Afrique) stationed at Fort Jackson, Louisiana, and the laundresses who served them and their white officers were formerly enslaved people who had seized their freedom by joining and aiding the Union cause. Over the course of six weeks, in December 1863 and January 1864, they engaged in open munity to protest racial and sexual violence inflicted by white Union officers. In so doing they made visible the violent terms of interracial interaction that informed the meaning of wartime freedom and Black labor (terms that were still very much rooted in the prisms and discourses of enslavement). More importantly, as free labor Black women began to negotiate a deeply abusive racial and sexual terrain.

“The Walls Have Fallen”

In 2021, June 19 (Juneteenth) became a federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people of African descent in the United States. Prior to Juneteenth gaining official status, January 1 (Emancipation Day) was the de facto national holiday on which African Americans celebrated the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery. From 1863 until the late twentieth century, African Americans throughout the nation celebrated what the black-owned journal The Elevator called “the greatest event in the history of the Colored people of America.” While several scholarly works focus on Emancipation Day celebrations throughout the United States, these studies have largely ignored how black westerners celebrated what was essentially “independence day” for African Americans. This essay examines Emancipation Day celebrations in the African American communities of San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. Emancipation Day celebrations illustrate how black Californians in the state’s largest African American communities used ritualized celebration and public dialogue to construct their new civic identities as free black men and women. Emancipation Day celebrations provided black Californians opportunities to testify to their aspirations as members of the American polity, and to their vision of themselves as upholders of liberty and beacons of freedom in post–Civil War America. Black Californians forthrightly used public commemorations of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to illustrate black community consciousness through the spirit of public festivals and civic celebrations, otherwise known as “public festive culture.” These public rituals did more than celebrate liberty: they legitimated black freedom and citizenship, honored the memory of Abraham Lincoln as God’s servant, and elaborated a political ethos powerful enough to unify African Americans as members of the American polity.

Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay

In this foundational work of the burgeoning scholarship on colonial Paraguay, Shawn Austin focuses on the Guaraní outside the Jesuit missions, those living in reducciones in Asunción and in areas between the missions. He is the first historian to systematically use judicial files, which show female litigants as well as Africans and their descendants, to examine how the Guaraní interacted with the Spanish and Africans in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Paraguay. Austin successfully demonstrates that encomienda, understood by the Spaniards and the Guaraní through cuñadazgo or tovajá, became the mode of colonial governance. The term tovajá initially named the exchange of women by the Guaraní for gifts given by the Spaniards, but increasingly this term shaped contexts central for expanding colonialism: for the encomienda system subjecting tributaries and also for trade. The marriage of Spanish men into the kinship of Guaraní caciques became central to securing Indigenous tributaries for the Spaniards, the core of the encomienda. Spaniards seemingly understood the implications of the term tovajá as binding them politically and economically with Guaraní leaders (p. 33). From the Spanish sources it is clear, also, that these women were not property but part of the conquistador household as inheritors. Conquistadores, and sometimes priests as well, also arranged marriages for their mestizo children in order to secure their future. The expectations of reciprocity that tovajá ties carried for the Guaraní also influenced the development of colonialism and, more broadly, the entire Paraguayan colonial society.While based on reciprocity, the tovajá system was unequally beneficial for the Spaniards, as a colonial configuration based on Guaraní cultural elements that facilitated access to labor and provisions. It was a system of reciprocity that the Spaniards institutionalized to promote colonial exploitation through encomiendas, which made Indigenous tovajás tributaries of labor.The Spaniards' ability to establish tovajá ties with Guaraní groups also allowed them to conduct raids (rancheadas) and war with other Indigenous people. Even under open violence tovajá relationships emerged. Sometimes Guaraní groups declined to participate in peaceful exchanges. In these cases, Spaniards forced their way through raids capturing women and provisions. These women were integrated into Spanish households through tovajá ties as long as the integrity of their Guaraní group persisted, and this created a sense of reciprocity under violence (p. 41). The terms of exchange placed women in the household of conquistadores and other Spanish men (which liberated Spaniards from manual labor and also provided them food), and the Spaniards retributed with iron tools like cuñas (axes). The similarity of the Guaraní word for “woman,” kuña, with the Spanish terms cuña and cuñado was noticed by the Spanish and the Guaraní as belonging to a vocabulary making sense of an economy of gift giving.Austin provides a chapter examining Indigenous resistance against the colonial regime as an antidote to misconceptions of kinship as a peaceful way of belonging to the Spanish empire in Paraguay. Somewhat naturally, this leads to studying the creation of Guaraní militias defending Spanish rule, which closes the second section of the book. The Guaraní developed a formidable militia system that influenced the larger politics of the region, for instance, during the many Spanish sieges of Portuguese Colonia del Sacramento. Austin also examines the city of Asunción, which was, in a way, the largest reducción, an Indigenous space, and the core of Spanish colonialism in Paraguay. Given the proliferation of small encomiendas in Asunción, the city became a rural-urban settlement with a high concentration of encomendero and tributary populations.The author also examines African slavery, and particularly free Black men and women in the context of cuñadazgo. A relatively large number of Africans lived in Paraguay since the conquest and as an extension of the slave trade to Buenos Aires after 1580. Free Black men's obligations to encomenderos sometimes were shaped by the ties of cuñadazgo, as seen in a Mercedarian convent's “encomienda of blacks” (p. 261). While the Mercedarians had freed these Africans and Afro-descendants from slavery, they kept them as tributaries through the ties of encomienda. In other instances, free Black men and women became tributaries of encomienda because of their marriages with Guaraní tributaries. In all these cases, free Black men and women were tied to obligations to Spaniards understood as tributaries and thus with meanings of tovajá ties. The tax on free men and women of African ancestry survived over the centuries in Paraguay due to its connections with Indigenous personal service, given that this was paid in labor. This tax was hardly applicable in other parts of the Río de la Plata, which may explain also why so many pardos from Paraguay are found in the eighteenth-century sources in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.This is a great read for understanding the reworking of Indigenous culture into the making of all aspects of a colonial society in the borderlands of Latin America.

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones

Reviewed by: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones Monica L. Mercado (bio) Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All By Martha S. Jones. New York: Basic Books, 2020. 352 pages, illustrations, 6" x 9". $30.00 cloth, $16.99 ebook. If women's history was going to have a moment, 2020 was poised to be it. For years, women's history stakeholders looked forward to that year—now memorable for a global pandemic that disrupted even the best laid plans—to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. With one sentence ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex"), US suffragists celebrated victory. Women's right to vote, requiring decades of continued action by women of color and their allies to extend and secure the franchise, has long been the subject of political and social histories. In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, historian Martha S. Jones rewrites conventional narratives of women's rights in US history by centering the work of Black women, whose expansive politics, by necessity, addressed both sexism and racism. Building on the foundational work of late suffrage historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, and published amid a wave of new books, podcasts, documentaries, museum exhibitions, and public sculpture timed to commemorate the "suffrage centennial," Vanguard is a standout volume that deserves our engagement long after 2020 is in the rearview mirror. But Vanguard is not a book about suffrage and suffragists. Those terms, Jones declares in her introduction, are "far too narrow to capture" the scope of Black women's activism (14). As the vanguard, the women Jones profiles are visionaries and volunteers, interrogating the meaning of freedom and demanding it for themselves and their communities. They joined clubs, churches, and conventions—and, as the endnotes underscore, historians still need to do a better job of acknowledging their contributions. The need for such a volume is clear, and it is personal to Jones, a native New Yorker and Johns Hopkins University professor. Movingly, Vanguard begins with a genealogy. Starting with her great-great-grandmother, Jones briefly unpacks the experiences of her ancestors, introducing us to Black women who "built power where [they] could" even when the vote was denied them (3). Club women, church women, educators, community organizers, fundraisers—each promoted a vision of "winning women's power that would serve all humanity" (8). The introduction lays the groundwork for Jones's argument that woman suffrage was only a small piece of Black women's politics; human rights, not women's rights, [End Page 427] might be a more appropriate term for the vanguard's imaginary in the wake of slavery and emancipation. If the chronological scope of Vanguard feels familiar—beginning around the time of the American Revolution and working its way toward the present—the stories Jones chooses to tell make for a fresh reworking of the history survey genre. There are familiar actors here, of course (Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell), as well as a host of new names (women like Troy, New York, speaker Elizabeth Wicks and New York City businesswoman Hester Lane). Most significantly, Jones maps out Black geographies that rarely intersect with formal suffrage organizing. The 1848 Seneca Falls convention is covered in just a handful of paragraphs, for example, enlarged with a few fascinating hints at the lives of free Black women who lived just a stone's throw from the meeting site. Instead, Vanguard takes seriously the middle decades of the nineteenth century as an era of conventions, plural. Black women attended, spoke up, and even lectured to other women and men at a host of women's rights conventions, colored conventions, and religious meetings. The founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) at the turn of the twentieth century solidified many of the networks that Black women forged in this earlier era, and shaped Black politics. "Black men...

‘“Dare you meet a woman”: black women, abolitionism, and protective violence, 1850–1859’

ABSTRACT ‘Dare you Meet a Woman’ examines how black women exhibited their willingness to take on forceful and even violent action to dismantle the institution of slavery. Black resistance was central to abolitionism and black women were essential to the movement. This essay argues that their activism should be examined as the politics of protective violence. The politics of protective violence explains black women's employment of force to protect themselves and their communities and ultimately promote the overthrow of slavery. Beginning with the Christiana Resistance in 1851 and culminating with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, this essay examines the bookends and high points of free and fugitive black women's responses during key turning points of the 1850s. In sum, black women violently resisted the Fugitive Slave Law and anti-black oppression. Moreover, black women leaders contributed significantly to the acceleration of violent sectional tensions and, ultimately, the American Civil War.

Women, Gender, and Rights: Past and Present

Women, Gender, and Rights: Past and Present

Review: Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years, by Dickson J. Preston

Review: Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years, by Dickson J. Preston

Philadelphia: City of Revolution and Home to Independence

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Association NewsFull AccessPhiladelphia: City of Revolution and Home to IndependenceMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:20 Feb 2020https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2020.2b17AbstractPhiladelphia is home to dozens of landmarks of the growing colonial unrest leading to the American Revolution, independence from Great Britain, and the signing of the Constitution.This life-sized exhibit in the Museum of the American Revolution depicts Hessian cavalry troops fighting on the side of the Loyalists.Courtesy of Museum of the American RevolutionLocated between New England and the colonies on the southeastern border of North America and the continent’s most populous city in the late 18th century, Philadelphia seemed destined to become the unofficial capital of the American Revolution.Founded as a city of religious tolerance, the spirit of Philadelphia infused the Revolution: It was home to one of the 18th century’s most famous citizens, Benjamin Franklin; the site of the first and second Continental Congress; and the place where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States of America were written and signed.Throughout the city and surrounding region are dozens of landmarks of the Revolution. Here are just a few of the most prominent:The Museum of the American Revolution is devoted entirely to the Revolutionary period, holding an important collection of art, manuscripts, and printed works along with British, French, and American weapons used in battle and personal diaries written in camp. The museum illuminates the lives of the founding fathers and common soldiers—as well as enslaved and free black people, American Indians, and women—through immersive displays and artifacts designed as a storytelling experience. Galleries are organized chronologically, leading visitors from the beginning of the conflict through the creation of the United States.Carpenters’ Hall was the site of the First Continental Congress, during which representatives of 12 of the American colonies (Georgia didn’t participate) registered their fury at King George’s taxes and trade policies in 1774. The representatives voted on a trade embargo, the first of many unified acts of defiance. In addition to being historic, the building is an architectural gem.Of course, visitors interested in the American Revolution will want to tour Independence Hall. In the sweltering summer of 1776, 56 delegates gathered at the Pennsylvania State House and pledged their “lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor” by signing the Declaration of Independence. Eleven years later, representatives from 12 states gathered to shape the U.S. Constitution, finally creating one unified nation. Tickets are free and available at the Independence Visitor Center.Families traveling with children to Philadelphia may especially want to visit The Betsy Ross House, home of America’s flagmaker. Betsy herself is at home, plying her trade and regaling visitors with stories of colonial life. The Revolutionary War left the young upholsterer twice a widow. After losing her first husband, John Ross, to an ammunition explosion, she wed John Ashburn, who died after being captured and imprisoned by the British.Congregation Mikveh Israel is the oldest formal congregation in Philadelphia and the oldest continuous synagogue in use in the United States. It is known as “the synagogue of the Revolution.” The congregation’s website states that during the war, Jews from the surrounding colonies came to Philadelphia seeking refuge from the British. Haym Salomon, a member of the congregation, helped to finance and underwrite the war effort and made personal loans to government figures. The website also states that Salomon was part of a delegation protesting the state’s religious test oath and was treasurer for the Society for the Relief of Destitute Strangers. ■ ISSUES NewArchived

Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 by William L. Andrews

Reviewed by: Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 by William L. Andrews Adrienne Monteith Petty (bio) Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865. By William L. Andrews. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 389. Cloth, $35.00.) To one of William L. Andrews’s slave-owning ancestors, slave narratives were such “nefarious publications” that he helped organize an antiabolition vigilance committee to halt their dissemination (ix). For Andrews himself, however, slave narratives have been the wellspring of a distinguished scholarly life. He has written or edited more than forty books. He curated the North American Slave Narratives collection for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Documenting the American South website, making antislavery texts publicly accessible in ways his great-great-grandfather could never have envisioned. His latest book, Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865, offers an intriguing but discomfiting analysis of how antebellum and Civil War–era slave narrators discussed social distinctions within slave society, especially divisions among slaves. Whether readers are persuaded by his argument, Andrews’s rich evidence and unapologetically assumption-rattling conclusions will challenge and engross new and seasoned scholars of slavery alike. Andrews argues that distinct classes existed among slaves in the ante-bellum South. He bases his contention on an analysis of more than sixty famous and obscure mid-nineteenth-century slave narratives, those published during the national and international heyday of this remarkable genre. Class, as Andrews defines it, refers to social differences among slaves based on their variable access to and control of material resources such as property, money earned for hiring out their labor, family status on the plantation, literacy, and even the “high privilege of living in a cabin” (157). In considering the class hierarchy within antebellum slavery, Andrews sees himself entering into conversation with historians Ira Berlin, John Blassingame, Michael Gomez, Deborah Gray White, and Steven Hahn. His work also intersects with Jeff Forret’s on slave-on-slave violence, Jessica [End Page 561] Millward’s on enslaved and free black women in Maryland, and Dylan Penningroth’s on slaves who owned property. “Higher-echelon” slaves, who often performed skilled work or lived in urban areas, had relatively more privileged existences under slavery than “lower-echelon” enslaved field-workers, Andrews argues. Their “peculiar advantages” bolstered their aspiration for freedom (141). An insight from Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) influenced this particular thread of Andrews’s argument: “Give [a slave] a bad master, and he aspires to a good master. Give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master” (66). It is no coincidence, Andrews maintains, that many authors of mid-nineteenth-century slave narratives were men and women who enjoyed certain privileges. In chapter 2, “Work, Status, and Social Mobility,” Andrews writes a work biography of many of his narrators. He pays close attention to the role their work played in how they viewed themselves, how they viewed other slaves, and what they aspired to do with their lives. Andrews argues that slaves who engaged in supervisory roles and “skilled work” held a higher status than slaves who worked in the field (although, as Daina Ramey Berry has argued, slave owners prized certain enslaved field-workers’ agricultural knowledge and discernment as well). Likewise, Andrews contends that enslaved domestic workers derived certain material benefits from their positions but also faced the constant threat of sexual violence and cruel punishment at the hands of slave-owning men and women. Nevertheless, he insists, narrators who performed domestic work and other nonagricultural roles found avenues for “social mobility” in the context of slavery. For instance, he points to Aunt Sally Williams of Fayetteville, North Carolina, who persisted in finding ways to hire her time out as a dressmaker and baker in order to improve her economic status. Andrews also uses the narratives to show that higher-echelon slaves had strong views about the laziness and idleness of slave owners, and about the exploitation of lower-class white workers. Andrews clearly establishes that mid-nineteenth-century slave...

Estratégias cimarronas para narrar a negritude no século XIX em "Autobiografía" de Juan Francisco Manzano (Cuba, 1835) e "Úrsula" (Brasil, 1859)

This reflection will analyze the strategies used by two Latin American black writers to present the theme of blackness in the 19th century. On one side, the autobiography written by the cuban Juan Francisco Manzano (1835), the only autobiography text that shows one Latin American semiliterate slave black man that nar-rates your life in exchange for your liberty. On the other side the narrative written by Maria Firmina dos Reis, a free black woman considered the first female novelist in Brazil: Úrsula (1859), an abolitionist text whose main characters are white, surprises by giving voice to the slave people, who narrate their memories in Africa and are aware of their condition. Theoretical references will be used about the novel as a form of projection of an ideal future (Sommer, 2004), abolitionist texts as thesis novel (Jeffers, 2013), mask of speechlessness (Kilomba, 2019) and cimarronagem’s pedagogy (Mendes, 2019) intending to revise the Latin American literary canon in an inclusion proposal the two narratives to mandatory readings in the Litera-ture studies in the Latin American universities.

Du Baptême à la Tombe: Afro-Catholicisme et Réseaux Familiaux dans les Communautés Esclaves Louisianaises (From baptism to the grave: Afro-Catholicism and family network in Louisiana slave communities)

In Du Baptême à la Tombe Geneviève Piché explores Louisiana, unique in its French, Spanish, and American heritages, and the challenging subject of African Catholicism in slave communities in the early American period (1803–1845). She uses church documents, comparing the urban New Orleans Parish with the rural Saint John the Baptist Parish, but also published sources, travel literature, directories, and registers, in English but mostly in French. Her theoretical stand includes slave agency and cultural negotiation, macrohistory and microhistory, history from below, and the search for the excluded. It also includes female protagonists, and discussions of creolization, hybridity, transculturation, and multicultural processes. She views religiosity as a key socializing practice, including for the subaltern, and considers plurality important in society and in historical interpretation. In local and global approaches, she stresses how slavery in Louisiana has an Atlantic context (American, Iberian, Caribbean, African, and Latin American). Piché deals first with the life of urban slaves in the New Orleans parish, including demographics and stressing a heterogeneous servile population, with the preponderance of female slaves as domestics and merchants. Leisure and amusement play important roles in slave urban life, most of it in tandem with religiosity, officially Catholic yet mixed with African mores. She then turns to the countryside of the Saint John the Baptist Parish, emphasizing the prevalence of males, the growing U.S.-born slave population's use of English, and Protestant features opposed by French Catholic missionary zeal. As most slaves were Catholics, she deals at length with the Church and the slaves in Louisiana. Slaves were active agents in Catholic practice; women, in particular, and some within the clergy opposed slavery. The Church was split and the clergy itself owned slaves. Catholic slave owners often opposed conversion. In any case, most slaves were Catholics, and Sunday was a resting day; priests opposed family split, as the thorny issue of marriage led to common slave church unions. Free black women volunteered to spread the Catholic faith. Piché concludes that voluntary adherence to Catholicism comforted the material and spiritual lives of slaves and free blacks. Even if that is impossible to prove, her arguments are convincing and contribute to understanding the past as inspiring, as even the most destitute can forge their own destinies.

Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott Jason Phillips Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research. By Paul D. Escott. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. Pp. 188.) Recently, Civil War historians have revolutionized their field by asking new questions, introducing fresh methods, collecting unexamined sources, and challenging conclusions and narratives. In the process, they have founded new journals, pioneered digital humanities, engaged the public, and expanded their subject. When fields experience such growth, they need books like this one that evaluate new directions and propose unexamined ones. In Rethinking the Civil War Era, Paul Escott surveys an impressive range of recent work. His astute insights make this a welcome volume for all Civil War historians but especially for scholars embarking on their careers and looking for a source to survey the field. Escott divides the book into thematic chapters that reflect his research interests instead of promising a comprehensive review of the field’s massive historiography. When assessing work on the sectional crisis, Escott divides scholarship into two categories, histories that probe events and groups from the inside out to clarify individual motivations and contingencies versus works that explain the era from the outside in to reveal compelling forces behind sectionalism. The field’s recent focus on transnational political developments and global economies favors the outside in approach. Escott praises this trend but encourages historians to study nationalism in both regions and explain how internal diversities affected national feelings. The most thorough chapters analyze subjects that Escott has contributed to the most, namely wartime society and African Americans. Guerrilla violence, desertion, home-front privation, class disorder, emancipation, and a host of other circumstances destabilized southern society and challenged the legitimacy of Confederate governments. But Escott observes, “The fact that the North won has too often diverted attention from the rents sustained in its social fabric” (43). White supremacy, charges of disloyalty, riots, and economic distress tested northern society, which affected the identities of political parties and national definitions of citizenship. Since the 1970s, historians have persuasively argued that African Americans were [End Page 112] central to the war’s origins, meaning, conduct, and consequences. While this work has established a black presence within the war’s larger stories, Escott notes that historians have missed diversities among African American groups and conditions. We need more research on the relationships between a wide spectrum of black people: from elite, black abolitionists and refugees in contraband camps to free black women and the millions of slaves who still prayed for freedom at the end of the war. The diversity of experiences among these groups raise “questions of how and to what extent they constituted a single social entity that we label with the words African American” (45). In chapters on military, digital, and environmental history, Escott identifies many opportunities for new research. Problems of high command and politicized armies, logistics and resources, and the military’s effects on postwar culture deserve more attention. Digital history has generated new data and questions. Escott highlights a number of ongoing projects that will deepen our understanding of military occupation, emancipation, guerrilla strategy, African American migration, and other large processes that can be illuminated by crowd-sourcing work, sharing findings, and displaying results in visual formats. Among many recommendations for the digital humanities, Escott urges scholars to standardize databases, tools, and software to enable compatibility and sharing and calls for someone to maintain a current registry of digital projects to encourage cooperation and disseminate knowledge. Like digital history, Civil War environmental history has expanded dramatically in recent years. Beyond studying geography and terrain from a military perspective, historians have explored the war’s climate, weather, animals, diseases, deforestation, pollution, and other natural elements that place humanity and history within living ecosystems. This fascinating work often requires interdisciplinary methods for understanding dynamic relationships. Escott notes that the war’s environmental legacy transcended southern destruction by also affecting northern attitudes of nature and western preservation. Finally, Escott evaluates new scholarship on the war’s outcomes. Much of this work focuses on the power of the federal government to enforce laws in the South and West. When we expand the temporal...

Donas, pretas livres e escravas em Luanda (Séc. XIX)

Luanda, a capital da colônia portuguesa de Angola, era uma cidade de maioria feminina em meados do século XIX. A população feminina era composta de donas, pretas livres e escravas que ocupavam espaços diferenciados nessa sociedade colonial. As filhas da elite luso-africana eram desde a infância reconhecidas como donas, refletindo seu status social e econômico. Ao longo da vida, elas acumulavam escravos, terras e objetos de luxo através de heranças e da participação no comércio local e de longa distância como mercadoras e intermediárias entre comerciantes estrangeiros e fornecedores africanos. As pretas livres buscavam oportunidades no comércio ambulante como quitandeiras e oferecendo serviços aos habitantes da cidade. Escravas, por sua vez, também adentravam o pequeno comércio das ruas e mercados e desempenhavam atividades domésticas nas residências de estrangeiros e luso-africanos. Esse estudo se baseia em registros de escravos, batismos, óbitos e escrituras de compra e venda para explorar experiências de donas, pretas livres e escravas na Luanda dos oitocentos. Numa sociedade luso-africana e escravocrata, elementos como descendência portuguesa, posse de bens e adesão à cultura lusa conferiam prestígio e determinavam as trajetórias pessoais de mulheres livres e escravizadas.

“They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians”: Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberian Atlantic

Hundreds of Castilian free black men and women obtained royal travel licenses to cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as black Old Christians. They settled across the Spanish Indies and developed trades as artisans, traders, sailors, healers, and small business owners, often becoming prominent and wealthy vecinos (residents). Exploring these often obscure and long-invisible biographies of individuals, the article revisits key historiographical debates about race, purity of blood, and vassalage in the early Spanish empire.