Kategoria BISAC: History >> African American & Black

The image of a scorpion surrounded by a ring of fire, stinging itself to death, was widespread among antislavery leaders before the Civil War. It captures their long-standing strategy for peaceful abolition: they would surround the slave states with a cordon of freedom, constricting slavery and inducing the social crisis in which the peculiar institution would die. The image opens a fresh perspective on antislavery and the coming of the Civil War, brilliantly explored here by one of our greatest historians of the period.

Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery nationwide.

Rael immerses readers in the mix of social, geographic, economic, and political...

Will Guzman delves into Nixon's lifelong struggle against Jim Crow. Linking Nixon's activism to his independence from the white economy, support from the NAACP, and the man's own indefatigable courage, Guzman also sheds light on Nixon's presence in symbolic and literal borderlands--as an educated...

Black barbers, reflected a freed slave who barbered in antebellum St. Louis, may have been the only men in their community who enjoyed, at all times, the privilege of free speech. The reason lay in their temporary--but absolute--power over a client. With a flick of the wrist, they could have slit the throats of the white men they shaved. In Knights of the Razor, Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr., explores this extraordinary relationship in the largely untold story of African American barbers, North and South, from the American Revolution to the First World War.

In addition to...

As details surrounding the shocking case emerged, both the crime and ensuing trial-which spanned several months-were featured in the national press. The trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the black community to public attention. At the same time, the mixed race of the...

Frederick Douglass's fluid, changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in the many conflicting accounts he gave of key events and relationships during his journey from slavery to freedom. Nevertheless, when these differing self-presentations are put side by side and consideration is given individually to their rhetorical strategies and historical moment, what emerges is a fascinating collage of Robert S. Levine's elusive subject. The Lives of Frederick Douglass is revisionist biography at its best, offering new perspectives on Douglass the social reformer, orator, and...

If you got your knowledge of American slavery from school textbooks or mainstream history books, you can be sure that most of this information is not only incorrect, but was intentionally distorted and rewritten to conceal the truth. Why? Because the Liberal establishment does not want you to know that the American Civil War was not fought over slavery, that Abraham Lincoln was not the "Great Emancipator," that American slavery got its start in the North, that the American abolition movement was born in the South, that true slavery was never practiced in the South, that white racism was...