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This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recentres 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.
About the author
David W. Blight (Editor) DAVID W. BLIGHT is a professor of history at Yale University, the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, and the author of several books, most recently,
American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.
Jim Downs (Editor) JIM DOWNS is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History at Gettysburg College, a 2025-26 Guggenheim Fellow, and the director of the African American History Program at the Library Company of Philadelphia. In addition to coediting
Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and
Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America, he has authored
Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine; and
Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Summary
This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recentres 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.
