History Commons^™

America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai

Robert L Tsai

The U.S. Constitution opens by proclaiming the sovereignty of all citizens: "We the People." Robert Tsai's gripping history of alternative constitutions invites readers into the circle of those who have rejected this ringing assertion--the defiant groups that refused to accept the Constitution's definition of who "the people" are and how their authority should be exercised. America's Forgotten Constitutions is the story of America as told by dissenters: squatters, Native Americans, abolitionists, socialists, internationalists, and racial nationalists. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Tsai chronicles eight episodes in which discontented citizens took the extraordinary step of drafting a new constitution. He examines …

The Young White Faces Of Slavery, Mary Niall Mitchell

Mary Niall Mitchell

No abstract provided.

Secular Damnation: Thomas Jefferson And The Imperative Of Race, Robert Forbes

Robert P Forbes

Race, we are told, is a “social construction.” If this is so, Thomas Jefferson was its principal architect. Jefferson consciously framed his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to check the rising status of Africans and to combat growing critiques of slavery from America’s European friends. Jefferson did this by importing the slaveholder’s sense of slaves as chattel into an Enlightenment world view, providing a metaphysical foundation for prejudice by transmuting the traditional Christian concept of the saved vs. the damned into material and aesthetic terms. Recasting in quasi-scientific language the ancient doctrine of the mark …

“Truth Systematised" : The Changing Debate Over Slavery And Abolition, 1761-1916, Robert Forbes

Robert P Forbes

No abstract provided.

Samuel Ward And The Making Of An Imperial Subject, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie

Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie

African Architectural Transference To The South Carolina Low Country, 1700-1880, Fritz Hamer

Fritz Hamer

There is growing historical and archaeological evidence that African style housing was an integral part of slave communities on plantations in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Besides the "shotgun" house, other African house forms were built in North America before descendants of African slaves became acculturated to western construction techniques. The rarity of historical and archaeological evidence of these structures can be attributed to the culture bias of early white observers and the poor preservation of these impermanent structures in the archaeological record.

Freedpeople In The Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860-1900, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie

Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie