The (Afro) Future of Henry Box Brown

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 125-142
Author(s):  
Danielle A.D. Howard
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Man ◽  
The American South

Henry Box Brown, a Black man born into slavery in the American South, devised an unforeseen yet ingenious plan to achieve emancipation: he was shipped to the North in a cramped, wooden box. The first testament of Brown’s escape was not his emergence from his box, but instead his voice responding to the box’s addressee. Later, Brown reenacts his original escape in Victorian England and becomes “The King of All Mesmerizers” by envisioning an alien future for himself, much like musician and philosopher-poet Sun Ra.

scholarly journals Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
American South ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Feminist Consciousness ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The American South

‘The degradations, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe.’ Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in the American South and went on to write one of the most extraordinary slave narratives. First published pseudonymously in 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl describes Jacobs’s treatment at the hands of her owners, her eventual escape to the North, and her perilous existence evading recapture as a fugitive slave. To save herself from sexual assault and protect her children she is forced to hide for seven years in a tiny attic space, suffering terrible psychological and physical pain. Written to expose the appalling treatment of slaves in the South and the racism of the free North, and to advance the abolitionist cause, Incidents is notable for its careful construction and literary effects. Jacobs’s story of self-emancipation and a growing feminist consciousness is the tale of an individual and a searing indictment of slavery’s inhumanity. This edition includes the short memoir by Jacobs’s brother, John S. Jacobs, ‘A True Tale of Slavery’.

Uneven Development in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparison of the Habsburg Empire and the United States

1986 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
David F. Good
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
National Market ◽  
Factor Markets ◽  
The American South

Unlike most studies of uneven development before World War I, this paper uses the region (not the nation) as the unit of study. Weak market links with the national market partially explain persisting relative backwardness in the Habsburg Empire's eastern hinterland and in the American South. Even if product and factor markets had been perfectly integrated, institutional rigidities would have greatly retarded development. In the Empire, growth emerged in the west where serfdom was weakening and spread slowly as feudal institutions decayed. In America, capitalistic institutions promoted development in the North more thoroughly than did slavery and postbellum institutions in the South.

‘Our Brethren’: A British Version of Southern Separatist Ideology during the American Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Michael J. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American South ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Economic Interest ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The North ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The American South ◽  
British People

British responses to the American Civil War were not straightforward, though the relevant historiography has tended to concentrate on a number of now quite familiar explanations. The reasons why British people took sides – if they did (for some did not) – are usually thought to have been shaped by the slavery question and concomitant thinking about race, labour systems, and the nature of work; by direct economic interest – cotton, grain, investments, and the potential for future commerce; by political ideas, relating especially to democracy, national self-determination, federalism, and republics; and by geostrategic concerns about how best to preserve Britain's global role and imperial power. These were all important, but so was a relatively neglected set of influences on British opinion that arose from cultural and social determinants. This article suggests that many British people supported the Confederacy because they saw the American South as fundamentally unlike the North and, what is more, as recognizably ‘English’. The words and deeds of a prominent pro-Southerner, A.J. Beresford Hope, are used to elucidate this motivation for taking sides. Scholars have not previously investigated Hope's activism or the cultural and social case for the Confederacy in much detail.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

The Sociology of Country Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Race And Ethnic Relations ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
The American South ◽  
Political Realignment

How can a sociological approach improve our understanding of country music? This chapter answers this question by focusing on the intersections between country music history and the core sociological theme of modernity. Challenging standard interpretations of country music as folk culture, it shows how the emergence of the popular commercial genre corresponds to the increasing modernization of the American South. The genre’s subsequent growth and evolution tracks central objects of sociological study including industrialization, geographic mobility, race and ethnic relations, the changing social class structure, political realignment in the United States, and (paradoxically) urbanization. Country music is comparatively understudied in the sociology of music despite its rich history and massive popularity; this chapter shows that the genre and the discipline nevertheless mutually illuminate one another in robust and often surprising ways.

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