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This book explains how lynching arose precisely out of an ideology of the sense of the rights accrued to someone possessing democratic freedom, and the sense that those rights were directly and formally a product of the earliest and most essential mandates of a slave society. Lynching can be broadly defined as the extralegal pursuit of vengeance against an offender of communal moral standards. The rationales and justifications that lynchers and their apologists produced to tease out the defenses of lynching reveal about American political discourse of all kinds are examined in this book. The most recent manifestations of the American political discourse has been African American public figures who have described their political ordeals as a high-technology lynching, and media coverage of a legal indictment for perjury as exhibiting an unethical, illegal lynch mob mentality. In more regular ways, frequent metaphorical employments of lynching are used as a way of terrorizing black Americans. The book demonstrates that the practice of lynching in American history is not only shameful but also central, and recognizes the ways in which lynching is both a metaphor and literal continues to haunt the republic.

This book explains the role of blacks in establishing cattle ranching in a range of places throughout the Americas. It demonstrates that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing production systems so fundamental to the environmental and social relations of the colonies that their consequences persist to the present. This book focuses on a sequence of cases, each concerned with a particular ranching frontier and its connections to other places. An Atlantic actor-network approach is used to contribute to the collective effort to understand more thoroughly the processes that connected places in Africa, Europe, and America. New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused on the lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico where cattle ranching first became established. The book also describes a case study of the emergence of cattle ranching in eighteenth-century Louisiana. The book examines the role of blacks in the open-range cattle herding of Barbuda, one of the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, from the seventeenth century onward. The hybridization of materials and ideas that arrived via shifting networks and repeated infusions of ideas and materials is an ongoing process across the Atlantic and within the Americas, and actors of African, European, native, Creole, and mixed origins. Their legacy echoes down to the present, both in particular ways in specific places and in general throughout the Americas.

This book examines the various essays based on the transatlantic slave trade database that contains 34,850 voyages, well over half of which contain information which was unavailable in 1999. A reassessment of the transatlantic slave trade is based on new information and interpretations for branches of the trade that have received less attention than they should. A new database to identify the coastal origins of vessels that were captured and condemned in the courts of mixed commission in Sierra Leone and Havana is used and detailed information now available on the Africans onboard those vessels is then exploited to construct a profile of enslaved peoples not previously possible. Traditional historiography argues for the central importance of Angola as a source of slaves arriving in nineteenth-century Cuba. The Dutch role in the early modern Atlantic world and North German slave trade are explained well. The book also examines some of the broader influences on and effects of the slave trade. Brazilian slave traffic within a broader geographic context is exhibited. There is a great need for similar work on slaves arriving in the Caribbean and the North American mainland, where captives have tended to disappear from the view of the historian after disembarking. The new estimates of the transatlantic traffic are combined with recent research on the intra-American slave trade and population data to reevaluate the demographic experience of Caribbean slave populations.

This book presents different aspects of George Samuel Schuyler's unique approach to the race question. It presents Schuyler as a centrally important twentieth-century black intellectual and as an essentially liberating figure for his unique application of satire to the race question. The book does not shy away from pointing out the satirist's most flamboyant moments of nearsightedness, farsightedness, and outright blindness. Its central concern remains the complex intellectual and political commitments that make Schuyler irreducible to such one-word descriptions as socialist, conservative, amalgamationist, integrationist, or antiessentialist. In his effort to fashion and project a unique black American identity, he took pleasure in playfully pitting such typical categories against one another. At different points in his career, Schuyler embraced almost all of them, especially the ones he found useful in disputing what he regarded as the narrow, racially motivated standard of his average reader. His ironic, open approach to the race question in many ways anticipates this new historical circumstance, where the invention of multiple racial identities has begun to supersede accounts of group distinctiveness based on narrow assumptions of biological essence or static notions of tradition. Schuyler struck an early blow for audacious independence on racial issues.

A study of monuments to the civil rights movement and African American history that have been erected in the U.S. South over the past three decades, this work explores how commemorative structures have been used to assert the presence of African Americans in contemporary Southern society. The book argues that these public memorials, ranging from the famous to the obscure, have emerged from, and speak directly to, the region's complex racial politics since monument builders have had to contend with widely varied interpretations of the African American past as well as a continuing presence of white supremacist attitudes and monuments.