A Desolate Place for a Defiant People

A Desolate Place for a Defiant People PDF Author: Daniel Sayers
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813055245
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In the 250 years before the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was a brutal landscape—2,000 square miles of undeveloped and unforgiving wetlands, peat bogs, impenetrable foliage, and dangerous creatures. It was also a protective refuge for marginalized communities, including Native Americans, African-American maroons, free African Americans, and outcast Europeans. Here they created their own way of life, free of the exploitation and alienation they had escaped. In the first thorough examination of this vital site, Daniel Sayers examines the area’s archaeological record, exposing and unraveling the complex social and economic systems developed by these defiant communities that thrived on the periphery. He develops an analytical framework based on the complex interplay between alienation, diasporic exile, uneven geographical development, and modes of production to argue that colonialism and slavery inevitably created sustained critiques of American capitalism.

A Desolate Place for a Defiant People

A Desolate Place for a Defiant People PDF Author: Daniel Sayers
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813055245
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In the 250 years before the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was a brutal landscape—2,000 square miles of undeveloped and unforgiving wetlands, peat bogs, impenetrable foliage, and dangerous creatures. It was also a protective refuge for marginalized communities, including Native Americans, African-American maroons, free African Americans, and outcast Europeans. Here they created their own way of life, free of the exploitation and alienation they had escaped. In the first thorough examination of this vital site, Daniel Sayers examines the area’s archaeological record, exposing and unraveling the complex social and economic systems developed by these defiant communities that thrived on the periphery. He develops an analytical framework based on the complex interplay between alienation, diasporic exile, uneven geographical development, and modes of production to argue that colonialism and slavery inevitably created sustained critiques of American capitalism.

Slavery's Exiles

Slavery's Exiles PDF Author: Sylviane A. Diouf
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814760287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
The forgotten stories of America maroons—wilderness settlers evading discovery after escaping slavery Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women’s proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.

An Archaeology of Structural Violence

An Archaeology of Structural Violence PDF Author: Michael P. Roller
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052440
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
“Brilliantly underscores how the manifestations of modern alienation and social inequality must be at the center of any truly anthropological analysis in the twenty-first century. This fantastic volume makes us comprehend the immense complexities of violent modernity and will compel us to critically interrogate our past, our present, and our future.”—Daniel O. Sayers, author of A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp Drawing on material evidence from daily life in a coal-mining town, this book offers an up-close view of the political economy of the United States over the course of the twentieth century. This community’s story illustrates the great ironies of this era, showing how modernist progress and plenty were inseparable from the destructive cycles of capitalism. At the heart of this book is one of the bloodiest yet least-known acts of labor violence in American history, the 1897 Lattimer Massacre, in which 19 striking immigrant mineworkers were killed and 40 more were injured. Michael Roller looks beneath this moment of outright violence at the everyday material and spatial conditions that supported it, pointing to the growth of shanty enclaves on the periphery of the town that reveal the reliance of coal companies on immigrant surplus labor. Roller then documents the changing landscape of the region after the event as the anthracite coal industry declined, as well as community redevelopment efforts in the late twentieth century. This rare sustained geographical focus and long historical view illuminates the rise of soft forms of power and violence over workers, citizens, and consumers between the late 1800s and the present day. Roller expertly blends archaeology, labor history, ethnography, and critical social theory to demonstrate how the archaeology of the recent past can uncover the deep foundations of today’s social troubles. Michael P. Roller is a research affiliate of the Anthropology Department of the University of Maryland. Currently, he is employed as an archaeologist for the National Park Service. A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel

City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Marcus Peyton Nevius
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820356425
Category : Dismal Swamp (N.C. and Va.)
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Dismal Freedom

Dismal Freedom PDF Author: J. Brent Morris
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed

The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed PDF Author: Daniel O. Sayers
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 081307259X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
The first comprehensive discussion of the historical archaeology of homelessness In a time when the idea of home has become central to living the American dream, The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed brings to the forefront the concept of homelessness. The book points out that homelessness remains underexplored in historical archaeology, a fact which may reflect societal biases and marginalization, and it provides the field’s first comprehensive discussion of the subject. Daniel Sayers argues that the unhomed and the home have been inherently interconnected in the real world across the past several centuries. Sayers builds a conceptual model that focuses on this dynamic and uses it to generate new insights into pre‒Civil War communities of Maroons and Indigenous Americans, Great Depression‒era hobo communities, and Midwest farmsteads. In doing so, he highlights the social complexities, ambiguities, and significance of the home and the unhomed in the archaeological record. Using a variety of data sources including documentary records and material culture and drawing on extensive fieldwork, Sayers illuminates how homelessness is created, reproduced, and disparaged by the dominant culture. The book also emphasizes the importance of applied archaeology. Through these studies, Sayers contends that activist archaeologists have a role—and responsibility—to share their knowledge to help policy makers and stakeholders understand the unhomed, homelessness, and the American experience in this area. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney and Krysta Ryzewski

Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy

Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy PDF Author: Moses Grandy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
This book is a slave narrative, written by former slave, Moses Grandy.

Maroon Societies

Maroon Societies PDF Author: Richard Price
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fugitive slave communities
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
"Price breaks new ground in the study of slave resistance in his 'hemispheric' view of Maroon societies." -- Journal of Ethnic Studies

Maroons and the Marooned

Maroons and the Marooned PDF Author: Richard Bodek
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827236
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Contributions by Richard Bodek, Claire P. Curtis, Joseph Kelly, Simon Lewis, Steve Mentz, J. Brent Morris, Peter Sands, Edward Shore, and James O'Neil Spady Commonly, the word maroon refers to someone cast away on an island. One becomes marooned, usually, through a storm at sea or by a captain as a method of punishment. But the term originally denoted escaped slaves. Though being marooned came to be associated mostly with white European castaways, the etymology invites comparison between true maroons (escaped slaves establishing new lives in the wilderness) and people who were marooned (through maritime disaster). This volume brings together literary scholars with historians, encompassing both literal maroons such as in Brazil and South Carolina as well as metaphoric scenarios in time-travel novels and postapocalyptic narratives. Included are examples from The Tempest; Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Both runaways and castaways formed new societies in the wilderness. But true maroons, escaped slaves, were not cast away; they chose to fly towards the uncertainties of the wild in pursuit of freedom. In effect, this volume gives these maroons proper credit, at the very heart of American history.

The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company

The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company PDF Author: Charles Royster
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
In this absorbing narrative Charles Royster traces the rise and fall of the eighteenth-century transatlantic culture that was built on the insatiable demand in Europe for Virginia tobacco and the equally insatiable American demand for European manufactured goods. Moving from the plantations of Virginia and Antigua to the warehouses of London and Glasgow, from the Gold Coast of Africa to the valleys of the Allegheny Mountains, from the iron furnaces of southern Wales to the subscribers' room of Lloyd's of London, Professor Royster gives us the story of the Dismal Swamp Company, a fantastically delusional enterprise that proposed draining and developing a vast morass along the Virginia-North Carolina border. Examining the interconnected lives of the company's partners, Royster reveals a colonial order built on a system of cronyism, conspicuous consumption, and debt that seems hauntingly familiar. He writes about the many schemers and dreamers (including George Washington, Robert "King" Carter, two William Byrds, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Morris) who failed to amass their desired fortunes, and a few realists (Samuel Gist, Dr. Thomas Walker, and Anthony Bacon) who succeeded, but at the dire expense of others. And we see the breakdown of this culture and the transition to a more democratic, though similar, system after the Revolution. Throughout Royster's narrative we seepossessors possessed by their possessions, slaveholders possessed by slavery, and heirs possessed by litigation. Connecting all their stories are their unceasing efforts to make something substantial out of the insubstantial--chief among them the almost unbelievable delusion that fortunes could bemade from the Dismal Swamp.