Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies – serie

So central was labor in the lives of African-American slaves that it has often been taken for granted, with little attention given to the type of work that slaves did and the circumstances surrounding it. Cultivation and Culture brings together leading scholars of slavery - historians, anthropologists, and sociologists - to explore when, where, and how slaves labored in growing the New World's great staples and how this work shaped the institution of slavery and the lives of African-American slaves.Selected from a conference on comparative slavery at the University of Maryland that set the agenda for the next decades' research in this field, the essays focus on the inter-relationship between the demands of particular crops, the organisation of labour, the nature of the labour force and the character of agricultural technology. They reveal the full complexity of the institution of chattel bondage in the New World and suggest why and how slavery varied from place to place and time to time.What these scholars show is that although work in the slave owners' fields accounted for most of the slaves' labouring time, slaves also worked for themselves and their independent economic activities had far reaching consequences. By producing food for themselves and others, tending cash crops, raising livestock, manufacturing finished goods, marketing their own products, consuming and saving the proceeds, and bequething property to their descendents, slaves took control of a large part of their lives. In many ways their independent economic endeavours offered a foundation for their domestic and commuity life, determining the social structure of slave society and providing a material basis for their distinctive culture. In exploring both the work that slaves performed for their owners and the work they did for themselves, Cultivation and Culture sheds new light on the origins and development of African-American culture and provides a new understanding of the African-American experience in slavery.

This is a study of school desegregation in Virginia. It traces the evolution of the Richmond public schools from segregation to desegregation to resegregation in the decades following the ""Brown"" decision. It analyses the ""separate but equal"" system and its impact on life in the city.

This text describes the introduction, evolution, demise and final abolition of slavery in Delaware. The author uncovers why Delaware, a staunch Unionist state during the Civil War, failed to abolish slavery until 1901 and repeatedly denied its black citizens the right to vote.

Using primary documents, this work examines the characteristics of North Carolina's African-American population in order to explain the social and political factors that shaped economic opportunity for this group from the Civil War until 1915.

This text examines public events in New York City from the end of the Civil War through World War I, demonstrating how ritualized elements of black processions, parades, riots and festivals made visible the inherent paradox of the ""separate but equal"" doctrine of the time.

This study draws on a variety of sources, including the reports and correspondence of prison inspectors and letters from prisoners and their families, to explore the history of the African-American men and women whose labour made Alabama's prison system the most profitable in the country.

A significant number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Virginians migrated north and west with the intent of extricating themselves from a slave society. All sought some kind of freedom: Whites who left the Old Dominion to escape from slavery refused to live any longer as slave owners or as participants in a society grounded in bondage; fugitive slaves attempted to liberate themselves; free African Americans searched for greater opportunity. In Migrants against Slavery Philip J. Schwarz suggests that antislavery migrant Virginians, both the famous - such as fugitive Anthony Burns and abolitionist Edward Coles - and the lesser known, deserve closer scrutiny. Their migration and its aftermath, he argues, intensified the national controversy over human bondage, playing a larger role than previous historians have realized in shaping American identity and in Americans' effort to define the meaning of freedom.

Explores the lives and work of fifteen black labor historians and social scientists as seen through the prisms of gender, class, and time. This biography offers portraits of these seminal figures, following them through their educations, their often groundbreaking work in economic and labor studies, and their invaluable public advocacy.