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Pub. Date
2020.
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English
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In 1619, a group of thirty-two African men, women and children arrived on the shores of Virginia. They had been kidnapped in the royal city of Kabasa, Angola, and forced aboard the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. The ship was attacked by privateers, and the captives were taken by the English to their New World colony. This group has been shrouded in controversy ever since. Historian Ric Murphy documents a fascinating story of colonialism, treason,...
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This work explores a neglected aspect of the forced migration of African laborers to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of captive Africans continued their journeys after the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Colonial merchants purchased and then transshipped many of these captives to other colonies for resale. Not only did this trade increase death rates and the social and cultural isolation of Africans; it also fed the expansion of British slavery...
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The custom of Indian enslavement during colonial times came from the necessity of disposing of war captives, from the greed of traders, and from the demand for labour.
In his 1913 book "Indian Slavery in Colonial Times," Almon Wheeler Lauber broadly defines "slave" as a "prisoner held by his captor as an inferior and forced to labor for him, or sold into servitude or freedom for the financial benefit of his captor." His book describes four kinds...
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"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" is an autobiographical narrative written by Harriet Jacobs, an African American woman who was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. The book was published under the pseudonym Linda Brent in 1861 and is one of the few accounts of slavery and the struggle for freedom written by a woman.
The narrative details Jacobs' life from her childhood into adulthood and her experiences as a slave. It highlights...
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English
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Enslaved Black people took up arms and fought in nearly every colonial conflict in early British North America. They sometimes served as loyal soldiers to protect and promote their owners' interests in the hope that they might be freed or be rewarded for their service. But for many Black combatants, war and armed conflict offered an opportunity to attack the chattel slave system itself and promote Black emancipation and freedom.
In six cases, starting...
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English
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In the years following the Glorious Revolution, independent slave traders challenged the charter of the Royal African Company by asserting their natural rights as Britons to trade freely in enslaved Africans. In this comprehensive history of the rise and fall of the RAC, William A. Pettigrew grounds the transatlantic slave trade in politics, not economic forces, analyzing the ideological arguments of the RAC and its opponents in Parliament and in...
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In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and co-author of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic.
Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and...
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Not all African-Americans in the 1790 were slaves. There were also "free blacks." This book examines the lives of the free blacks during a time when slavery was allowed in the country. What were the rules that they had to follow? How did the white Americans treat them? Finally, why were they transported to Africa for free? This may be a hard book to read but it's history!
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In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675–76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676–1749. When the wartime...
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For twenty years in the eighteenth century, Georgia--the last British colony in what became the United States--enjoyed a brief period of free labor, where workers were not enslaved and were paid. The Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia created a "Georgia experiment" of philanthropic enterprise and moral reform for poor white workers, though rebellious settlers were more interested in shaking off the British social system of deference...
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In Spaces of Enslavement, Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies.
In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River and founded communities from...
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Claire Priest is the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Twitter @priest_claire
How American colonists laid the foundations of American capitalism with an economy built on credit
Even before the United States became a country, laws prioritizing access to credit set colonial America apart from the rest of the world. Credit Nation examines how the drive to expand credit shaped property laws and legal institutions in the colonial...
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"From 1754 to 1755, the slave ship Hare completed a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States--a journey that transformed more than seventy Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild...
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From trusted to tainted, an examination of the shifting perceived reputation of overseers of enslaved people during the eighteenth century.
In the antebellum southern United States, major landowners typically hired overseers to manage their plantations. In addition to cultivating crops, managing slaves, and dispensing punishment, overseers were expected to maximize profits through increased productivity-often achieved through violence and cruelty....
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This is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations. Using diaries, court records, legal documents, books, paintings, photographs, and oral histories, From Slave Ship to Harvard traces a family-from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today-forming a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement.
Yarrow Mamout was an educated Muslim from Guinea, brought...
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English
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This definitive biography tells the story of the former slave Olaudah Equiano (1745?—1797), who in his day was the English-speaking world's most renowned person of African descent. Equiano's greatest legacy is his classic 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. A key document of the early movement to ban the slave trade, as well as the fundamental text in the...
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