Forceful and detailed account of the struggle for “freedom” after the American Civil War How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger’s radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the jubilee, using fresh sources and texts to build on the leading historical accounts of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Reinstating ex-slaves’ own “freedom dreams” in constructing these histories, Roediger creates a masterful account of the emancipation and its ramifications on a whole host of day-to-day concerns for Whites and Blacks alike, such as property relations, gender roles, and labor.

"Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. Despite the trauma it could incur, many African Americans opted to publicize their experiences by testifying about the violence they endured and witnessed." "In this evocative and deeply moving history, Kidada Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence that federal officials and the American people would be inspired bear witness to thier suffering and support their demands for justice. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement." -- Book Cover.

Historian Wilbert Jenkins sheds light on how former slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, in an attempt to adjust to freedom after the Civil War and gain control over their own lives, battled whites trying to regain control. Using autobiographies, slave narratives, Freedmen's Bureau letters and papers, and many other documents, Jenkins focuses on the freedmen's hopes and aspirations. 30 photos.

An absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, by the foremost historian of race and labor The Obama era produced countless articles arguing that America’s race problems were over. The election of Donald Trump has proved those hasty pronouncements wrong. Race has always played a central role in US society and culture. Surveying a period from the late seventeenth century—the era in which W.E.B. Du Bois located the emergence of “whiteness”—through the American Revolution and the Civil War to the civil rights movement and the emergence of the American empire, How Race Survived US History reveals how race did far more than persist as an exception in a progressive national history. This masterful account shows how race has remained at the heart of American life well into the twenty-first century.

An unforgettable chronicle from a groundbreaking journalist who covered Emmett Till's murder, the Little Rock Nine, and ten US presidents

Documents an early nineteenth-century event that inspired Herman Melville's "Beneto Cereno," tracing the cultural, economic, and religious clash that occurred aboard a distressed Spanish ship of West African pirates.

Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.