San Antonio College Library

The last New World countries to abolish slavery were Cuba and Brazil, more than twenty years after slave emancipation in the United States. Why slavery was so resilient and how people in Latin American fought against it are the subjects of this compelling study. -- Cover p. 4.

An account of the first experiment in Reconstruction, the effort of northern missionary abolitionists to assist the abandoned slaves of Sea Island, South Carolina establish schools, train troops, claim land ownership, and accept their status as freed men.

"Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution as both an islandwide and a circum-Caribbean phenomenon, Graham Nessler examines the intertwined histories of Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti, and Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic. Tracing conflicts over the terms and boundaries of territory, liberty, and citizenship that transpired in the two colonies that shared one island, Nessler argues that the territories'...

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah is a richly illustrated, accessibly written book modeled on the very successful Slavery in New York, a volume Leslie M. Harris coedited with Ira Berlin. Here Harris and Diana Ramey Berry have collected a variety of perspectives on slavery, emancipation, and black life in Savannah from the city's founding to the early twentieth century. Written by leading historians of Savannah, Georgia, and the South, the volume includes...

Littlefield's account of the freed blacks' social and economic life is a valuable discussion. Students of the West and race relations will welcome this book. "Between 1837 and the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Chickasaw Indians experienced the social discontinuity of removal from their traditional homelands in Mississippi to the Indian Territory, built a new life for themselves on the new lands, and established the Chickasaw Nation. During...

Louisiana, 1843: a German immigrant thinks she recognizes a young slave girl as the long-lost daughter of her German friend, but the girl has no memory of such a past, and her owner refuses to free her. In novelistic detail, historian John Bailey reconstructs the exotic sights, sounds, and smells of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, an "infernal motley crew" of cotton kings, decadent river workers, immigrants, and slaves. The dramatic trial offers...

"In The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation, Wilma Dunaway calls into question the dominant paradigm of the U.S. slave family. She contends that U.S. slavery studies have been flawed by neglect of small plantations and export zones and by exaggeration of slave agency. Using data on population trends and slave narratives, she identifies several profit-maximizing strategies that owners implemented to disrupt and endanger African-American...

"Revisiting the origins of the British antislavery movement of the late eighteenth century, Christopher Leslie Brown challenges prevailing scholarly arguments that locate the roots of abolitionism in economic determinism or bourgeois humanitarianism. Brown instead connects the shift from sentiment to action to changing views of empire and nation in Britain, particularly the anxieties and dislocations spurred by the American Revolution"--Page 4 of...