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

The story of the widow Volunbrun and her slaves might be told through differing analytic frames: empire, constitution making, anti-slavery constitution making, antislavery movements, political economy, high court pronouncements pronouncements, and biography.8 In this essay the answers lie in the intimate dynamics of a household and the lived experience of the enslaved people in it. Can we understand what the problem of slavery and freedom looked like for those enslaved people whose life itineraries were shaped by the meta-forces of commercial, political, and military conflict and exchange? Being enslaved in 1796 Port-au-Prince differed from being enslaved in 1801 New York City or 1818 Baltimore. Along this Atlantic itinerary, the Volunbrun slaves confronted new rules, rituals, and structures of power. Straining to adopt their perspective, we see the lived dimensions of slavery and law. We learn how enslaved people quietly navigated a complex matrix of courts, attorneys, and reformers. We will also see how the claims of Saint-Domingue's slaves in Maryland, making their lives at the intersection of the Haitian Revolution and an emerging domestic slave trade, shaped the parameters of Southern southern legal culture.

The Case of Jean Baptiste, un Créole de Saint-Domingue: Narrating Slavery, freedom, and the Haitian Revolution in Baltimore City

"Make us a power": African American methodists debate the "Woman question," 1870-1900

Make Us a Power

Studies in Legal History

This essay takes up an 1801 freedom suit brought by those held as slaves in the Volunbrun household by those said to be slaves from the French colony of Saint-Domingue. It was the era of gradual emancipation in New York and law makers were engaged in a self-conscious series of reforms aimed at regulating and ultimately bringing an end to slavery in the state. Still, little was settled. Courts, confronted with the lived experiences and doctrinal questions posed by the presence of black refugees from the Haitian revolution, contemplated whether France had abolished slavery in 1794, and, if so, how U.S. courts should regard black refugees said to have been made freed people. Atlantic world dynamics forced legal culture to grapple with authorities beyond its territorial jurisdiction--fleets of French naval vessels, refugees from Caribbean revolutions, decrees of slave generals, and the force of some 200 “French negroes” gathered on a local street. Courts gave way to zealous attorneys, aggressive reformers, impassioned pundits, illicit traders, household intimacies, and disorderly crowds for supremacy over slavery’s juridical dimensions. Slavery helped make the reputations of New York’s elite attorneys and define the parameters of its distinct legal culture. Ultimately, legal culture evidenced neither the acumen nor the ambition to settle who was a slave and who was not.

Martha S. Jones

Papers

The Case of Jean Baptiste, un Créole de Saint-Domingue: Narrating Slavery, freedom, and the Haitian Revolution in Baltimore City

"Make us a power": African American methodists debate the "Woman question," 1870-1900

Make Us a Power

Studies in Legal History

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