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Klappentext The Work of Reconstruction draws on a rich documentary record, in which ex-slaves express in their own words and behavior the aspirations and goals that underlay their efforts. Not satisfied to render freed men and women as objects of theoretical inquiry, this book vividly recovers the concrete practices and language in which ex-slaves achieved freedom and the expectations that they had of liberation. Zusammenfassung In their efforts to achieve freedom! ex-slaves mounted a dual struggle to elude the personal domination of the old order and to blunt new coercions embedded in terms of emerging wage employment. In the labor disputes that convulsed the post-Civil War South can be read former slaves' critiques of both Southern slavery and Northern freedom. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations used in notes; A note on spellings; Maps; Introduction; Part I. Freedom Versus Freedom: Competing Visions of Emancipation: 1. Antebellum field slaves' labor: regional overviews; 2. Twilight of slavery, dawn of freedom; 3. Rebels and 'rebels in disguise'; Part II. A Measure of Freedom: Plantation Workers and the Wartime Introduction of Wage Labor in Port Royal: 4. Eluding the confederacy's grasp; 5. Inducing wage labor behind federal lines; 6. Wartime planting; 7. 'A dollar a task'; 8. 'As hard times as they has see with the rebel'; Part III. Restoration and Reaction: The Struggle for Land in the Sherman Reserve; Part IV. The Reconstruction of Work: 9. Remaking family life and labor in the interior; 10. Control of the crop; 11. Control of supplemental plots; 12. Working on shares; 13. Holding onto land and time in the low country; 14. Uncertain harvests: seasonalization of agricultural employment; Part V. The Work of Reconstruction: 15. Light in August; 16. 'Why can't we be friends?'; 17. 'There's a meeting here tonight'; 18. A perfect system?; 19. 'On duty' in the league; 20. 'We the laboring men out of doors'; Afterword; Bibliography; Index....
