History Commons^™

The Language Of Law: Interpreting Nineteenth-Century Legal Documents, Arthur Mitchell Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

The documentary record produced in the course of 19th century American legal proceedings remains one of the greatest sources for understanding the everyday lives of the middling and non-elite who otherwise rarely rise to the surface of the historical record. This documentation though has often gone unused or misused thanks to the circumstances of its production and the difficulties of parsing the specialized language used within. Documents produced for use in a courtroom always have multiple layers of meaning, each intended with different purposes and audiences in mind. Formulaic language and confusing tangles of proceedings and filings too often get …

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 …

All Things Were Working Together For My Deliverance: The Life And Times Of Twelve Years A Slave, Mary Niall Mitchell

Mary Niall Mitchell

No abstract provided.

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.

[Review Of The Book William Johnson’S Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary Of A Free Negro], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] To raise this issue of Johnson's silences and social isolation is not to engage in historical pity. He made choices from the options available to him and suffered the consequences as they developed. But his history underscores the fact that slavery generated a corresponding social system that was unforgiving to the individual caught in its contradictory currents. As Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark suggest in Black Masters, their sensitive study of another slave owner and ex-slave, William Ellison of South Carolina, a purely personal solution to such volatile social relations proved impossible. What bound William Johnson to …

[Review Of The Book The Trials Of Anthony Burns: Freedom And Slavery In Emerson's Boston], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] The intellectual core of The Trials of Anthony Burns explores the connection between Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New England Transcendentalists and the abolitionist cause. Ideas effect social life, von Frank insists, and he examines that point in a rich analysis that weaves intellectual, religious, political, and cultural perspectives into a sophisticated and detailed narrative. Emersonians came to embrace abolitionist activity as a central component of their philosophical idealism, particularly during the i850s. In an interesting way, the Burns case called upon many of New England's social and cultural elites to rethink their understanding of the relationship between idea …

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

Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie

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

Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie