LITMIR.BIZ

The riveting story of control over the mobility of poor migrants, and how their movements shaped current perceptions of class and status in the United States Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants – consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves – populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations. Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called “vagrants,” arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.

Подробнее

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Reveals the lived experience of slaves in eighteenth-century Boston Instead of relying on the traditional dichotomy of slavery and freedom, Hardesty argues we should understand slavery in Boston as part of a continuum of unfreedom. In this context, African slavery existed alongside many other forms of oppression, including Native American slavery, indentured servitude, apprenticeship, and pauper apprenticeship. In this hierarchical and inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment and honor than with emancipation, as they pushed for autonomy, protected their families and communities, and demanded a place in society. Drawing on exhaustive research in colonial legal records – including wills, court documents, and minutes of governmental bodies – as well as newspapers, church records, and other contemporaneous sources, Hardesty masterfully reconstructs an eighteenth-century Atlantic world of unfreedom that stretched from Europe to Africa to America. By reassessing the lives of enslaved Bostonians as part of a social order structured by ties of dependence, Hardesty not only demonstrates how African slaves were able to decode their new homeland and shape the terms of their enslavement, but also tells the story of how marginalized peoples engrained themselves in the very fabric of colonial American society.

Подробнее

The study of slavery in the Americas generally assumes a basic racial hierarchy: Africans or those of African descent are usually the slaves, and white people usually the slaveholders. In this unique interdisciplinary work of historical archaeology, anthropologist Katherine Hayes draws on years of fieldwork on Shelter Island’s Sylvester Manor to demonstrate how racial identity was constructed and lived before plantation slavery was racialized by the legal codification of races. Using the historic Sylvester Manor Plantation site turned archaeological dig as a case study, Hayes draws on artifacts and extensive archival material to present a rare picture of northern slavery on one of the North’s first plantations. The Manor was built in the mid-17th century by British settler Nathaniel Sylvester, whose family owned Shelter Island until the early 18th century and whose descendants still reside in the Manor House. There, as Hayes demonstrates, white settlers, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans worked side by side. While each group played distinct roles on the Manor and in the larger plantation economy of which Shelter Island was part, their close collaboration and cohabitation was essential for the Sylvester family’s economic and political power in the Atlantic Northeast. Through the lens of social memory and forgetting, this study addresses the significance of Sylvester Manor’s plantation history to American attitudes about diversity, Indian land politics, slavery and Jim Crow, in tension with idealized visions of white colonial community.

Подробнее

Inthe seventeenth-century English Atlantic, religious beliefs and practicesplayed a central role in creating racial identity. English Protestantismprovided a vocabulary and structure to describe and maintain boundaries betweeninsider and outsider. In this path-breaking study, Heather MiyanoKopelson peels back the layers ofconflicting definitions of bodies and competing practices of faith in thepuritan Atlantic, demonstrating how the categories of “white,”“black,” and “Indian” developed alongside religious boundaries between“Christian” and “heathen” and between “Catholic” and “Protestant.” Faithful Bodies focuses on threecommunities of Protestant dissent in the Atlantic World: Bermuda,Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In this “puritan Atlantic,” religiondetermined insider and outsider status: at times Africans and Natives couldbelong as long as they embraced the Protestant faith, while Irish Catholics andEnglish Quakers remained suspect. Colonists’interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West CentralAfricans shaped their understandings of human difference and its acceptableboundaries. Prayer, religious instruction, sexual behavior, andother public and private acts became markers of whether or not blacks andIndians were sinning Christians or godless heathens. As slavery becamelaw, transgressing people of color counted less and less as sinners in Englishpuritans’ eyes, even as some of them made Christianity an integral part oftheir communities. As Kopelson shows, this transformation proceededunevenly but inexorably during the long seventeenth century.

Подробнее

Against Wind and Tide tells the story of African American’s battle against the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 with the intention to return free blacks to its colony Liberia. Although ACS members considered free black colonization in Africa a benevolent enterprise, most black leaders rejected the ACS, fearing that the organization sought forced removal. As Ousmane K. Power-Greene’s story shows, these African American anticolonizationists did not believe Liberia would ever be a true “black American homeland.” In this study of anticolonization agitation, Power-Greene draws on newspapers, meeting minutes, and letters to explore the concerted effort on the part of nineteenth century black activists, community leaders, and spokespersons to challenge the American Colonization Society’s attempt to make colonization of free blacks federal policy. The ACS insisted the plan embodied empowerment. The United States, they argued, would never accept free blacks as citizens, and the only solution to the status of free blacks was to create an autonomous nation that would fundamentally reject racism at its core. But the activists and reformers on the opposite side believed that the colonization movement was itself deeply racist and in fact one of the greatest obstacles for African Americans to gain citizenship in the United States. Power-Greene synthesizes debates about colonization and emigration, situating this complex and enduring issue into an ever broader conversation about nation building and identity formation in the Atlantic world.

Подробнее

Shortly after winning its independence in 1804, Haiti’s leaders realizedthat if their nation was to survive, it needed to build strong diplomatic bondswith other nations. Haiti’s first leaders looked especially hard at the UnitedStates, which had a sizeable free black population that included vocalchampions of black emigration and colonization. In the 1820s, PresidentJean-Pierre Boyer helped facilitate a migration of thousands of black Americansto Haiti with promises of ample land, rich commercial prospects, and mostimportantly, a black state. His ideas struck a chord with both blacks andwhites in America. Journalists and black community leaders advertised emigrationto Haiti as a way for African Americans to resist discrimination and show theworld that the black race could be an equal on the world stage, whileantislavery whites sought to support a nation founded by liberated slaves.Black and white businessmen were excited by trade potential, and racist whitesviewed Haiti has a way to export the race problem that plagued America. By the end of the decade, black Americans migration to Haiti began to ebb asemigrants realized that the Caribbean republic wasn’t the black Eden they’danticipated. Caribbean Crossingdocuments the rise and fall of the campaign for black emigration to Haiti,drawing on a variety of archival sources to share the rich voices of theemigrants themselves. Using letters, diary accounts, travelers’ reports,newspaper articles, and American, British, and French consulate records, SaraFanning profiles the emigrants and analyzes the diverse motivations that fueledthis unique early moment in both American and Haitian history.

Подробнее

Tells the diverse story of four congregations in New York City as they navigated the social and political changes of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. In the fifty years after the Constitution was signed in 1787, New York City grew from a port town of 30,000 to a metropolis of over half a million residents. This rapid development transformed a once tightknit community and its religious experience. Including four churches belonging in various forms to the Church of England, that in some form still thrive today. Rapid urban and social change connected these believers in unity in the late colonial era. As the city grew larger, more impersonal, and socially divided, churches reformed around race and class-based neighborhoods. In Four Steeples over the City Streets, Kyle T. Bulthuis examines the intertwining of these four famous institutions—Trinity Episcopal, John Street Methodist, Mother Zion African Methodist, and St. Philip’s (African) Episcopal—to uncover the lived experience of these historical subjects, and just how religious experience and social change connected in the dynamic setting of early Republic New York. Drawing on a wide range of sources including congregational records and the unique histories of some of the churches leaders, Four Steeples over the City Streets reveals how these city churches responded to these transformations from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century. Bulthuis also adds new dynamics to the stories of well-known New Yorkers such as John Jay, James Harper, and Sojourner Truth. More importantly, Four Steeples over the City Streets connects issues of race, class, and gender, urban studies, and religious experience, revealing how the city shaped these churches, and how their respective religious traditions shaped the way they reacted to the city. This book is a critical addition to the study and history of African American activism and life in the ever-changing metropolis of New York City.

Подробнее