• Slavery in the shadow of liberty : the problem of slavery in Congress and the nation's capital / Paul Finkelman
• pt.
• 1. Congress and slavery in context
• The impact of British abolitionism on American sectionalism / David Brion Davis
• Christian statesmanship, codes of honor, and congressional violence : the antislavery travails and triumphs of Joshua Giddings / James B. Stewart
• Gamaliel Bailey, antislavery journalist and lobbyist / Stanley Harrold
• Saturday nights at the Baileys' : building an antislavery movement in Congress, 1838/1854 / Jonathan Earle
• "A nest of rattlesnakes let loose among them" : congressional debates over women's antislavery petitions, 1835/1845 / Susan Zaeske
• Debating slavery by proxy : the Texas annexation controversy / David Zarefsky
• pt.
• 2. The politics of slavery in the District of Columbia
• The 1846 retrocession of Alexandria : protecting slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia / A. Glenn Crothers
• "Whether they be ours or no, they may be heirs of the kingdom" : the pursuit of family ties among enslaved people in the District of Columbia / Mary Beth Corrigan
• The 1848 Pearl escape from Washington, D.C. : a convergence of opportunity, motivation, and political action in the nation's capital / Mary K. Ricks
• Celebrating emancipation and contesting freedom in Washington, D.C. / Mitch Kachun.

Few images of early America were more striking, and jarring, than that of slaves in the capital city of the world's most important free republic. Black slaves served and sustained the legislators, bureaucrats, jurists, cabinet officials, military leaders, and even the presidents who lived and worked there. While slaves quietly kept the nation's capital running smoothly, lawmakers debated the place of slavery in the nation, the status of slavery in the territories newly acquired from Mexico, and even the legality of the slave trade in itself. This volume, with essays by some of the most distinguished historians in the nation, explores the twin issues of how slavery made life possible in the District of Columbia and how lawmakers in the district regulated slavery in the nation. Contributors: David Brion Davis, Mary Beth Corrigan, A. Glenn Crothers, Jonathan Earle, Stanley Harrold, Mitch Kachun, Mary K. Ricks, James B. Stewart, Susan Zaeske, David Zarefsky.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Part I. Gender, Law, and Urban Slavery
• Sites of Enslavement, Spaces of Freedom : Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic Cities of Havana and Rio de Janeiro
• The Law Is Final, Excellent Sir : Slave Law, Gender, and Gradual Emancipation
• Part II. Seeking Freedom
• As a Slave Woman and as a Mother : Law, Jurisprudence, and Rhetoric in Stories from Women's Claims-Making
• Exaggerated and Sentimental? : Engendering Abolitionism in the Atlantic World
• I Wish to Be in This City : Women and the Quest for Urban Freedom
• Part III. Conceiving Freedom
• Enlightened Mothers of Families or Competent Domestic Servants? : Elites Imagine the Meanings of Freedom
• She Was Now a Free Woman : Ex-Slave Women and the Meanings of Urban Freedom
• My Mother Was Free-Womb, She Wasn't a Slave : Conceiving Freedom
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: Conceiving Citizenship.

In Conceiving Freedom, Camillia Cowling shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts. Cowling examines how women, typically illiterate but with access to scribes, instigated myriad successful petitions for emancipation, often using "free-womb" laws that declared that the children of enslaved women were legally free. She reveals how enslaved women's struggles connected to abolitionist movements in each city and the broader Atlantic World, mobilizing new notions about enslaved and free womanhood. She shows how women conceived freedom and then taught the "free-womb" generation to understand and shape the meaning of that freedom. Even after emancipation, freed women would continue to use these claims-making tools as they struggled to establish new spaces for themselves and their families in post emancipation society.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• ""Contents""; ""Tables""; ""Abbreviations""; ""Preface""; ""Introduction""; ""1 The Loyalists and Slavery""; ""2 Roots: The British Connection""; ""3 Helping the Lord against the Mighty""; ""4 A Feeble Voice from the Backwoods of Canada""; ""5 Land, an Interest in the Soil, and a Christian Education""; ""6 Educating the Public""; ""7 The Church and Antislavery""; ""8 A Question of Identity""; ""9 Ontario and the Freedman""; ""10 Retrospect""; ""Notes""; ""Bibliography""; ""Index""; ""A""; ""B""; ""C""; ""D""; ""E""; ""F""; ""G""; ""H""; ""I""; ""J""; ""K""; ""L""; ""M""; ""N""; ""O""; ""P""

• ""Q""""R""; ""S""; ""T""; ""U""; ""V""; ""W""; ""Y""; ""Z""; ""Illustrations""

• ""Contents""; ""Tables""; ""Abbreviations""; ""Preface""; ""Introduction""; ""1 The Loyalists and Slavery""; ""2 Roots: The British Connection""; ""3 Helping the Lord against the Mighty""; ""4 A Feeble Voice from the Backwoods of Canada""; ""5 Land, an Interest in the Soil, and a Christian Education""; ""6 Educating the Public""; ""7 The Church and Antislavery""; ""8 A Question of Identity""; ""9 Ontario and the Freedman""; ""10 Retrospect""; ""Notes""; ""Bibliography""; ""Index""; ""A""; ""B""; ""C""; ""D""; ""E""; ""F""; ""G""; ""H""; ""I""; ""J""; ""K""; ""L""; ""M""; ""N""; ""O""; ""P""

• ""Q""""R""; ""S""; ""T""; ""U""; ""V""; ""W""; ""Y""; ""Z""; ""Illustrations""

• Acknowledgments; Note on Orthography; Introduction;
• Chapter 1. "Death to Slavery": Sparking the Abolition Debate;
• Chapter 2. "While the Cry for Emancipation Still Echoes": The Political Effects of the 1871 Law;
• Chapter 3. "We Need to Put into Action the Liberal Ideas We Speak Of": A Thwarted Attempt to Free Recife;
• Chapter 4. The "Disorderliness of the Intransigent Abolitionists": An Abolitionist Parade, New Associativism, and Elections;
• Chapter 5. "March on over the Thorns That Lie in Your Path": Reaction and Counterreaction in the Cotegipe Era.

• Chapter 6. "Celebrations of Freedom": Abolition and the Changing Debates over CitizenshipConclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Celso Thomas Castilho offers original perspectives on the political upheaval surrounding the process of slave emancipation in postcolonial Brazil. He shows how the abolition debates in Pernambuco transformed the practices of political citizenship and marked the first instance of a mass national political mobilization. In addition, he presents new findings on the scope and scale of the opposing abolitionist and sugar planters' mobilizations in the Brazilian northeast. The book highlights the extensive interactions between enslaved and free people in theconstruction of abolitionism, and reveals how Brazil's first social movement reinvented discourses about race and nation, leading to the passage of the abolition law in 1888. It also documents the previously ignored counter-mobilizations led by the landed elite, who saw the rise of abolitionism as a political contestation and threat to their livelihood. Overall, this study illuminates how disputes over control of emancipation also entailed disputes over the boundaries of the political arena and connects the history of abolition to the history of Brazilian democracy. It offers fresh perspectives on Brazilianpolitical history and on Brazil's place within comparative discussions on slavery and emancipation.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The transatlantic slave trade comes to Georgia / James A. McMillin
• "The King of England's soldiers": armed blacks in Savannah and its hinterlands during the Revolutionary War era, 1778-1787 / Timothy Lockley
• At the intersection of cotton and commerce: antebellum Savannah and its slaves / Susan Eva O'Donovan
• To "venerate the spot" of "airy visions": slavery and the romantic conception of place in Mary Telfair's Savannah / Jeffrey Robert Young
• Slave life in Savannah: geographies of autonomy and control / Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry
• Free black life in Savannah / Janice L. Sumler-Edmond
• Wartime workers, moneymakers: Black labor in Civil War-era Savannah / Jacqueline Jones
• "We defy you!": politics and violence in reconstruction Savannah / Jonathan M. Bryant
• "The fighting has not been in vain": African American intellectuals in Jim Crow Savannah / Bobby J. Donaldson.

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah is a richly illustrated, accessibly written book modeled on the very successful Slavery in New York, a volume Leslie M. Harris coedited with Ira Berlin. Here Harris and Daina Ramey Berry have collected a variety of perspectives on slavery, emancipation, and black life in Savannah from the city's founding to the early twentieth century. Written by leading historians of Savannah, Georgia, and the South, the volume includes a mix of longer thematic essays and shorter sidebars focusing on individual people, events, and places. The story of slavery in Savannah may s.

• Introduction: imagining freedom in the slave South
• City of contrasts: Charleston before the Civil War
• A way out of no way: Black women and manumission
• To survive and thrive: race, sex, and waged labor in the city
• The currency of citizenship: property ownership and Black female freedom
• A tale of two women: the lives of Cecille Cogdell and Sarah Sanders
• A fragile freedom: the story of Margaret Bettingall and her daughters
• Epilogue: the continuing search for freedom.

For black women in antebellum Charleston, freedom was not a static legal category but a fragile and contingent experience. In this deeply researched social history, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers analyzes the ways in which black women in Charleston acquired, defined, and defended their own vision of freedom. Drawing on legislative and judicial materials, probate data, tax lists, church records, family papers, and more, Myers creates detailed portraits of individual women while exploring how black female Charlestonians sought to create a fuller freedom by improving their financial, social, and legal standing. Examining both those who were officially manumitted and those who lived as free persons but lacked official documentation, Myers reveals that free black women filed lawsuits and petitions, acquired property (including slaves), entered into contracts, paid taxes, earned wages, attended schools, and formed familial alliances with wealthy and powerful men, black and white--all in an effort to solidify and expand their freedom. Never fully free, black women had to depend on their skills of negotiation in a society dedicated to upholding both slavery and patriarchy. Forging Freedom examines the many ways in which Charleston's black women crafted a freedom of their own design instead of accepting the limited existence imagined for them by white Southerners.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)