Slaves fought against their subhuman treatment in a myriad of ways, from passive resistance to armed insurrection. This encyclopedia details how slaves struggled against their bondage, highlights key revolts, and delves into important cultural and religious ideas that nurtured and fed slaves' hunger for freedom.

When Columbus arrived in 1492, the first free black person—a sailor—set foot in the Americas. Over the next 400 years, as slavery spread and became entrenched in the Western Hemisphere, free blacks built communities throughout North and South America, playing a critical role in every region, colony, and country. From Canada to the Caribbean to Chile, they established vital economic and social institutions, championed the cause of abolition, and formed a bridge between the worlds of free whites and enslaved blacks. They worked as artisans, farmers, journalists, ministers, merchants, and shipbuilders. Many free blacks served in the military and fought in every major war, including the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Latin American wars for independence. Others served in government, and some—like presidents Bernardino Rivadavia of Argentina and Vicente Guerrero of Mexico—became national leaders. Free people of color in the United States and the Americas hold a unique status in global history. Never before and never since has such a group existed in large numbers anywhere in the world. Long shrouded in obscurity and overshadowed by scholarship on slavery and race, the free black community in the Americas has become a growing and vibrant field of study. Historians have recently uncovered vast material on this important group, revealing how they lived, how they shaped society, and how they transformed the history of every nation in the Western Hemisphere. Encyclopedia of Free Blacks and People of Color in the Americas is the first reference to cover this crucial subject and provides a wealth of information not available anywhere else. Arranged alphabetically, this groundbreaking, two-volume encyclopedia includes articles on all major events, issues, and concepts relevant to the free black community in the United States from the colonial period to the Civil War and in the rest of the Western Hemisphere from the late 1400s to the late 1800s, when emancipation became universal. Nearly 400 signed articles cover every country, colony, state, city, and region in the Americas with a significant presence of free blacks, and biographies, thematic articles, and entries on related subjects shed additional light on this vital and fascinating topic. Entries include: Abolitionist movement in Brazil Zabeau Bellanton Captain Cudjoe Coffee cultivation Education and literacy Forten family Free black artisans French Caribbean Gender attitudes Guerrero (slave ship) Haitian Revolution La Escalera Plot Laws of free birth Legal discrimination on the basis of race Living "as free" Toussaint Louverture Maroons Marriage between free and slave Midwives and traditional healers Negro Convention Movement Rebecca Protten Somerset v. Stewart.

Designed specially for undergraduate course use, this new textbook is both an introduction to the study of American slavery and a reader of core texts on the subject. No other volume that combines both primary and secondary readings covers such a span of time--from the early seventeenth century to the Civil War. The book begins with a substantial introduction to the entire volume that gives an overview of slavery in North America. Each of the twelve chapters that follow has an introduction that discusses the leading secondary books and articles on the topic in question, followed by an essay and three primary documents. Questions for further study and discussion are included in the chapter introduction, while further readings are suggested in the chapter bibliography. Topics covered include slave culture, the slave-based economy, slavery and the law, slave resistance, pro-slavery ideology, abolition, and emancipation. The essays, by such eminent historians as Drew Gilpin Faust, Don E. Fehrenbacher, Eric Foner, John Hope Franklin, and Sylvia R. Frey, have been selected for their teaching value and ability to provoke discussion. Drawing on black and white, male and female experiences, the primary documents come from a wide variety of sources: diaries, letters, laws, debates, oral testimonies, travelers’ accounts, inventories, journals, autobiographies, petitions, and novels.

The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture. Scarlet and Black, Volume Three, concludes this groundbreaking documentation of the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. This final of three volumes concludes the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History. This latest volume includes essays about Black and Puerto Rican students' experiences; the development of the Black Unity League; the Conklin Hall takeover; the divestment movement against South African apartheid; anti-racism struggles during the 1990s; and the Don Imus controversy and the 2007 Scarlet Knights women's basketball team. To learn more about the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History, visit the project's website at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu.

This book provides a fresh interpretation of the development of the English Atlantic slave system.