[PDF] Marie Or Slavery In The United States eBook

Author : Gustave de Beaumont
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 29,72 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780801860645

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Gustave de Beaumont's 1835 work, Marie, or Slavery in the United States is structured as a fascinating essay on race interwoven with a novel. It is the story of socially forbidden love between an idealistic young Frenchman and an apparently white American woman with African ancestry. The couple's idealism fades as they repeatedly face racial prejudice and violence, and are eventually forced to seek shelter among exiled Cherokee people. Notable as the first abolitionist novel to focus on racial prejudice rather than bondage as a social evil, Beaumont's work was also the first to link prejudice against Native Americans to prejudice against blacks. This translation, with a new introduction by Gerard Fergerson, provides modern readers with interesting insights into the inconsistencies and injustices of democratic Jacksonian society.

Author : Marie Jenkins Schwartz
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 47,65 MB
Release : 2010-03-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0674034929

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The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realize that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage. In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage the health of enslaved women from puberty through the reproductive years, attempting to foster pregnancy, cure infertility, and resolve gynecological problems, including cancer. Black women, however, proved an unruly force, distrustful of both the slaveholders and their doctors. With their own healing traditions, emphasizing the power of roots and herbs and the critical roles of family and community, enslaved women struggled to take charge of their own health in a system that did not respect their social circumstances, customs, or values. Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. Birthing a Slave is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.

Author : Jeannine Marie DeLombard
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 23,54 MB
Release : 2009-06-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0807887730

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America's legal consciousness was high during the era that saw the imprisonment of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, the execution of slave revolutionary Nat Turner, and the hangings of John Brown and his Harpers Ferry co-conspirators. Jeannine Marie DeLombard examines how debates over slavery in the three decades before the Civil War employed legal language to "try" the case for slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media. Discussing autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, a scandal narrative about Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist speech by Henry David Thoreau, sentimental fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a proslavery novel by William MacCreary Burwell, DeLombard argues that American literature of the era cannot be fully understood without an appreciation for the slavery debate in the courts and in print. Combining legal, literary, and book history approaches, Slavery on Trial provides a refreshing alternative to the official perspectives offered by the nation's founding documents, legal treatises, statutes, and judicial decisions. DeLombard invites us to view the intersection of slavery and law as so many antebellum Americans did--through the lens of popular print culture.