Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Odysseus As Slave: The Ritual Of Domination And Social Death In Homeric Society, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Eumaeus, in his first protracted exchange with Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey, goes a long way towards conveying what it means to be a slave in Homeric society. Disguised, Odysseus is a guest to Eumaeus, but he is also a beggar who could become a dependent in the same way that Eumaeus had. Emphasising that guests and beggars are sacred to Zeus (14.56-8), Eumaeus talks about his role in Odysseus' household. His labour (14.66) increased his master's holdings, yet Eumaeus' focal point, the way in which he frames his speech is not labour, per se, but honour and power. …

Saving Savannah: The City And The Civil War (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War by Jacqueline Jones. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Black And On The Border, Edward L. Ayers, William G. Thomas Iii, Anne Sarah Rubin

History Faculty Publications

In an attempt to bring together aspects of the war that are often kept separate, this essay focuses on the region of the United States that is often ignored when explaining the onset of the Civil War: the border where the upper South met the lower North. This area--a third of the nation--went into the war with uncertainty but then gave itself over to the conflict, playing a crucial role start to finish as battlefield and supplier of soldiers, materiel, and leaders. Specifically, this essay looks at the border between Virginia and Pennsylvania, a region almost arbitrarily divided by the …

Jasper, John, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Perhaps the most famous of all the slave preachers, John Jasper was born in Fluvanna County, Virginia, on July 4, 1812, the youngest of twenty-four children born to Phillip and Tina Jasper. His father, also a slave preacher, died two months before John was born, but he prophesied that his son would become a famous preacher.

Generations Later: Has Once-Remote Promise Of Freedom Been Fulfilled?, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Emancipation began with a flickering promise, burned intensely for a few years during Reconstruction, and then smoldered for a century. Equality and justice have come into view for most African-Americans only in the past two generations. For many descendants of slavery, those essential rights of a free people are still hard to see.

Slavery, Economics And Constitutional Ideals, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

As we think about endings, however, it is also useful to think about beginnings. That is what President Abraham Lincoln did in his Second Inaugural Address, delivered just five weeks before the surrender at Appomattox and his own assassination soon thereafter. All knew, he said reflecting sadly and thoughtfully on how the Civil War came about, that slavery was, "somehow," the cause. In fact, "somehow," however, lay puzzles, contradictions, and questions. The connections between slavery and the Civil War have concerned Americans ever since the events at Appomattox.

Rethinking Slavery And Freedom (Book Reviews), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review essay of the following books:

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by Ira Berlin.

Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War edited by Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland.

Humanist Ethics And Political Justice: Soto, Sepúlveda, And The "Affair Of The Indies", G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In the debate over Spanish treatment of the natives of the New World, both sides regularly invoked Aristotle on natural slaves. This paper argues that the interpretation of the Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto displays a greater understanding of Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition of justice than that of Juan Gines de Sepúlveda, the Spanish Humanist. The paper goes on to argue that it is the humanist tradition itself that disposes Sepúlveda to misconstrue Aristotle and the tradition of political justice.

Worrying About The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

There is no animosity in any of these historical or practical interpretations of the Civil War. It is clear that the North fought for purposes entirely good--for Union and the end of slavery--but Confederate soldiers also win respect for their bravery, their devotion, and their struggle against long odds. They seem to have been playing historical roles for which they are not to blame. The reenactors, the books in stores, and the battlefield tours generally avoid talking about the cause of the war, focusing instead on the common bravery and hardships of soldiers North and South.

The Strange Career Of Thomas Jefferson: Race And Slavery In American Memory, Edward L. Ayers, Scot A. French

History Faculty Publications

Jefferson's life has come to symbolize America's struggle with racial inequality, his successes and failures mirroring those of his nation. The quest for a more honest and inclusive rendering of the American past has placed a heavy burden on Jefferson and his slaves. Generation after generation of Americans has sought some kind of moral symmetry at Monticello, some kind of reconciliation between slavery and freedom, black and white, past injustice and present compensation.

"He's Long Gone": The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore And Literature, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Throughout their experiences in this country, certain segments of the Black population have viewed themselves as enslaved, whether they were chattel owned by slaveowners prior to emancipation, whether they were impressed into peonage and forced to work on white plantations and in chain gangs after slavery, whether they were victims of sharecropping systems that virtually reenslaved them during the twentieth century, whether they were the repressed and disfranchised and persecuted in Southern Jim Crow towns throughout the first half of the twentieth century, whether they are those trapped by unemployment and poverty today, or whether they are among the Blacks …

The World The Liberal Capitalists Made (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South by James Oakes. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Slavery and Freedom pursues its thesis with dogged energy. "Southerners took their definition of freedom from the liberal capitalist world which produced them and of which they remained a part," Oakes argues, "and this could only mean that southern slavery was defined as the denial of the assumptions of liberal capitalism."

The Fruits Of Merchant Capital: Slavery And Bourgeois Property In The Rise And Expansion Of Capitalism (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book,The Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Wit And Humor In The Slave Narratives, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

This passage suggests something of the nature of Black humor and the function it has served, not only in the slave narratives, but in the folk tales and throughout the history of recorded literature from William Wells Brown to Amiri Baraka. The life revealed in all of these sources is shown to often be alternately degrading and courageous, tragic and absurdly comic, hopeless and yet enduring; indeed that life could hardly ever be termed merely amusing. And the Black character, though he may be seen to laugh, can hardly be deemed carefree, unbothered, satisfied, even truly happy. Indeed the paradox …