In Conceiving Freedom, Camillia Cowling shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts. Cowling examines how women, typically illiterate but with access to scribes, instigated myriad successful petitions for emancipation, often using "free-womb" laws that declared that the children of enslaved women were legally free. She reveals how enslaved women's struggles connected to abolitionist movements in each city and the broader Atlantic World, mobilizing new notions about enslaved and free womanhood. She shows how women conceived freedom and then taught the "free-womb" generation to understand and shape the meaning of that freedom. Even after emancipation, freed women would continue to use these claims-making tools as they struggled to establish new spaces for themselves and their families in post emancipation society.

This eBook edition of "The New Freedom" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. The book is an attempt to express the new spirit of American politics and to set forth, in large terms which may stick in the imagination, what it is that must be done if we are to restore the politics to their full spiritual vigor again, and the national life, whether in trade, in industry, or in what concerns us only as families and individuals, to its purity, its self-respect, and its pristine strength and freedom. The New Freedom is only the old revived and clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern America. Contents: The Old Order Changeth What is Progress? Freemen Need No Guardians Life Comes from the Soil The Parliament of the People Let There Be Light The Tariff--"Protection," or Special Privilege? Monopoly, or Opportunity? Benevolence, or Justice? The Way to Resume is to Resume The Emancipation of Business The Liberation of a People's Vital Energies

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I The Negative Conception of Freedom -- Chapter 1 Hayek's Notion of Freedom -- Chapter 2 Constraints on Freedom -- Chapter 3 Free Action, Free Person and Free Society -- Chapter 4 Limits of Negative Freedom in Capitalism -- Chapter 5 The Hybrid View -- Part II The Positive Conception of Freedom -- Chapter 6 Green's Notion ofFreedom -- Chapter 7 Kant on Rational Self-Determination -- Chapter 8 Hegel on Concrete Freedom -- Chapter 9 Communitarians on the Social Context of Freedom -- Chapter 10 Freedom as the Power for Self-Determination -- Chapter 11 The Historical Account: Freedoms and Unfreedoms in Capitalism -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index

Traces the development of Kant's views on free will from earlier writings through the three Critiques and beyond.

Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated. European countries sought to regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America, by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of pronatalism through what Laura Lovett calls "nostalgic modernism," which romanticized agrarianism and promoted scientific racism and eugenics. Lovett looks closely at the ideologies of five influential American figures: Mary Lease's maternalist agenda, Florence Sherbon's eugenic "fitter families" campaign, George Maxwell's "homecroft" movement of land reclamation and home building, Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation and country life, and Edward Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control. Demonstrating the historical circumstances that linked agrarianism, racism, and pronatalism, Lovett shows how reproductive conformity was manufactured, how it was promoted, and why it was coercive. In addition to contributing to scholarship in American history, gender studies, rural studies, and environmental history, Lovett's study sheds light on the rhetoric of "family values" that has regained currency in recent years.