University of North Carolina Press: Excerpts

The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South

by Dylan C. Penningroth

In The Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African American family and community life from the heyday of plantation slavery to the "freedom generation" of the 1870s. MORE

Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations

by Sharia M. Fett

Exploring the charged topic of black health under slavery, Sharla Fett reveals how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery, and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South. Fett shows how enslaved men and women drew on African precedents to develop a view of health and healing that was distinctly at odds with slaveholders' property concerns. MORE

Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War

by John David Smith

Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery

by John Michael Vlach

Behind the "Big Houses" of the antebellum South existed a different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves' environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves' own point of view. MORE

Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830

by Sylvia R. Frey

The conversion of African-born slaves and their descendants to Protestant Christianity marked one of the most important social and intellectual transformations in American history. Come Shouting to Zion is the first comprehensive exploration of the processes by which this remarkable transition occurred. MORE

Defining Moments: African American Commemoration & Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913

by Kathleen Ann Clark

With Defining Moments, Kathleen Clark shines new light on African American commemorative traditions in the South, where events such as Emancipation Day and Fourth of July ceremonies served as opportunities for African Americans to assert their own understandings of slavery, the Civil War, and Emancipation - efforts that were vital to the struggles to define, assert, and defend African American freedom and citizenship. MORE

Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South

by Michael A. Gomez

The transatlantic slave trade brought individuals from diverse African regions and cultures to a common destiny in the American South. In this comprehensive study, Michael Gomez establishes tangible links between the African American community and its African origins and traces the process by which African populations exchanged their distinct ethnic identities for one defined primarily by the conception of race. MORE

Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom

by Heather Andrea Williams

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. MORE

Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth Century Slave Narratives

by Paul D. Escott

This is the first major attempt to analyze the slave narratives in the Federal Writers' Project. Escott read nearly 2,400 narratives to establish 81 categories of information for computer analysis. Tables presenting this data are set within a well-organized text that includes many quotations. MORE

The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South

by Dylan C. Penningroth

In The Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African American family and community life from the heyday of plantation slavery to the "freedom generation" of the 1870s. MORE

Within the Plantation Household: Black & White Women of the Old South

by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Documenting the difficult class relations between women slaveholders and slave women, this study shows how class and race as well as gender shaped women's experiences and determined their identities. MORE

Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations

by Sharia M. Fett

Exploring the charged topic of black health under slavery, Sharla Fett reveals how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery, and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South. Fett shows how enslaved men and women drew on African precedents to develop a view of health and healing that was distinctly at odds with slaveholders' property concerns. MORE