Undoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the human body was universal and faced with the growing racism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, abolitionists in North America and Britain focused on undoing slavery's harm to the bodies of the enslaved. Their pragmatic focus on restoring the bodily integrity and wellbeing of enslaved people threw up many unexpected challenges. This book explores those challenges. Slavery exploited the bodies of men and women differently: enslaved women needed to be acknowledged as mothers rather than as reproducers of slave property, and enslaved men needed to claim full adult personhood without triggering white fears about their access to male privilege. Slavery's undoing became more fraught by the 1850s, moreover, as federal Fugitive Slave Law and racist medicine converged. The reach of the federal government across the borders of free states and theories about innate racial difference collapsed the distinctions between enslaved and emancipated people of African descent, making militant action necessary. Escaping to so-called "free" jurisdictions, refugees from slavery demonstrated that a person could leave the life of slavery behind. But leaving behind the enslaved body, the fleshy archive of trauma and injury, proved impossible. Bodies damaged by slavery needed urgent physical care as well as access to medical knowledge untainted by racist science. As the campaign to end slavery revealed, legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.

The abolitionist movement fought to end slavery long before the Civil War. Abolitionists campaigned for freedom for enslaved people. Abolitionists used print materials, passionate speeches, and direct action to disrupt the racist system of slavery. Learn about abolitionist leaders such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, setbacks and victories for the movement, and the work abolitionists continue to inspire. Read WokeTM Books are created in partnership with Cicely Lewis, the Read Woke librarian. Inspired by a belief that knowledge is power, Read Woke Books seek to amplify the voices of people of the global majority (people who are of African, Arab, Asian, and Latin American descent and identify as not white), provide information about groups that have been disenfranchised, share perspectives of people who have been underrepresented or oppressed, challenge social norms and disrupt the status quo, and encourage readers to take action in their community.

For thousands of years, slavery went unchallenged in principle. Then in a single century, slavery was abolished and more than seven million slaves were freed. Greatest Emancipation tells this amazing story, focusing on Haiti, the British Caribbean, the United States, Cuba and Brazil, which accounted for the vast majority of slaves in the west. Jim Powell offers some surprising insights and shows that while the abolition of slavery was essential to any free society, it wasn't the sole determing factor, since some societies that abolished slavery later embraced dictatorships. Jim Powell reveals the process and tremendous influence that slavery's eradication had on individual societies in the west.

Undoing Slavery: American Abolitionism in Transnational Perspective (1776-1865) is a collection of seven essays by leading and emerging scholars of abolition in France. Contributors to the volume situate American abolitionism in a transnational framework, pointing out how slaves running away to Canada, free African Americans emigrating to Haiti and activists meeting in a Paris salon all influenced the fate of slavery in the United States. In the wake of recent historiographical trends, they extend not only the geography but also the chronology of abolitionism, attending to its development and evolutions over the longue durée. Special emphasis is also placed on the varied print culture of abolition, from antislavery novels, newspapers, gift books and almanacs to black-authored pamphlets and printed orations on the abolition of the slave trade. Undoing Slavery is prefaced by Manisha Sinha, author of the award-winning The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.

Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process—a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women. “Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States... The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.” —Edward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review

This classic and controversial volume provides extensive coverage of slave resistance and revolt in Jamaica.