Leslie A. Schwalm – författare

African-American women fought for their freedom with courage and vigor during and after the Civil War. Leslie Schwalm explores the vital roles of enslaved and formerly enslaved women on the rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina, both in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery. From there, she chronicles their efforts as freedwomen to recover from the impact of the war while redefining their lives and labor. Freedwomen asserted their own ideas of what freedom meant and insisted on important changes in the work they performed both for white employers and in their own homes. As Schwalm shows, these women rejected the most unpleasant or demeaning tasks, guarded the prerogatives they gained under the South's slave economy, and defended their hard-won freedoms against unwanted intervention by Northern whites and the efforts of former owners to restore slavery's social and economic relations during Reconstruction. A bold challenge to entrenched notions, A Hard Fight for We places African American women at the center of the South's transition from a slave society.

This book addresses reconstruction-era struggles for civil rights and citizenship. Most studies of emancipation's consequences have focused on the South. Moving the discussion to the North, Leslie Schwalm enriches our understanding of the national impact of the transition from slavery to freedom. ""Emancipation's Diaspora"" follows the lives and experiences of thousands of men and women who liberated themselves from slavery, made their way to overwhelmingly white communities in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and worked to live in dignity as free women and men and as citizens.Schwalm explores the hotly contested politics of black enfranchisement as well as collisions over segregation, civil rights, and the more informal politics of race - including how slavery and emancipation would be remembered and commemorated. She examines how gender shaped the politics of race, and how gender relations were contested and negotiated within the black community. Based on extensive archival research, ""Emancipation's Diaspora"" shows how in churches and schools, in voting booths and Masonic temples, in bustling cities and rural crossroads, black and white Midwesterners - women and men - shaped the local and national consequences of emancipation.

Black Union soldiers and refugees fleeing enslavement during the Civil War faced dire circumstances when they fell ill or were injured. During the war, white Northerners routinely promoted ideas about Black inferiority using the language of science and medicine, and as medical care became institutionalized under agencies like the U.S. Sanitary Commission, white scientists and health workers used their authority and expertise to reinforce racial hierarchy. When Black soldiers and refugees came under that authority, they were routinely subjected to inferior health care and treated as objects of study. This mistreatment continued after death. The human remains of Black soldiers and civilians were dissected, dismembered, exhumed, and displayed by white medical professionals, and too often they were later buried in mass graves or waste pits. Drawing on archives of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the recollections of Civil War soldiers and medical workers, and testimonies from Black Americans who endured the wartime medical system, Leslie A. Schwalm exposes the racist ideas and practices that shaped the Union's Civil War health care. Painstakingly researched and accessibly written, this book helps readers understand the persistence of anti-Black racism and health disparities in both civilian and military settings during and after the war.