For 2013, the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs,...

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2013)

For 2018 the bibliography continues its coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, notes and ...

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2018)

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

For 2011 the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, ...

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2011)

This article examines the historically and culturally specific valence of ‘gender’ as currently deployed in the field of gender and women's history. It draws broadly on the scholarship on gender since the 1980s, while focusing particularly on the case of the British North American colonies and the early United States republic. The essay argues against the common practice of assuming that gender, understood as an oppositional binary, functions virtually universally as a primary process for representing differential power. It concludes by calling for a way of thinking about gender that can recognise important historical and cultural alternatives.

Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

The place of women's rights in African American public culture has been an enduring question, one that has long engaged activists, commentators, and scholars. "All Bound Up Together" explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. Martha Jones reveals how, through the nineteenth century, the "woman question" was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights. Unlike white women activists, who often created their own institutions separate from men, black women, Jones explains, often organized within already existing institutions - churches, political organizations, mutual aid societies, and schools. Covering three generations of black women activists, Jones demonstrates that their approach was not unanimous or monolithic but changed over time and took a variety of forms, from a woman's right to control her body to her right to vote. Through a far-ranging look at politics, church, and social life, Jones demonstrates how women have helped shape the course of black public culture.

All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900

All Bound Up Together

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. Edited by Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage. John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 308. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2091-6.) Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women offers a compelling exploration of black women's diverse intellectual labors and contributions. The volume is organized into four chronological sections that span the period from Phillis Wheatley's writings to the present day; the collection's focus lies within and beyond the United States, and it draws on numerous academic traditions. This border-crossing impetus shapes the collection's content and foci as well as its methods. It is historical in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, stretching the terms of what counts as history, who counts as a knower, and what constitutes an adequate historiographical method or source. Because the volume approaches intellectual history from beyond the usual bounds, it was a bit surprising to find no reference to some foundational interdisciplinary volumes documenting black women's ideas, such as Beverly Guy-Sheftall's edited collection Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York, 1995) and Ann Allen Shockley's Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (Boston, 1988). Nevertheless, the volume's interdisciplinary reach adds many new insights to the extant literatures focused on tracing and analyzing black women's distinctive intellectual traditions. The authors illustrate that bringing together seemingly disparate sources is necessary to illuminate this rich history, given the partial and often fragmented nature of the historical archive vis-a-vis black women's lives. The contributors explore diverse genres of knowing across time, place, and circumstance, including novels, poetry, prose, spiritual autobiographies, letters, journalism, church registers, cloth, colonial archives, mission reports, church newsletters, trial records, public depositions, diaries, social media, speeches, the blogosphere, and various forms of activism, organizing, and protest. Many contributors also examine sites of reluctance, backlash, withholding, silence, and self-censure, underscoring that the expressive nature of the unsaid, the erased, and the untellable is in and of itself a pivotal means for tracing genealogies of black women's intellectual history, in terms of both epistemic and historical politics. Given my own work on Anna Julia Cooper, an early black feminist scholar, educator, and activist, 1 was drawn to the essays that highlighted black women's strategies for pivoting dominant frames of knowing (though, for full disclosure, I had hoped to find some engagement with Cooper's 1925 Sorbonne dissertation on the Haitian and French revolutions, which anticipated black Atlantic studies and predated W. …

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women

The widow Drouillard de Volunbrun and her household boarded the brig Mary & Elizabeth in November 1796, only after many failed attempts to leave the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Like many others, they sought refuge from the violence and deprivation of the Haitian Revolution. In the party were the widow, her mother, a male companion, Marie Alphonse Clery and, at best count, twenty enslaved people. Catastrophe struck November 18 when the Mary & Elizabeth wrecked on the west end of the Miguana Reef, off the Bahamas. The vessel and cargo were “totally” lost, but the captain, crew, and twenty-nine passengers, including the Volunbrun household, were “saved.” By the following April of 1797, the household was again at sea, bound for New York City. New York was, Shane White explains, “the center of the heaviest slaveholding region” in the North. Slaveholdings were small, with slaves a shrinking minority of the overall population. Still, one in five households held at least one slave. The household maintained a modest profile during their first four years in the city, moving to what was then the city's northeast periphery, Eagle Street near Bowery. Their neighbors were skilled workers, including butchers, masons, and men working the maritime trades. The widow put most of those she termed slaves to work manufacturing cigars.

Martha S. Jones

Papers

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900

All Bound Up Together

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women

Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York