Black Trials

2007-12-18 History

Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste

Author: Mark S. Weiner

Publisher: Vintage

ISBN: 0307425037

Category: History

Page: 448

View: 1354

From a brilliant young legal scholar comes this sweeping history of American ideas of belonging and citizenship, told through the stories of fourteen legal cases that helped to shape our nation. Spanning three centuries, Black Trials details the legal challenges and struggles that helped define the ever-shifting identity of blacks in America. From the well-known cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to the more obscure trial of Joseph Hanno, an eighteenth-century free black man accused of murdering his wife and bringing smallpox to Boston, Weiner recounts the essential dramas of American identity—illuminating where our conception of minority rights has come from and where it might go. Significant and enthralling, these are the cases that forced the courts and the country to reconsider what it means to be black in America, and Mark Weiner demonstrates their lasting importance for our society. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Black Cosmopolitanism

2005-06-15 Literary Criticism

Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas

Author: Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

ISBN: 0812238788

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 291

View: 1144

Through readings of slave narratives, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, newspaper editorials, and government documents including texts by Frederick Douglass and freed West Indian slave Mary Prince, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo explicates the growing interrelatedness of people of African descent through the Americas in the nineteenth century.
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The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

2011-09-26 History

Author: Eric Foner

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

ISBN: 9780393080827

Category: History

Page: 448

View: 4540

“A masterwork [by] the preeminent historian of the Civil War era.”—Boston Globe Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong engagement with the nation's critical issue: American slavery. A master historian, Eric Foner draws Lincoln and the broader history of the period into perfect balance. We see Lincoln, a pragmatic politician grounded in principle, deftly navigating the dynamic politics of antislavery, secession, and civil war. Lincoln's greatness emerges from his capacity for moral and political growth.
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Love of Freedom

2010-02-01 Social Science

Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

Author: Catherine Adams,Elizabeth H. Pleck

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780199779833

Category: Social Science

Page: 280

View: 1271

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.
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Slavery on Trial

2009-06-01 History

Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture

Author: Jeannine Marie DeLombard

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

ISBN: 9780807887738

Category: History

Page: 344

View: 3047

America's legal consciousness was high during the era that saw the imprisonment of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, the execution of slave revolutionary Nat Turner, and the hangings of John Brown and his Harpers Ferry co-conspirators. Jeannine Marie DeLombard examines how debates over slavery in the three decades before the Civil War employed legal language to "try" the case for slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media. Discussing autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, a scandal narrative about Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist speech by Henry David Thoreau, sentimental fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a proslavery novel by William MacCreary Burwell, DeLombard argues that American literature of the era cannot be fully understood without an appreciation for the slavery debate in the courts and in print. Combining legal, literary, and book history approaches, Slavery on Trial provides a refreshing alternative to the official perspectives offered by the nation's founding documents, legal treatises, statutes, and judicial decisions. DeLombard invites us to view the intersection of slavery and law as so many antebellum Americans did--through the lens of popular print culture.
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Americans Without Law

2008-12-01 Law

The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship

Author: Mark S. Weiner

Publisher: NYU Press

ISBN: 0814793657

Category: Law

Page: 205

View: 4058

Americans Without Law shows how the racial boundaries of civic life are based on widespread perceptions about the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, which Mark S. Weiner calls “juridical racialism.” The book follows the history of this civic discourse by examining the legal status of four minority groups in four successive historical periods: American Indians in the 1880s, Filipinos after the Spanish-American War, Japanese immigrants in the 1920s, and African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. Weiner reveals the significance of juridical racialism for each group and, in turn, Americans as a whole by examining the work of anthropological social scientists who developed distinctive ways of understanding racial and legal identity, and through decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that put these ethno-legal views into practice. Combining history, anthropology, and legal analysis, the book argues that the story of juridical racialism shows how race and citizenship served as a nexus for the professionalization of the social sciences, the growth of national state power, economic modernization, and modern practices of the self.
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The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative

2014 Literary Collections

Author: John Ernest

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

ISBN: 0199731489

Category: Literary Collections

Page: 472

View: 9744

The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative approaches the history of slave testimony in three ways: by prioritizing the broad tradition over individual authors; by representing interdisciplinary approaches to slave narratives; and by highlighting emerging scholarship on slave narratives, concerning both established debates over concerns of authorship and agency, for example, and developing concerns like ecocritical readings of slave narratives. Ultimately, the aim of the Handbook is not to highlight the singularity of any particular account, nor to comfortably locate slave narratives in traditional literary or cultural history, but rather to faithfully represent a body of writing and testimony that was designed to speak for the many, to represent the unspeakable, and to account for the experience of enslaved and nominally free communities.
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The Rule of the Clan

2013-03-12 Political Science

What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom

Author: Mark S. Weiner

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN: 1466836385

Category: Political Science

Page: 272

View: 9954

A revealing look at the role kin-based societies have played throughout history and around the world A lively, wide-ranging meditation on human development that offers surprising lessons for the future of modern individualism, The Rule of the Clan examines the constitutional principles and cultural institutions of kin-based societies, from medieval Iceland to modern Pakistan. Mark S. Weiner, an expert in constitutional law and legal history, shows us that true individual freedom depends on the existence of a robust state dedicated to the public interest. In the absence of a healthy state, he explains, humans naturally tend to create legal structures centered not on individuals but rather on extended family groups. The modern liberal state makes individualism possible by keeping this powerful drive in check—and we ignore the continuing threat to liberal values and institutions at our peril. At the same time, for modern individualism to survive, liberals must also acknowledge the profound social and psychological benefits the rule of the clan provides and recognize the loss humanity sustains in its transition to modernity. Masterfully argued and filled with rich historical detail, Weiner's investigation speaks both to modern liberal societies and to developing nations riven by "clannism," including Muslim societies in the wake of the Arab Spring.
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Library Journal

2004 Libraries

Author: N.A

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: N.A

Category: Libraries

Page: N.A

View: 1862

Includes, beginning Sept. 15, 1954 (and on the 15th of each month, Sept.-May) a special section: School library journal, ISSN 0000-0035, (called Junior libraries, 1954-May 1961). Also issued separately.
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Public Library Core Collection

2008 Public libraries

A Selection Guide to Reference Books and Adult Nonfiction. Nonfiction

Author: John Greenfieldt,Patrice Bartell

Publisher: Hw Wilson Co

ISBN: 9780824210946

Category: Public libraries

Page: 1856

View: 6463

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Freedom in My Heart

2008 History

Voices from the United States National Slavery Museum

Author: Cynthia Jacobs Carter

Publisher: National Geographic

ISBN: N.A

Category: History

Page: 255

View: 4019

Captures the complete experience of American slavery, as well as the contributions of slaves and their descendants, in a beautifully illustrated volume that brings together artifacts, images, and documents from the United States National Slavery Museum, accompanied by commentary and reminiscences of slaves and their descendants. 15,000 first printing.
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America, History and Life

2007 Canada

Author: N.A

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: N.A

Category: Canada

Page: N.A

View: 6130

Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.
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Program

2005 Historians

Author: Organization of American Historians. Meeting

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: N.A

Category: Historians

Page: N.A

View: 5664

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Democratization in America

2009-08-05 Political Science

A Comparative-Historical Analysis

Author: Desmond King,Robert C. Lieberman,Gretchen Ritter,Laurence Whitehead

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

ISBN: 9780801893254

Category: Political Science

Page: 352

View: 2264

The essays in this volume examine democracy’s development in the United States, demonstrating how that process has shaped—and continues to shape—the American political system. Scholars of American politics commonly describe the political development of the United States as exceptional and distinct from that of other advanced industrial democracies. They point to the United States as the longest-lived and most stable liberal democracy in history. What they often fail to mention, though, is that it took considerable time to extend democracy throughout the country. The contributors to this volume suggest that it is intellectually fruitful to consider the U.S. case in comparison to other countries. They argue that the development of democracy is ongoing in America; that even with a written constitution grounded in liberal democracy, the meaning and significance of U.S. democracy are still evolving. This volume shows that democratization and the pursuit of democracy are processes affected by multiple and continuing challenges—including such issues as citizenship, race, institution building, and political movements—as patterns and practices of politics and governance continue to change. This innovative approach contributes significantly to comparative democratization studies, a field normally confined to Latin America and former communist countries. The U.S. case is a unique reference point for students of American political development and comparative democratization.
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