Louisiana state law was unique in allowing slaves to contract for their freedom and to initiate a lawsuit for liberty. Judith Kelleher Schafer describes the ingenious and remarkably sophisticated ways New Orleans slaves used the legal system to gain their independence and find a voice in a society that ordinarily gave them none. Showing that remaining free was often as challenging as becoming free, Schafer also recounts numerous cases in which free people of color were forced to use the courts to prove their status. She further documents seventeen free blacks who, when faced with deportation, amazingly sued to enslave themselves. Schafer’s impressive detective work achieves a rare feat in the historical profession—the unveiling of an entirely new facet of the slave experience in the American South.

Shows that the law of freedom, not slavery, determined the way that race developed over time in three slave societies.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic History, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of Atlantic History, the study of the transnational interconnections between Europe, North America, South America, and Africa, particularly in the early modern and colonial period. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

This book is a comprehensive guide to recognizing and dealing with domestic abuse and violence. It outlines the different types and stages of abuse, and provides information on how to change such relationships or escape from them.

In North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. examines the lives of free persons categorized by their communities as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” “mixed-bloods,” or simply “free people of color.” From the colonial period through Reconstruction, lawmakers passed legislation that curbed the rights and privileges of these non-enslaved residents, from prohibiting their testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. While such laws suggest that most white North Carolinians desired to limit the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by free people of color, Milteer reveals that the two groups often interacted—praying together, working the same land, and occasionally sharing households and starting families. Some free people of color also rose to prominence in their communities, becoming successful businesspeople and winning the respect of their white neighbors. Milteer’s innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements—with whites placing themselves above persons of color—those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included. North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures—all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever-evolving forms of racial discrimination.

Becoming Free Have you ever dreamed of just clearing your desk, packing up your life and heading across Europe into the sunset for an adventure, not knowing where it’s going to take you? Well, Kay did just that. She was maybe naïve, but she was determined to follow her dream of living free. After being made redundant from the fifth largest employer in the world, she made that jump into the unknown, knowing that she couldn’t stay on these shores any more. We join her in a real-time journey of adventure, self-discovery and awakening as she as she escapes to an old friend’s yoga retreat in rural Portugal. We meet the characters she encounters along the way, all leading an alternative lifestyle outside the normal social order. And for a while, she too is part of this. But what brought her back to the UK so soon, to re-enter the society she had fled on six months earlier, and from which she had been so desperate to escape? A week before Christmas, she finds herself back, in sub-zero temperatures, to a homecoming not fit for a fairytale. Back in the rat race she had left behind, stripped of all material possessions and with no home or job to fall back on. But with the compassion of friends and the kindness of strangers, she started to rebuild her life. Then God dealt her a blow that would change her life forever. And out of the fear came hope. The fairytale had to end happily ever after, now!

Building on recent dynamic visual, literary and archaeological work on Roman freedmen, this book examines the impact of freed slaves on Roman society and culture.