Brenda Stevenson

The story of the abolitionist leaders who were also feminists, joined in a double crusade to liberate women and slaves. Yellin analyzes the texts and graphic images that carried the message of these feminist abolitionists successfully - until their icons were taken-over by the patriarchal elite.

Au cours des derniers mois, le monde a vu les monuments confederes des campus universitaires, des centres-villes – dans des metropoles animees comme dans les petites villes –, etre contestes, renverses, tagues, incendies et repeints. Cette vague immense de souffrance et de protestation s’est dechainee apres les agressions mortelles perpetrees contre des vies noires (Black Lives) et d’autres problemes systemiques d’inegalites ethniques et raciales que symbolisent les meurtres de George Floyd, ...

Life in the old South has always fascinated Americans-whether in the mythical portrayals of the planter elite from fiction such as Gone With the Wind or in historical studies that look inside the slave cabin. Now Brenda E. Stevenson presents a reality far more gripping than popular legend, even as she challenges the conventional wisdom of academic historians. Life in Black and White provides a panoramic portrait of family and community life in and around Loudoun County, Virginia-weaving the fascinating personal stories of planters and slaves, of free blacks and poor-to-middling whites, into a powerful portrait of southern society from the mid-eighteenth century to the Civil War. Loudoun County and its vicinity encapsulated the full sweep of southern life. Here the region's most illustrious families-the Lees, Masons, Carters, Monroes, and Peytons-helped forge southern traditions and attitudes that became characteristic of the entire region while mingling with yeoman farmers of German, Scotch-Irish, and Irish descent, and free black families who lived alongside abolitionist Quakers and thousands of slaves. Stevenson brilliantly recounts their stories as she builds the complex picture of their intertwined lives, revealing how their combined histories guaranteed Loudon's role in important state, regional, and national events and controversies. Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, for example, were hidden at a local plantation during the War of 1812. James Monroe wrote his famous "Doctrine" at his Loudon estate. The area also was the birthplace of celebrated fugitive slave Daniel Dangerfield, the home of John Janney, chairman of the Virginia secession convention, a center for Underground Railroad activities, and the location of John Brown's infamous 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry. In exploring the central role of the family, Brenda Stevenson offers a wealth of insight: we look into the lives of upper class women, who bore the oppressive weight of marriage and motherhood as practiced in the South and the equally burdensome roles of their husbands whose honor was tied to their ability to support and lead regardless of their personal preference; the yeoman farm family's struggle for respectability; and the marginal economic existence of free blacks and its undermining influence on their family life. Most important, Stevenson breaks new ground in her depiction of slave family life. Following the lead of historian Herbert Gutman, most scholars have accepted the idea that, like white, slaves embraced the nuclear family, both as a living reality and an ideal. Stevenson destroys this notion, showing that the harsh realities of slavery, even for those who belonged to such attentive masters as George Washington, allowed little possibility of a nuclear family. Far more important were extended kin networks and female headed households. Meticulously researched, insightful, and moving, Life in Black and White offers our most detailed portrait yet of the reality of southern life. It forever changes our understanding of family and race relations during the reign of the peculiar institution in the American South.

... Carolina, added. "We can't read de hymns ebben iffen we had a book 'cause weain't 'lowed ter have no books, but we sung jist the same." 13 A woman who had been enslaved in Alabama noted similarly that, "All de niggahs love to go ...

Louisa Picquet and her mother’s stories of concubinage chart experiences that they shared with thousands of other enslaved women in the antebellum South, and hundreds of thousands in the Atlantic World. Born in the late 1820s on a plantation outside of Columbia, South Carolina, Louisa was sold as an infant, along with her mother Elizabeth Ramsey. Elizabeth was about twenty years old when Louisa was born. A seamstress and domestic for her mistress by day, Elizabeth was the “quadroon” concubine of her owner, James Hunter Randolph, by night. Although James Randolph had sworn Elizabeth to secrecy regarding the paternity of her “white” baby, Mrs. Randolph could see for herself that Louisa had a remarkable resemblance to her own infant, born only two weeks earlier. Mrs. Randolph insisted that Elizabeth and her child be sold.

... the progenitor of the black literary tradition was a woman means, in the most strictly literal sense, that all sub-sequent black writers have evolved in a matrilinear line of descent, and that each, consciously or unconsciously, has ex-tended and revised a canon whose foundation ...

The Journal of Negro History “created” slavery studies in the early twentieth century, pioneering article-length historical analyses of the institution, serializing longer monographs, and producing an archive of primary documents on the subject. Under both its initial title and The Journal of African American History (JAAH ), this publication has been most responsible for robust intellectual discourse on the economic, political, and legislative aspects of the institution of racial slavery in North America while examining the enslaved person’s subjectivity and voice; cultures and cultural change; archival sources and methodologies; resistance, fugitivity, and revolutionary strategies; as well as slavery’s institutionalization and practice in the Atlantic World, both in Africa and the Americas. Likewise, it was the first such academic publication to dedicate entire issues to scholarship on enslaved black women. The Journal, indeed, has premiered all the major trends in slavery’s expanding historiography since it began publication more than a century ago. It is fitting, therefore, that we routinely turn our attention to the new and continuing research on this ever-essential

Introduction: What is Slavery? Chapter One: Slavery Across Time and Place Before the Atlantic Slave Trade Chapter Two: African Beginnings and the Atlantic Slave Trade Chapter Three: African People in the Colonial World of North America Chapter Four: Slavery and Antislavery in Antebellum America (144) Conclusion

In 1935, John B. Cade, an African American historian, college archivist and administrator, published an article in The Journal of Negro History drawn directly from the autobiographical accounts of formerly enslaved men and women and former slaveholders who resided in Texas and Louisiana. Cade had been intellectually aroused by the assertion of slavery historian Ulrich B. Phillips that enslaved African Americans had been content with their place under the institution. Phillips, a southerner who was mentored by William Dunning and taught at the University of Wisconsin and then Yale, was the leading slavery scholar of his generation. Phillips’s

More than twenty years ago, Deborah Gray White began a serious, fully documented study of enslaved women in the antebellum South. The eventual book-length study Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, published in 1985, was the first of its kind. It is still one of only a few such studies. What was, and remains, important about Professor White's work, however, is not only its status as the "first," but also the quality of her work as a research monograph. Few pioneering studies have stood the test of time as well as White's Ar'n't I a Woman?. Most of the findings that White presents in her brilliant description of female slave life and its delineation from the lives of enslaved men, the standard focus of social histories of slavery, remain uncontested. Whether it is her analyses of African American female stereotypes in the public imagination; the central importance of childbearing, rearing, and socialization to women's sense of self and their identity as females; the immense importance of their labor in the field and the domestic sphere; or the social lives, spheres, and networks of these women; White provides a veritable road map for any future study of enslaved females. The contributors to this Special Issue of The Journal of African American History salute Deborah White's enormous contribution by continuing her legacy of inquiry and excellence in the pursuit of enslaved women's lived experiences. These essays, including that of Deborah Gray White, are part of a number of papers given at a commemorative conference that I convened, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the publication of Ar'n't I a Woman? The conference was funded by and held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, in May 2005. Deborah Gray White, of course, contributes an essential essay in this collection--her thoughts on the production of her book. White's "'Matter Out of Place': Ar'n't I a Woman? Black Female Scholars and the Academy," is an eloquent explication of the origins of her book, the hostile response from almost every academic venue, and the toll that this endeavor, and her courageous life as an African American female historian of African American females, has taken. She is, as ever, in this essay honest, bold, and uncompromising in her attempt to come to terms with the pain, and the pleasure, of being the pioneer, the "matter out of place," that she is. Darlene Clark Hine's retrospective essay "Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South--Twenty Years After" comprehensively recounts the many contributions that White's book has made to the historiography of African Americans, southern history, American social history, and women's history. As the true "mother" of African American women's history, Professor Hine's comments are more than celebration. They are testimony to the enormous importance of White's work as the foundation of much that has followed and that will come. The other four essays in this Special Issue embrace Professor White's conclusions as they move on to address some of the questions she explicitly and implicitly explored in Ar'n't I a Woman? Daina Ramey Berry's "'In Pressing Need of Cash': Gender, Skill, and Family Persistence in the Domestic Slave Trade" is an important expansion of White's discussion of the labor and perceived value of enslaved women. Indeed, Berry takes up new questions regarding the monetary worth of enslaved females and the variables, including a female's age, skill, assumed fertility, and general physical and mental health, along with an owner's financial needs, as well as market forces, that determine this value. Beginning with the traditional belief that the domestic slave market centered on the buying and selling of enslaved "prime men," Berry's meticulous investigation proves otherwise. By canvassing an array of primary documents representing the Upper and Lower South, Berry is able to document that female prices, and therefore the value of their labor, were often equal to those of males. …

1. 'Tasha: "Always Energetic, Positive, Full of Energy" 2. Soon Ja Du: "She Had a Good Life in Korea" 3. March 16, 1991: Not Just Another Saturday in South Central 4. People v. Du: The Trial 5. Judge Joyce Karlin: "I Would Dream of Closing Arguments " 6. The People v. Du: Sentencing 7. Whose Fire This Time? Epilogue: Justice?

Life in the old South has always fascinated Americans-whether in the mythical portrayals of the planter elite from fiction such as Gone With the Wind or in historical studies that look inside the slave cabin. Now Brenda E. Stevenson presents a reality far more gripping than popular legend, even as she challenges the conventional wisdom of academic historians. Life in Black and White provides a panoramic portrait of family and community life in and around Loudoun County, Virginia-weaving the fascinating personal stories of planters and slaves, of free blacks and poor-to-middling whites, into a powerful portrait of southern society from the mid-eighteenth century to the Civil War. Loudoun County and its vicinity encapsulated the full sweep of southern life. Here the region's most illustrious families-the Lees, Masons, Carters, Monroes, and Peytons-helped forge southern traditions and attitudes that became characteristic of the entire region while mingling with yeoman farmers of German, Scotch-Irish, and Irish descent, and free black families who lived alongside abolitionist Quakers and thousands of slaves. Stevenson brilliantly recounts their stories as she builds the complex picture of their intertwined lives, revealing how their combined histories guaranteed Loudon's role in important state, regional, and national events and controversies. Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, for example, were hidden at a local plantation during the War of 1812. James Monroe wrote his famous "Doctrine" at his Loudon estate. The area also was the birthplace of celebrated fugitive slave Daniel Dangerfield, the home of John Janney, chairman of the Virginia secession convention, a center for Underground Railroad activities, and the location of John Brown's infamous 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry. In exploring the central role of the family, Brenda Stevenson offers a wealth of insight: we look into the lives of upper class women, who bore the oppressive weight of marriage and motherhood as practiced in the South and the equally burdensome roles of their husbands whose honor was tied to their ability to support and lead regardless of their personal preference; the yeoman farm family's struggle for respectability; and the marginal economic existence of free blacks and its undermining influence on their family life. Most important, Stevenson breaks new ground in her depiction of slave family life. Following the lead of historian Herbert Gutman, most scholars have accepted the idea that, like white, slaves embraced the nuclear family, both as a living reality and an ideal. Stevenson destroys this notion, showing that the harsh realities of slavery, even for those who belonged to such attentive masters as George Washington, allowed little possibility of a nuclear family. Far more important were extended kin networks and female headed households. Meticulously researched, insightful, and moving, Life in Black and White offers our most detailed portrait yet of the reality of southern life. It forever changes our understanding of family and race relations during the reign of the peculiar institution in the American South.

Despite the arrival of African captives in other European settler communities at least 100 years before pirated Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, it was in that colony that much of the roadmap for North America’s Black slave society was created. Virginia, after all, imported the largest numbers of Africans to North America, held resident the continent’s largest enslaved Black population in the colonial and antebellum eras, and had the first exportable cash crop, signaling that North American White wealth could be generated from Black bodies in the fields of seized Indigenous lands. One of the original captives was an Ndongo woman whom the Portuguese had named Angela. This essay attempts to move this woman from the referential margins to a more central locus as we consider the significance of 1619 in the founding of the nation’s history, the history of the Atlantic World, and the Black female diaspora. What, then, is Angela’s story? And how does it help to frame the broader context of Black women’s lives in British colonized North America?

Au cours des derniers mois, le monde a vu les monuments confederes des campus universitaires, des centres-villes – dans des metropoles animees comme dans les petites villes –, etre contestes, renverses, tagues, incendies et repeints. Cette vague immense de souffrance et de protestation s’est dechainee apres les agressions mortelles perpetrees contre des vies noires (Black Lives) et d’autres problemes systemiques d’inegalites ethniques et raciales que symbolisent les meurtres de George Floyd, ...

... the progenitor of the black literary tradition was a woman means, in the most strictly literal sense, that all sub-sequent black writers have evolved in a matrilinear line of descent, and that each, consciously or unconsciously, has ex-tended and revised a canon whose foundation ...

Abstract:This essay underscores that film is a powerful medium that has been used to both solidify popular and scholarly images of history and radically challenge them. Slavery filmography began with all of the ugly, stereotyped characterizations and storylines one would expect of the racial nadir of the early twentieth century. A revolutionary social movement at midcentury and a profound revision in the historiography of slavery beginning in the 1970s prompted changes in the public's reception of more realistic and humanistic images of enslaved black people, their interior lives, personal worth, and strivings. This essay moves forward from the earliest films to present-day cinema and TV series offerings to demonstrate how central slavery has been to Hollywood, its portrayal of American life, and how its screen representations have reflected changes in the historiography and the nation's social realities.

1. 'Tasha: "Always Energetic, Positive, Full of Energy" 2. Soon Ja Du: "She Had a Good Life in Korea" 3. March 16, 1991: Not Just Another Saturday in South Central 4. People v. Du: The Trial 5. Judge Joyce Karlin: "I Would Dream of Closing Arguments " 6. The People v. Du: Sentencing 7. Whose Fire This Time? Epilogue: Justice?

In 1935, John B. Cade, an African American historian, college archivist and administrator, published an article in The Journal of Negro History drawn directly from the autobiographical accounts of formerly enslaved men and women and former slaveholders who resided in Texas and Louisiana. Cade had been intellectually aroused by the assertion of slavery historian Ulrich B. Phillips that enslaved African Americans had been content with their place under the institution. Phillips, a southerner who was mentored by William Dunning and taught at the University of Wisconsin and then Yale, was the leading slavery scholar of his generation. Phillips’s

1. 'Tasha: "Always Energetic, Positive, Full of Energy" 2. Soon Ja Du: "She Had a Good Life in Korea" 3. March 16, 1991: Not Just Another Saturday in South Central 4. People v. Du: The Trial 5. Judge Joyce Karlin: "I Would Dream of Closing Arguments " 6. The People v. Du: Sentencing 7. Whose Fire This Time? Epilogue: Justice?

The Journal of Negro History “created” slavery studies in the early twentieth century, pioneering article-length historical analyses of the institution, serializing longer monographs, and producing an archive of primary documents on the subject. Under both its initial title and The Journal of African American History (JAAH ), this publication has been most responsible for robust intellectual discourse on the economic, political, and legislative aspects of the institution of racial slavery in North America while examining the enslaved person’s subjectivity and voice; cultures and cultural change; archival sources and methodologies; resistance, fugitivity, and revolutionary strategies; as well as slavery’s institutionalization and practice in the Atlantic World, both in Africa and the Americas. Likewise, it was the first such academic publication to dedicate entire issues to scholarship on enslaved black women. The Journal, indeed, has premiered all the major trends in slavery’s expanding historiography since it began publication more than a century ago. It is fitting, therefore, that we routinely turn our attention to the new and continuing research on this ever-essential

... Carolina, added. "We can't read de hymns ebben iffen we had a book 'cause weain't 'lowed ter have no books, but we sung jist the same." 13 A woman who had been enslaved in Alabama noted similarly that, "All de niggahs love to go ...