scholarly journals A Vigorous Affirmation of Life: Slaves in the Face of Dehumanization

Elements ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Nista
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Affirmation Of Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The American South

For a slave living under the system of chattel slavery in the American South during the nineteenth century, avenues of self-expression were extremely limited. One of the few ways slaves could exert control over their own lives was through singing and dancing. These arts gave slaves a chance to relieve stress and establish a culture through the creation of musical instruments, songs, and dances. All of these contained hints at the true nature of slaves’ feelings towards the system that oppressed them, feelings that they had to frequently repress. However, despite slaves’ efforts to make this culture entirely their own, masters tried to find ways to use it to their advantage instead of to the slaves’ benefit. The resulting covert power struggle sometimes ended in favor of the masters, taking the form of regulations on slaves’ dances, requirement of the performance of songs and dances for the masters’ entertainment, and even abuse of slaves by using their own arts. Ultimately, however, slaves emerged victorious because of the hidden messages in their songs and dances. Though this method of coping could not erase all the masters did, it was at least one glimmer of hope.

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.

Making the Bible Belt

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Locke
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Religious Support ◽  
Bible Belt ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Face ◽  
The American South ◽  
Shared Commitment

By reconstructing the religious crusade to achieve prohibition in Texas, Making the Bible Belt reveals how southern religious leaders overcame long-standing anticlerical traditions and built a powerful political movement that injected religion irreversibly into public life. H.L. Mencken coined the term “Bible Belt” in the 1920s to capture the peculiar alliance of religion and public life in the American South, but the reality he described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. Through the politics of prohibition, and in the face of bitter resistance, a complex but shared commitment to expanding the power and scope of religion transformed southern evangelicals’ inward-looking restraints into an aggressive, self-assertive, and unapologetic political activism. Early defeats forced prohibitionist clergy to recast their campaign as a broader effort that churned notions of history, race, gender, and religion into a moral crusade that elevated ambitious leaders such as the pugnacious fundamentalist J. Frank Norris and US senator Morris Sheppard, the “Father of National Prohibition,” into national figures. By exploring the controversies surrounding the religious support of prohibition in Texas, Making the Bible Belt reconstructs the purposeful, decades-long campaign to politicize southern religion, hints at the historical origins of the religious right, and explores a compelling and transformative moment in American history.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
William A. Link
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American South ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Global Events ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The American South ◽  
American Nation ◽  
National Borders

William Link introduces key contexts for the book, namely that the origins, onsets, and resolutions of the American Civil War are best understood as a global struggle. Not only was the creation of a new American nation a result of the war, but this creation also occurred in concert with a worldwide emergence of modern nationalism. By 1860, the American South contained the world’s largest and most valuable enslaved population, and the huge wealth in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco secured through slave labor is what drove exports, trade, and profit in American and global financial centers. This book suggests new ways to situate US Reconstruction as affecting and being affected by global events, and it argues that Reconstruction cannot be understood unless we extend our analysis beyond national borders.

scholarly journals The Post-Bellum Recovery of the South and the Cost of the Civil War

1976 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 898-907 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Labor Supply ◽  
American South ◽  
The South ◽  
Rate Of Growth ◽  
Lasting Effect ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Cost

In the last half of the nineteenth century the economy of the American South experienced three separate shocks which have been analyzed separately by different authors. This note synthesizes the literature and presents an integrated story in which the decline in the rate of growth of the demand for cotton (noted by Wright) and the results of emancipation on the southern labor supply (noted by Ransom and Sutch) had equal impacts on measured income in the post-bellum South. The Civil War itself had a much smaller and less lasting effect on southern income than Coldin and Lewis assumed; in the long run, it was the least important of the three shocks.

The Ties that Bind

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
British Caribbean ◽  
William Lloyd Garrison ◽  
The Usa ◽  
George Thompson ◽  
The American South

This book explores the close affinities that bound together anti-slavery activists in Britain and the USA during the mid-nineteenth century, years that witnessed the overthrow of slavery in both the British Caribbean and the American South. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the book sheds important new light on the dynamics of abolitionist opinion building during the Age of Reform, from books and artefacts to anti-slavery songs, lectures and placards. Building an anti-slavery public required patience and perseverance. It also involved an engagement with politics, even if anti-slavery activists disagreed about what form that engagement should take. This is a book about the importance of transatlantic co-operation and the transmission of ideas and practices. Yet, at the same time, it is also alert to the tensions that underlay these Atlantic affinities, particularly when it came to what was sometimes perceived as the increasing Americanization of anti-slavery protest culture. Above all, the book stresses the importance of personality, perhaps best exemplified in the enduring transatlantic friendship between George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison.

Pimps and Pied Pipers: Quality Television in the Age of Its Direct Delivery

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 813-844 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL SZALAY
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
The Face ◽  
True Blood ◽  
Direct Delivery ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Time Warner ◽  
Direct Distribution ◽  
Material Form

This essay examines the fascination with bodily conversion that characterizes recent HBO programming. Dramas and comedies like True Blood, Veep, Silicon Valley, and True Detective describe human forms in various states of transformation: into a menagerie of supernatural creatures, polling data, digital information and, even, the landscape of the American South. These transformations anticipate and seek to rationalize the exchange of the programs in which they appear into and out of diverse forms of Time Warner brand equity – even as they rehearse anxieties that the network's famed “quality” diminishes in the face of such exchanges. Female characters bear the brunt of this reflexivity; their forcibly contorted and monetized bodies figure the temporary material form assumed by otherwise liquid equity as it moves within Time Warner and, ultimately, over Internet lines and into the viewer's home. The network's famed misogyny is, in this respect, self-conscious and idiosyncratic, and reveals something essential about the incoherence of HBO's parent company at the moment that the network discovers new pathways for the direct distribution of its product.

“Wondering with an Unending Wonder”: Remarks on Ham Mukasa's Journey to England in 1902

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 55-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heike Behrend
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Contextual Understanding ◽  
The Face ◽  
Central Characteristic ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Stephen Greenblatt has shown that wonder was the central characteristic of the first European encounters with the New World and the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the face of radical difference (Greenblatt 1994:27). Wonder, says Greenblatt, appears to be a category immune to all denial and ideological co-optation, and it exerts an irresistible force. It occurs in a moment when meanings are lacking and is accompanied by the fragmentation of contextual understanding (Greenblatt 1994:33).Wonder was already an essential topic of discourses in philosophy and art even before the voyages of discovery (Matuschek 1991); thus, for Socrates, philosophy begins with astonishment and wonder, and the art of poetry intends the creation of the wondrous (Greenblatt 1994:33). Greenblatt argues that the frequency and intensity with which European discoverers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries referred to the experience of the wondrous provoked its conceptual elucidation (Greenlbatt 1994:34). The colonization of the wondrous began; and astonishment became a means of appropriation and subjugation (Greenblatt 1994:42).By the nineteenth century, the century of European journeys of discovery in Africa, wonder had been used up. English, French, and German travelers no longer wondered about anything. Their glance had achieved a confidence that allowed them to objectify and take possession of what was foreign to them. It was now the various Others, the objects of their glance, to whom they imputed the wonder they themselves were no longer capable of.

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