Tamika Y. Nunley – författare

The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power.Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places Black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington, D.C., and the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America.

The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power.Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places Black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington, D.C., and the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America.

Award-winning historian Tamika Y. Nunley has unearthed the stories of enslaved Black women charged by their owners with poisoning, theft, murder, infanticide, and arson. While free Black and white people accused of capital crimes received a hearing, trial, and, if convicted, an opportunity to appeal, none of these options were available to enslaved people. Conviction was final, and only the state or owners could spare their accused chattel of punishment by death. For enslaved women in Virginia, clemency was not uncommon, but Nunley shows why this act ultimately benefitted owners and punished the accused with a fate worse than death: perpetual bondage.Demonstrating how crimes, convictions, and clemency functioned within a slave society that upheld the property interests of white Virginians, Nunley reveals the frequency with which owners preferred to keep the accused in bondage, which allowed them, behind the veil of paternalism, to continue to benefit from Black women's labor. This so-called clemency also sought to rob Black women of the power they exercised when they committed capital crimes. The testimonies that Nunley has collected and analyzed offer compelling glimpses of the self-identities forged by Black women as they attempted to resist enslavement and the limits of justice available to them in the antebellum courtroom.

Award-winning historian Tamika Y. Nunley has unearthed the stories of enslaved Black women charged by their owners with poisoning, theft, murder, infanticide, and arson. While free Black and white people accused of capital crimes received a hearing, trial, and, if convicted, an opportunity to appeal, none of these options were available to enslaved people. Conviction was final, and only the state or owners could spare their accused chattel of punishment by death. For enslaved women in Virginia, clemency was not uncommon, but Nunley shows why this act ultimately benefitted owners and punished the accused with a fate worse than death: perpetual bondage.Demonstrating how crimes, convictions, and clemency functioned within a slave society that upheld the property interests of white Virginians, Nunley reveals the frequency with which owners preferred to keep the accused in bondage, which allowed them, behind the veil of paternalism, to continue to benefit from Black women's labor. This so-called clemency also sought to rob Black women of the power they exercised when they committed capital crimes. The testimonies that Nunley has collected and analyzed offer compelling glimpses of the self-identities forged by Black women as they attempted to resist enslavement and the limits of justice available to them in the antebellum courtroom.

Originally published in 1961, Benjamin Quarles’s The Negro in the American Revolution remains one of the most comprehensive histories of the presence and politics of Black people in the colonies and their complicated participation in the American Revolution. Enduringly innovative in its source base and subsequent analysis, Quarles’s landmark work continues to serve as a cornerstone for scholars across disciplines. In addition to the original text, this critical edition includes an introduction by the editors and five new essays by historians and literary scholars that bring together methodological insights drawn from Quarles’s original work with the latest innovations in archival research, revealing how gender, geographic location, and placemaking shaped the wartime experiences of Black people. Contributors include Leslie Alexander, Tara Bynum, Michael Dickinson, Vanessa Holden, Adam McNeil, Tamika Nunley, and Derrick Spires.