ebooks John Taylor Wood : Sea Ghost of the Confederacy by Royce Shingleton in History

Description

These essays; by some of the most prominent young historians writing about slavery; fill gaps in our understanding of such subjects as enslaved women; the Atlantic and internal slave trades; the relationships between Indians and enslaved people; and enslavement in Latin America. Inventive and stimulating; the essays model the blending of methods and styles that characterizes the new cultural history of slavery’s social; political; and economic systems.Several common themes emerge from the volume; among them the correlation between race and identity; the meanings contained in family and community relationships; gender; and life’s commonplaces; and the literary and legal representations that legitimated and codified enslavement and difference. Such themes signal methodological and pedagogical shifts in the field away from master/slave or white/black race relations models toward perspectives that give us deeper access to the mental universe of slavery.Topics of the essays range widely; including European ideas about the reproductive capacities of African women and the process of making race in the Atlantic world; the contradictions of the assimilation of enslaved African American runaways into Creek communities; the consequences and meanings of death to Jamaican slaves and slave owners; and the tensions between midwifery as a black cultural and spiritual institution and slave midwives as health workers in a plantation economy.Opening our eyes to the personal; the contentious; and even the intimate; these essays call for a history in which both enslaved and enslavers acted in a vast human drama of bondage and freedom; salvation and damnation; wealth and exploitation.