Debating Slavery
Title | Debating Slavery PDF eBook |
Author | Mark M. Smith |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 140 |
Release | 1998-12-10 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 9780521576963 |
Even while slavery existed, Americans debated slavery. Was it a profitable and healthy institution? If so, for whom? The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not end this debate. Similar questions concerning the profitability of slavery, its impact on masters, slaves, and nonslaveowners still inform modern historical debates. Is the slave South best characterized as a capitalist society? Or did its dogged adherence to non-wage labor render it precapitalist? Today, southern slavery is among the most hotly disputed topics in writing on American history. With the use of illustrative material and a critical bibliography, Dr Smith outlines the main contours of this complex debate, summarizes the contending viewpoints, and at the same time weighs up the relative importance, strengths and weaknesses of the various competing interpretations. This book introduces an important topic in American history in a manner which is accessible to students and undergraduates taking courses in American history.
Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery
Title | Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery PDF eBook |
Author | David Zarefsky |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 324 |
Release | 1993-06 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0226978761 |
Previously published in hbk.: Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990.
Debating the Slave Trade
Title | Debating the Slave Trade PDF eBook |
Author | Srividhya Swaminathan |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 262 |
Release | 2016-05-13 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317154185 |
How did the arguments developed in the debate to abolish the slave trade help to construct a British national identity and character in the late eighteenth century? Srividhya Swaminathan examines books, pamphlets, and literary works to trace the changes in rhetorical strategies utilized by both sides of the abolitionist debate. Framing them as competing narratives engaged in defining the nature of the Briton, Swaminathan reads the arguments of pro- and anti-abolitionists as a series of dialogues among diverse groups at the center and peripheries of the empire. Arguing that neither side emerged triumphant, Swaminathan suggests that the Briton who emerged from these debates represented a synthesis of arguments, and that the debates to abolish the slave trade are marked by rhetorical transformations defining the image of the Briton as one that led naturally to nineteenth-century imperialism and a sense of global superiority. Because the slave-trade debates were waged openly in print rather than behind the closed doors of Parliament, they exerted a singular influence on the British public. At their height, between 1788 and 1793, publications numbered in the hundreds, spanned every genre, and circulated throughout the empire. Among the voices represented are writers from both sides of the Atlantic in dialogue with one another, such as key African authors like Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano; West India planters and merchants; and Quaker activist Anthony Benezet. Throughout, Swaminathan offers fresh and nuanced readings that eschew the view that the abolition of the slave trade was inevitable or that the ultimate defeat of pro-slavery advocates was absolute.
A House Divided
Title | A House Divided PDF eBook |
Author | Mason I. Lowance Jr. |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 567 |
Release | 2018-06-05 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0691188866 |
This anthology brings together under one cover the most important abolitionist and--unique to this volume--proslavery documents written in the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War. It makes accessible to students, scholars, and general readers the breadth of the slavery debate. Including many previously inaccessible documents, A House Divided is a critical and welcome contribution to a literature that includes only a few volumes of antislavery writings and no volumes of proslavery documents in print. Mason Lowance's introduction is an excellent overview of the antebellum slavery debate and its key issues and participants. Lowance also introduces each selection, locating it historically, culturally, and thematically as well as linking it to other writings. The documents represent the full scope of the varied debates over slavery. They include examples of race theory, Bible-based arguments for and against slavery, constitutional analyses, writings by former slaves and women's rights activists, economic defenses and critiques of slavery, and writings on slavery by such major writers as William Lloyd Garrison, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Together they give readers a real sense of the complexity and heat of the vexed conversation that increasingly dominated American discourse as the country moved from early nationhood into its greatest trial.
Great Debates in American History: Slavery from 1790 to 1857
Title | Great Debates in American History: Slavery from 1790 to 1857 PDF eBook |
Author | Marion Mills Miller |
Publisher | |
Pages | 436 |
Release | 1913 |
Genre | Civil rights |
ISBN |
Great Debates in American History: Slavery from 1790 to 1857; with an introduction by C. F. Adams
Title | Great Debates in American History: Slavery from 1790 to 1857; with an introduction by C. F. Adams PDF eBook |
Author | Marion Mills Miller |
Publisher | |
Pages | 430 |
Release | 1913 |
Genre | Civil rights |
ISBN |
Arguing about Slavery
Title | Arguing about Slavery PDF eBook |
Author | William Lee Miller |
Publisher | Vintage |
Pages | 594 |
Release | 1998-01-12 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0679768440 |
In the 1830s slavery was so deeply entrenched that it could not even be discussed in Congress, which had enacted a "gag rule" to ensure that anti-slavery petitions would be summarily rejected. This stirring book chronicles the parliamentary battle to bring "the peculiar institution" into the national debate, a battle that some historians have called "the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy." The campaign to make slavery officially and respectably debatable was waged by John Quincy Adams who spent nine years defying gags, accusations of treason, and assassination threats. In the end he made his case through a combination of cunning and sheer endurance. Telling this story with a brilliant command of detail, Arguing About Slavery endows history with majestic sweep, heroism, and moral weight. "Dramatic, immediate, intensely readable, fascinating and often moving."--New York Times Book Review