African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom - Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction

This innovative book examines how African Americans in the South made sense of the devastating loss of life unleashed by the Civil War and emancipation. During and after the war, African Americans died in vast numbers from battle, disease, and racial violence. While freedom was a momentous event for the formerly enslaved, it was also deadly. Through an investigation into how African Americans reacted to and coped with the passing away of loved ones and community members, Ashley Towle argues that freedpeople gave credence to their free status through their experiences with mortality. African Americans harnessed the power of death in a variety of arenas, including within the walls of national and private civilian cemeteries, in applications for widows' pensions, in the pulpits of black churches, around séance tables, on the witness stand at congressional hearings, and in the columns of African American newspapers. In the process of mourning the demise of kith and kin, black people reconstituted their families, forged communal bonds, and staked claims to citizenship, civil rights, and racial justice from the federal government. In a society upended by civil war and emancipation, death was political.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction
Chapter 1 "Let's Go to Buryin'": African American Civilian Funerals and Cemeteries in Freedom
Chapter 2 "To Repose with Their Comrades": African Americans and the Creation of National Cemeteries
Chapter 3 "The Widows and Families of the Heroic Dead": African American Kinship and Domestic Economy
Chapter 4 "The Invisible Army": African American Religious Life and Death
Chapter 5 "We Are Killed All the Day Long": Testifying and Writing About Death
Conclusion "In the Cold Valley and Shadow of the South Land"
Bibliography
About the Author

Über den Autor / die Autorin

Ashley Towle is assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Southern Maine.

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Ashley Towle
• Verlag: Bloomsbury
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Fester Einband
• Erschienen: 22.11.2022
• EAN: 9781666905717
• ISBN: 978-1-6669-0571-7
• Seiten: 201
• Abmessung: 158 mm x 236 mm x 18 mm
• Gewicht: 458 g
• Illustration: 7 b/w photos
• Serie: New Studies in Southern History
• Themen: Sachbuch > Geschichte > Sonstiges; USA, Social & cultural history, HISTORY / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877), HISTORY / United States / 19th Century, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, United States of America, USA, Relating to African American people, History of the Americas, Black & Asian Studies, HISTORY / African American & Black, American Civil War and Reconstruction (1861–1877)