Throughout the colonial and antebellum periods, Virginia's tobacco producers exploited slave labor to ensure the profitability of their agricultural enterprises. In the wake of the Civil War, however, the abolition of slavery, combined with changed market conditions, sparked a breakdown of traditional tobacco culture. Focusing on the transformation of social relations between former slaves and former masters, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie traces the trajectory of this breakdown from the advent of emancipation to the stirrings of African American migration at the turn of the twentieth...
Throughout the colonial and antebellum periods, Virginia's tobacco producers exploited slave labor to ensure the profitability of their agricultural e...
Thirty years before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the antislavery movement won its first victory in the British Parliament. On August 1, 1834, the Abolition of Slavery Bill took effect, ending colonial slavery throughout the British Empire. Over the next three decades, "August First Day," also known as "West India Day" and "Emancipation Day," became the most important annual celebration of emancipation among people of African descent in the northern United States, the British Caribbean, Canada West, and the United Kingdom and played a critical role in popular mobilization...
Thirty years before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the antislavery movement won its first victory in the British Parliament. On Augu...
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie's Freedom's Seekers offers a bold and innovative intervention into the study of emancipation as a transnational phe-nomenon and serves as an important contribution to our understanding of the remaking of the nineteenth-century Atlantic Americas.
Drawing on decades of research into slave and emancipation societies, Kerr-Ritchie is attentive to those who sought but were not granted freedom, and those who resisted enslavement individually as well as collectively on behalf of their communities. He explores the many roles that fugitive slaves, slave soldiers, and slave...
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie's Freedom's Seekers offers a bold and innovative intervention into the study of emancipation as a transnational phe-nomenon...