Book Display - June 2023
Juneteenth
Also known as Emancipation Day, Juneteenth is a national holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States.
Visit the library's Juneteenth research guide for even more resources, or schedule an appointment with a librarian by emailing ask@dickinson.libanswers.com
Beyond Freedom by
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 it mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Some of the essays disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation.
Call Number: Available Online and in print
Four Hundred Souls by
A "choral history" of African Americans covering 400 years of history in the voices of 80 writers, edited by the bestselling, National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. Last year marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first African presence in the Americas--and also launched the Four Hundred Souls project, spearheaded by Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Antiracism Institute of American University, and Keisha Blain, editor of The North Star. They've gathered together eighty black writers from all disciplines -- historians and artists, journalists and novelists--each of whom has contributed an entry about one five-year period to create a dynamic multivoiced single-volume history of black people in America.
Call Number: Available Online and in print
Illusions of Emancipation by
There are many controversies and chronic misconceptions surrounding the idea of emancipation in the nineteenth-century United States. Much recent scholarship has sought to address these misconceptions ... Reidy further enriches and complicates our understanding of emancipation in the context of the Civil War. Drawing us back to testimonies of participants and contemporary witnesses of the era and synthesizing the perspectives of subsequent observers, Reidy reveals emancipation as a long, messy process, with contingencies that clustered around the categories of time, place, and person ... Reidy's thematic approach allows him to shed new light on the wide-ranging and diverse expressions and experiences of freedom as it came suddenly, slowly, or not at all.
Call Number: Available Online and in print
Slave No More by
Commanding a vast historiography of slavery and emancipation, Aline Helg argues that significant numbers of enslaved Africans and their descendants across the entire Western Hemisphere managed to free themselves hundreds of years before the formation of white-run abolitionist movements. Her analysis of resistance and struggle covers more than three centuries, from early colonization to the American and Haitian revolutions, Spanish American independence, and abolition in the British Caribbean. But Helg's purpose is not only to underscore the agency of those who managed to become 'free people of color' before abolitionism took hold but also to assess in detail the specific strategies they created and utilized.
Call Number: Available Online and in print
Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania by
A general introduction to the topic of slavery and abolition in Pennsylvania. Synthesizes works produced in that field from its beginning at the turn of the century to the present day.
Call Number: Available Online and in print
The Record of Murders and Outrages by
After the Civil War's end, reports surged of violence by whites against Black men, women, and children. Leaders of the new southern governments and northern Democrats typically denied that the atrocities were happening, or they professed that the levels of violence were nothing more than typical criminal behavior. But as occupying Federal troops grew increasingly aware of and even targeted by violent assaults, in September 1866, Freedmen's Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard requested that assistant commissioners in the states compile reports of 'murders and outrages' to catalog the extent of violence.
Call Number: E185.2 .B55 2021
Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and its Legacies
An incisive and illuminating analysis of the enduring legacy of the post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction--a comprehensive story of Black Americans' struggle for human rights and dignity and the failure of the nation to fulfill its promises of freedom, citizenship, and justice.
Call Number: E185.2 .M365 2021
Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All by
How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger's radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the jubilee, using fresh sources and texts to build on the leading historical accounts of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Reinstating ex-slaves' own "freedom dreams" in constructing these histories, Roediger creates a masterful account of the emancipation and its ramifications on a whole host of day-to-day concerns for Whites and Blacks alike, such as property relations, gender roles, and labor.
Call Number: E185.2 .R69 2014
On Juneteenth by
"It is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States." -Annette Gordon-Reed. The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native. Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us.
Call Number: E185.93.T4 G67 2021
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by
How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave-owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
Call Number: E441 .S654 2021
Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by
The extraordinary life of Henrietta Wood--a formerly enslaved woman sold back into slavery, eventually freed again, and who then sued the man who had sold her back into bondage, and won.
Call Number: E444.W815 M35 2019
The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America by
Amid the devastation of war rise the first stirrings of freedom in this absorbing, ground-level narrative by an acclaimed historian. Virginia's Great Valley, prosperous in peace with a rich soil and an enslaved workforce, invited destruction in war. Voracious Union and Confederate armies ground up the valley, consuming crops, livestock, fences, and human life. Pitched battles at Gettysburg, Lynchburg, and Cedar Creek punctuated a cycle of vicious attacks and reprisals in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. North of the Mason-Dixon line, in the Pennsylvania portion of the valley, free black families sent husbands and sons to fight with the U.S. Colored Troops. In letters home, even as Lincoln commemorated the dead at Gettysburg, they spoke movingly of a war for emancipation.
Call Number: E470.3 .A94 2017
W. E. B. du Bois: Black Reconstruction (LOA #350) by
A definitive edition of the landmark book that forever changed our understanding of the Civil War's aftermath and the legacy of racism in America. Upon publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois's now classic Black Reconstruction offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction--and of American democracy itself. One of the towering African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all his intellectual powers to bear on the nation's post-Civil War era of political reorganization, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow.
Call Number: E668 .D83 2021
Forever Free by Call Number: E668 .F655 2005
Juneteenth by Call Number: PS3555 .L625 J86 1999
New Items
