Böcker utgivna av University of Pennsylvania Press

"As winter turned to spring in the year 1699, Sebastian and Jane embarked on a campaign of persuasion. The two wished to marry, and they sought the backing of their community in Boston. Nothing, however, could induce Jane's enslaver to consent. Only after her death did Sebastian and Jane manage to wed, forming a union that was stable and long-lasting despite the fact that husband and wife were not always able to live in the same household. New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but this snippet of Jane and Sebastian's story reminds us that it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most whom were of African descent. In Belonging, Gloria McCahon Whiting tells the region's early history from the perspective of the people, like Jane and Sebastian, who belonged to others and who struggled to maintain a sense of belonging among their kin. Through a series of meticulously reconstructed family narratives, Whiting traces the contours of enslaved people's intimate lives. Bondage created family problems for the enslaved, who tended to live in the same dwellings as those who bound them, but often lived apart from their kin. Enslaved spouses rarely were able to cohabit; fathers and their offspring routinely were separated by inheritance practices; children could be removed from their mothers at an enslaver's whim; and people in bondage had only partial control of their movement through the region, which made more difficult the task of maintaining distant relationships. But Belonging does more than lay bare the obstacles to family stability for those in bondage; the book also examines how people of African descent created kinship ties despite these limitations. Whiting charts Afro-New Englanders' persistent demands for intimacy throughout the century and a half stretching from New England's founding to the American Revolution. And she shows how the work of making and maintaining relationships influenced the region's law, religion, society, and politics. Ultimately, the actions taken by people in bondage to fortify their families played a pivotal role in bringing about the collapse of slavery in New England's most populous state, Massachusetts"--

"This book recovers the spectacular scenes of "pagan" religion that filled England's theaters in the seventeenth century. Recycled across many plays, these iconic set-pieces became stereotyped and widely applied to a whole set of cultural and geographic sites, both ancient and modern, beyond the Abrahamic religions"--Publisher's description.

Explores the legacies of slavery in Southern cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coastsCities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when "urban" and "rural" indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year-centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities -similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan-resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.Captive City explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the "hospitality" cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the "post" in postindustrial and the "neo" in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted-not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts-but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments.