Melissa Ladd Teed - Böcker

Providing an indispensable resource for students and scholars studying the history of slavery, this book covers the full spectrum of daily life among slaves in the Antebellum South, giving readers a more complete picture of slaves' experiences in the decades before emancipation.In their daily struggles to forge lives of dignity and meaning within an inhuman system, slaves in the Antebellum South demonstrated creativity, resilience, and an insatiable desire to be free. The Daily Life of African American Slaves in the Antebellum South focuses on their struggles to create lives of meaning and dignity within a brutal and repressive system.This volume provides a comprehensive examination of the institution of slavery from the perspective of the slaves themselves. Readers can explore family life, religious beliefs, political activities, intellectual aspirations, material possessions, and recreational pursuits of enslaved people. The book shows that enslaved people were tightly constrained by the harsh realities of the oppressive system under which they lived but that they found ways to forge lives of their own. The book synthesizes the latest and best literature on slavery and gives readers the opportunity to examine history through the lens of daily life using primary source documents created by slaves or former slaves.

Providing an exciting narrative of Reconstruction based on current scholarship, historical sources, as well as interpretive essays on special topics, this book offers real insight into a controversial and critical period in American history.Reconstruction: A Reference Guide covers the entire period of Reconstruction (1863–1877) with a special emphasis on the struggle for social and political equality in the post-Civil War South. The book's analytical essays, selection of primary documents, and biographies of key participants give readers an understanding of social, political, and economic changes that occurred during this important period as well as provide opportunities to explore more specific issues and debates. Synthesizing and building on the work of recent scholars, the book documents how the central struggles of Reconstruction revolved around the meaning of freedom for former slaves. The essays describe how a new and sometimes deadly conflict over equal rights and racial justice raged throughout the South in the post-Civil War period and generated a constitutional crisis in the nation's capital as former slaves created alliances with sympathetic whites and sought to build a biracial democracy in the former Confederacy. Readers will not only understand the facts and events of the period, but will also be introduced to historical sources and key interpretive debates.