A Desolate Place For A Defiant People

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In the 250 years before the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was a brutal landscape—2,000 square miles of undeveloped and unforgiving wetlands, peat bogs, impenetrable foliage, and dangerous creatures. It was also a protective refuge for marginalized communities, including Native Americans, African-American maroons, free African Americans, and outcast Europeans. Here they created their own way of life, free of the exploitation and alienation they had escaped. In the first thorough examination of this vital site, Daniel Sayers examines the area’s archaeological record, exposing and unraveling the complex social and economic systems developed by these defiant communities that thrived on the periphery. He develops an analytical framework based on the complex interplay between alienation, diasporic exile, uneven geographical development, and modes of production to argue that colonialism and slavery inevitably created sustained critiques of American capitalism.

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Genre : Social Science
Author : Daniel Sayers
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Release : 2014-11-25
File : 271 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9780813055244


Maroons And The Marooned

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Contributions by Richard Bodek, Claire P. Curtis, Joseph Kelly, Simon Lewis, Steve Mentz, J. Brent Morris, Peter Sands, Edward Shore, and James O'Neil Spady Commonly, the word maroon refers to someone cast away on an island. One becomes marooned, usually, through a storm at sea or by a captain as a method of punishment. But the term originally denoted escaped slaves. Though being marooned came to be associated mostly with white European castaways, the etymology invites comparison between true maroons (escaped slaves establishing new lives in the wilderness) and people who were marooned (through maritime disaster). This volume brings together literary scholars with historians, encompassing both literal maroons such as in Brazil and South Carolina as well as metaphoric scenarios in time-travel novels and postapocalyptic narratives. Included are examples from The Tempest; Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Both runaways and castaways formed new societies in the wilderness. But true maroons, escaped slaves, were not cast away; they chose to fly towards the uncertainties of the wild in pursuit of freedom. In effect, this volume gives these maroons proper credit, at the very heart of American history.

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Genre : History
Author : Richard Bodek
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Release : 2020-04-20
File : 218 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781496827234


Water And Human Societies

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This book explores the historical relationships between human communities and water. Bringing together for the first time key texts from across the literature, it discusses how the past has shaped our contemporary challenges with equitable access to clean and ample water supplies. The book is organized into chapters that explore thematic issues in water history, including “Water and Civilizations,” Water and Health,” “Water and Equity” and “Water and Sustainability”. Each chapter is introduced by a critical overview of the theme, followed by four primary and secondary readings that discuss critical nodes in the historical and contemporary development of each chapter theme. “Further readings” at the end of each chapter invite the reader to further explore the dynamics of each theme. The foundational premise of the book is that in order to comprehend the complexity of global water challenges, we need to understand the history of cultural forces that have shaped our water practices. These historical patterns shape the range of choices available to us as we formulate responses to water challenges. The book will be a valuable resource to all students interested in understanding the challenges of water use today.

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Genre : Social Science
Author : David A. Pietz
Publisher : Springer Nature
Release : 2021-08-18
File : 266 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9783030676926


What Sorrows Labour In My Parent S Breast

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The legacy of the slave family haunts the status of black Americans in modern U.S. society. Stereotypes that first entered the popular imagination in the form of plantation lore have continued to distort the African American social identity. In What Sorrows Labour in My Parents' Breast?, Brenda Stevenson provides a long overdue concise history to help the reader understand this vitally important African American institution as it evolved and survived under the extreme opposition that the institution of slavery imposed. The themes of this work center on the multifaceted reality of loss, recovery, resilience and resistance embedded in the desire of African/African descended people to experience family life despite their enslavement. These themes look back to the critical loss that Africans, both those taken and those who remained, endured, as the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley honors in the line—“What sorrows labour in my parents’ breast?,” and look forward to the generations of slaves born through the Civil War era who struggled to realize their humanity in the recreation of family ties that tied them, through blood and emotion, to a reality beyond their legal bondage to masters and mistresses. Stevenson pays particular attention to the ways in which gender, generation, location, slave labor, the economic status of slaveholders and slave societies’ laws affected the black family in slavery.

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Genre : History
Author : Brenda E. Stevenson
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Release : 2023-04-21
File : 440 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781442252172


As If She Were Free

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A groundbreaking collective biography narrating the history of emancipation through the life stories of women of African descent in the Americas.

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Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Author : Erica L. Ball
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Release : 2020-10-08
File : 529 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781108493406


Kindred Creation

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A vital path home. Employing African epistemologies and an embodied African beingness, this book embraces the revelation and miracle of Blackness. Creating a world worthy of our children requires recalling the dignity and distinction of the African way of life. This book is not written for settler consumption. Kindred Creation is a call and response to dream and design better worlds rooted in African lifeways: a path to Black freedom, a love letter to Black futures, and a blueprint to intergenerational Black joy and dignity—all (and always) on Black terms. Author, organizer, and designer Aida Mariam Davis explores the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, making explicit the ways that extraction, oppression, and enslavement serve the goals of empire—not least by severing ancestral connections and disrupting profound and ancient relationships to self, nature, and community. Structured in three parts—Remember, Refuse, and Reclaim—Kindred Creation is a philosophical guidebook and a vital invitation to power and reconnection. Davis employs parable, poetry, theory, memory, narrative, and prophecy to help readers: Remember: By unforgetting the unending and cascading violence of settler colonialism and other forms of domination and exploring the ways that African land, language, lifestyle, and labor are stolen, distorted, and repackaged for colonial consumption to extract capital and sever ties to ancestral knowledge, lifeways, and dignity Refuse: By rejecting and interrupting death-making institutions and relationships and choosing kinship and self-determination in the face of settler colonial violence Reclaim: By revealing that freedom is within us—and within reach. Davis shares how the reader can birth new worlds and relationships and offers strategies for reclaiming land, language, lifestyle, and labor. The colonial violence and dispossession of African land, language, and labor is inflicted intentionally—and by design. Reclaiming African lifeways and remembering what was forcibly forgotten must be by creation: a re-membering of our interconnectedness and kinship.

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Genre : Social Science
Author : Aida Mariam Davis
Publisher : North Atlantic Books
Release : 2024-12-03
File : 226 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9798889841364


Nature Shock

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An award†‘winning environmental historian explores American history through wrenching, tragic, and sometimes humorous stories of getting lost The human species has a propensity for getting lost. The American people, inhabiting a mental landscape shaped by their attempts to plant roots and to break free, are no exception. In this engaging book, environmental historian Jon Coleman bypasses the trailblazers so often described in American history to follow instead the strays and drifters who went missing. From Hernando de Soto’s failed quest for riches in the American southeast to the recent trend of getting lost as a therapeutic escape from modernity, this book details a unique history of location and movement as well as the confrontations that occur when our physical and mental conceptions of space become disjointed. Whether we get lost in the woods, the plains, or the digital grid, Coleman argues that getting lost allows us to see wilderness anew and connect with generations across five centuries to discover a surprising and edgy American identity.

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Genre : History
Author : Jon T. Coleman
Publisher : Yale University Press
Release : 2020-08-12
File : 356 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9780300255867


Critical Animal Studies

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This important book charts new territory by showcasing some of the newest developments in the rapidly-growing field of Critical Animal Studies. Critical Animal Studies presents a radical ethical and normative challenge to existing systems of power in the context of neoliberal capitalism and to the existential structure of speciesism. The essays in this book link activist and academic approaches to dismantle the exploitation and oppression of nonhuman animals. Featuring an international team of contributors, the book reflects the transdisciplinary character of Critical Animal Studies, with chapters by activists and academics from disciplines across the social sciences, including historical archaeology, political science, psychology, geography, law, social work and philosophy. The book provides advanced-level students with an ideal introduction to a wide range of perspectives on Critical Animal Studies, amongst other things proposing new ways of considering animal advocacy, decolonization and liberation.

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Genre : Social Science
Author : Atsuko Matsuoka
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Release : 2018-02-05
File : 374 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781786606488


Thoreau S Religion

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Boldly reconfigures Walden for contemporary ethics and politics by recovering Thoreau's theological vision of environmental justice.

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Genre : History
Author : Alda Balthrop-Lewis
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Release : 2021-01-21
File : 333 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781108835107


Writing The History Of Slavery

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Exploring the major historiographical, theoretical, and methodological approaches that have shaped studies on slavery, this addition to the Writing History series highlights the varied ways that historians have approached the fluid and complex systems of human bondage, domination, and exploitation that have developed in societies across the world. The first part examines more recent attempts to place slavery in a global context, touching on contexts such as religion, empire, and capitalism. In its second part, the book looks closely at the key themes and methods that emerge as historians reckon with the dynamics of historical slavery. These range from politics, economics and quantitative analyses, to race and gender, to pyschohistory, history from below, and many more. Throughout, examples of slavery and its impact are considered across time and place: in Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Europe, colonial Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and trades throughout the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Also taken into account are thinkers from Antiquity to the 20th century and the impact their ideas have had on the subject and the debates that follow. This book is essential reading for students and scholars at all levels who are interested in not only the history of slavery but in how that history has come to be written and how its debates have been framed across civilizations.

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Genre : History
Author : David Stefan Doddington
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Release : 2022-01-13
File : 481 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9781474285605