"An exceptional work that will stand for years as the best study of the African colonization movement. Burin's insights into this often misunderstood idea will be appreciated by all historians of the early national era. The research, both archival and secondary, is excellent."--Douglas Egerton, Le Moyne College "Burin adds significantly to our understanding of the world view of slaveholding colonizationists, of their negotiations with prospectively freed people, and of their struggle with proslavery critics of colonization. . . . Historians of proslavery thought will find new ideas and information here."--Torrey Stephen Whitman, Mount St. Mary’s College From the early 1700s through the late 1800s, many whites advocated removing blacks from America. The American Colonization Society (ACS) epitomized this desire to deport black people. Founded in 1816, the ACS championed the repatriation of black Americans to Liberia in West Africa. Supported by James Madison, James Monroe, Henry Clay, and other notables, the ACS sent thousands of black emigrants to Liberia. In examining the ACS’s activities in America and Africa, Eric Burin assesses the organization’s impact on slavery and race relations. Burin focuses on ACS manumissions—that is, instances wherein slaves were freed on the condition that they go to Liberia. In doing so, he provides the first account of the ACS that covers the entire South throughout the antebellum era. He investigates everyone involved in the society’s affairs, from the emancipators and freedpersons at the center to the colonization agents, free blacks, southern jurists, newspaper editors, neighboring whites, proslavery ideologues, northern colonizationists, and abolitionists on the periphery. In mixing a panoramic view of ACS operations with close-ups on individual participants, Burin presents a unique, bifocal perspective on the ACS. Although colonization leaders initially envisioned their program as a pacific enterprise, in reality the push-and-pull among emancipators, freedpersons, and others rendered ACS manumissions logistically complex, financially troublesome, legally complicated, and at times socially disruptive enterprises. Like pebbles dropped in water, ACS manumissions rippled outward, destabilizing slavery in their wake. Based on extensive archival research and a database of 11,000 ACS emigrants, Burin’s study offers new insights concerning the origins, intentions, activities, and fate of the colonization movement.

"A history of the private enterprise that made uneasy peace with slavery to rescue free Africans and transplant them on the west coast of Africa"--Cover

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Richard Dunn reconstructs the lives of three generations of slaves on a sugar estate in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery took. Deadly work regimens and rampant disease among Jamaican slaves contrast with population expansion in Virginia leading to the selling of slaves and breakup of families.

Between 1820 and 1913, approximately 16,000 black people left the United States to start new lives in Liberia, Africa, in what was at the time the largest out-migration in US history. When Tolbert Major, a former Kentucky slave and single father, was offered his own chance for freedom, he accepted. He, several family members, and seventy other people boarded the Luna on July 5, 1836. After they arrived in Liberia, Tolbert penned a letter to his former owner, Ben Major: "Dear Sir, We have all landed on the shores of Africa and got into our houses.... None of us have been taken with the fever yet." Drawing on extensive research and fifteen years' worth of surviving letters, author Susan E. Lindsey illuminates the trials and triumphs of building a new life in Liberia, where settlers were free, but struggled to acclimate themselves to an unfamiliar land, coexist with indigenous groups, and overcome disease and other dangers. Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia explores the motives and attitudes of colonization supporters and those who lived in the colony, offering perspectives beyond the standard narrative that colonization was driven solely by racism or forced exile.

Winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association Co-Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South. Praise for the previous edition: “Densely packed, closely argued, and highly controversial in its dissent from much of the scholarly conventional wisdom about the function and structure of slavery worldwide.” —Boston Globe “There can be no doubt that this rich and learned book will reinvigorate debates that have tended to become too empirical and specialized. Patterson has helped to set out the direction for the next decades of interdisciplinary scholarship.” —David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books “This is clearly a major and important work, one which will be widely discussed, cited, and used. I anticipate that it will be considered among the landmarks in the study of slavery, and will be read by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—as well as many other scholars and students.” —Stanley Engerman

In Chained to History, Steven J. Brady places slavery at the center of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom. Chained to History shows how slavery was interwoven with America's foreign relations and affected policy controversies ranging from trade to extradition treaties to military alliances. Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable. From the Age of Revolutions through the American Civil War, slavery was a constant factor in shaping US relations with the Atlantic World and beyond. Chained to History addresses this critical topic in its complete scope and shows the immoral practice of human bondage to have informed how the United States re-entered the community of nations after 1865.

Pennsylvania contained the largest concentration of early America’s abolitionist leaders and organizations, making it a necessary and illustrative stage from which to understand how national conversations about the place of free blacks in early America originated and evolved, and, importantly, the role that colonization—supporting the emigration of free and emancipated blacks to Africa—played in national and international antislavery movements. Beverly C. Tomek’s meticulous exploration of the archives of the American Colonization Society, Pennsylvania’s abolitionist societies, and colonizationist leaders (both black and white) enables her to boldly and innovatively demonstrate that, in Philadelphia at least, the American Colonization Society often worked closely with other antislavery groups to further the goals of the abolitionist movement. In Colonization and Its Discontents, Tomek brings a much-needed examination of the complexity of the colonization movement by describing in depth the difference between those who supported colonization for political and social reasons and those who supported it for religious and humanitarian reasons. Finally, she puts the black perspective on emigration into the broader picture instead of treating black nationalism as an isolated phenomenon and examines its role in influencing the black abolitionist agenda.

How politics and race shaped Baltimore's distinctive disarray of cultures and subcultures. Charm City or Mobtown? People from Baltimore glory in its eccentric charm, small-town character, and North-cum-South culture. But for much of the nineteenth century, violence and disorder plagued the city. More recently, the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody has prompted Baltimoreans—and the entire nation—to focus critically on the rich and tangled narrative of black–white relations in Baltimore, where slavery once existed alongside the largest community of free blacks in the United States. Matthew A. Crenson, a distinguished political scientist and Baltimore native, examines the role of politics and race throughout Baltimore's history. From its founding in 1729 up through the recent past, Crenson follows Baltimore's political evolution from an empty expanse of marsh and hills to a complicated city with distinct ways of doing business. Revealing how residents at large engage (and disengage) with one another across an expansive agenda of issues and conflicts, Crenson shows how politics helped form this complex city's personality. Crenson provocatively argues that Baltimore's many quirks are likely symptoms of urban underdevelopment. The city's longtime domination by the general assembly—and the corresponding weakness of its municipal authority—forced residents to adopt the private and extra-governmental institutions that shaped early Baltimore. On the one hand, Baltimore was resolutely parochial, split by curious political quarrels over issues as minor as loose pigs. On the other, it was keenly attuned to national politics: during the Revolution, for instance, Baltimoreans were known for their comparative radicalism. Crenson describes how, as Baltimore and the nation grew, whites competed with blacks, slave and free, for menial and low-skill work. He also explores how the urban elite thrived by avoiding, wherever possible, questions of slavery versus freedom—just as wealthier Baltimoreans, long after the Civil War and emancipation, preferred to sidestep racial controversy. Peering into the city's 300-odd neighborhoods, this fascinating account holds up a mirror to Baltimore, asking whites in particular to reexamine the past and accept due responsibility for future racial progress.