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Document Type
Book Chapter
Department/Program
American Studies
Publication Date
11-1-2017
Book Title
Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation
Publisher
University of Georgia Press
Editor
David W. Blight and Jim Downs
City
Athens, Georgia
Series
UnCivil Wars
First Page
145
Last Page
159
Abstract
This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did freedom mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Did freedom just mean the absence of constraint and a widening of personal choice, or did it extend to the ballot box, to education, to equality of opportunity? In examining such questions, rather than defining every aspect of postemancipation life as a new form of freedom, these essays develop the work of scholars who are looking at how belonging to an empowered government or community defines the outcome of emancipation.
Some essays in this collection disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation. Others offer trenchant renderings of emancipation, with new interpretations of the language and politics of democracy. Still others sidestep academic conventions to speak personally about the politics of emancipation historiography, reconsidering how historians have used source material for understanding subjects such as violence and the suffering of refugee women and children. Together the essays show that the question of freedom―its contested meanings, its social relations, and its beneficiaries―remains central to understanding the complex historical process known as emancipation.
Contributors: Justin Behrend, Gregory P. Downs, Jim Downs, Carole Emberton, Eric Foner, Thavolia Glymph, Chandra Manning, Kate Masur, Richard Newman, James Oakes, Susan O’Donovan, Hannah Rosen, Brenda E. Stevenson.
ISBN
978-0820351490
Recommended Citation
Rosen, H. (2017). In the Moment of Violence: Writing the History of Postemancipation Terror. David W. Blight and Jim Downs (Ed.), Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation (pp. 145-159). Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/95
