Slavery and freedom in nineteenth-century America

Freedom has never been a fixed category or predetermined concept. Subject to multiple interpretations, its definition has been created and recreated by historical contingencies and social conflicts. Eric Foner traces how the existence of helped to shape the understanding of freedom by Americans both white and black from the colonial era to the end of Reconstruction. He pays particular attention to the metaphorical uses of by groups seeking to expand prevailing definitions of freedom (such as the labour movement's critique of wage slavery, and criticism of the slavery of sex by early feminists) as well as to the debate over the meaning of freedom unleashed by the destruction of during the Civil War

Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Race, History, and American Society

• Progress versus Social Justice

  Open Access•T Gruenewald•The Journal of American Culture•2021

  Add to list