Myra B. Young Armstead – författare

A fascinating study of freedom and slavery, told through the life of an escaped slave who built a life in the Hudson ValleyIn 1793 James F. Brown was born a slave, and in 1868 he died a free man. At age 34 he ran away from his native Maryland to pass the remainder of his life as a gardener to a wealthy family in the Hudson Valley. Two years after his escape and manumission, he began a diary which he kept until his death. In Freedom's Gardener, Myra B. Young Armstead uses the apparently small and domestic details of Brown's diaries to construct a bigger story about the transition from slavery to freedom.In this first detailed historical study of Brown's diaries, Armstead utilizes Brown's life to illuminate the concept of freedom as it developed in the United States in the early national and antebellum years. That Brown, an African American and former slave, serves as such a case study underscores the potential of American citizenship during his lifetime.

A fascinating study of freedom and slavery, told through the life of an escaped slave who built a life in the Hudson ValleyIn 1793 James F. Brown was born a slave, and in 1868 he died a free man. At age 34 he ran away from his native Maryland to pass the remainder of his life as a gardener to a wealthy family in the Hudson Valley. Two years after his escape and manumission, he began a diary which he kept until his death. In Freedom's Gardener, Myra B. Young Armstead uses the apparently small and domestic details of Brown's diaries to construct a bigger story about the transition from slavery to freedom.In this first detailed historical study of Brown's diaries, Armstead utilizes Brown's life to illuminate the concept of freedom as it developed in the United States in the early national and antebellum years. That Brown, an African American and former slave, serves as such a case study underscores the potential of American citizenship during his lifetime.

A history of African American presence in the Hudson Valley region from the colonial period to the present.Using New York State's Hudson Valley as a backdrop, this book provides a regional perspective on black identity from the colonial period to the present. Through racialized struggles and varying experiences of black residents, a black presence in the region has persisted. Factors such as religious structures and cosmologies, ethnicity, legal systems, economic patterns, class, gender, family structures, and leaders have uniquely influenced black identity.The religion-inspired metamorphosis of celebrated antebellum black resident Isabella Van Wagenen, later known as Sojourner Truth, illustrates how the abandonment of her slave identity and her refusal to call her new employer "master," was a liberation for blacks-a "mighty change." Moving from the colonial period to the present, this book underscores the mighty change in the identity of blacks in the region over nearly a four-hundred-year period-from captive to slave, from slave to free, from northern-born to southern-influenced, from pre-industrial to post-industrial, from multi-ethnic to multi-national. Like Isabella, in her successful determination to reclaim her son who had been wrongfully forced into slavery, black people within the region have stood "tall within."