Revealing Communities

Highlights the long-understudied history of free Black communities in the United States.This volume makes a unique contribution to a growing body of scholarship bringing forgotten free Black communities back into public memory and expanding views of Black history. Each of the book’s nine chapters presents a different historical-archaeological study of a community on the East Coast to the Midwest in environments ranging from rural to urban. The authors share what their investigations into material traces and documents have uncovered about the experiences, accomplishments, and struggles of people who were self-emancipated, manumitted, or born into freedom. Among the topics covered are inter- and intra-community relations, land ownership, place-making, landscapes, cemeteries and burials, private life and interiors, work, health, imagination, and material and spiritual strategies used to cultivate individuals, families, and communities. The authors’ innovative approaches, combined with the affective power of sites and artifacts, illuminate creative and resourceful efforts to establish thriving Black communities, whose members often had different biographies, views, and economic statuses. At the same time, each chapter pays close attention to the external barriers, including prejudice and violence, that aimed to limit the freedom of Black Americans and that made their experiences of freedom different from those of white Americans.