Enjoy the Same Liberty
Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era
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- 34,99 €
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- 34,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
In this cohesive narrative, Edward Countryman explores the American Revolution in the context of the African American experience, asking a question that blacks have raised since the Revolution: What does the revolutionary promise of freedom and democracy mean for African Americans? Countryman, a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, draws on extensive research and primary sources to help him answer this question. He emphasizes the agency of blacks and explores the immense task facing slaves who wanted freedom, as well as looking at the revolutionary nature of abolitionist sentiment. Countryman focuses on how slaves remembered the Revolution and used its rhetoric to help further their cause of freedom.
Many contend that it is the American Revolution that defines us as Americans. Edward Countryman gives the reader the chance to explore this notion as it is reflected in the African American experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bancroft Prize-winning Countryman (A People in Revolution) begins with the bleak premise that everywhere explorers and colonizers went, with them they brought slavery "the great unifying colonial institution." Despite a dearth of primary sources, the result of Countryman's research efforts is impressive; the book includes paintings and a map of New York from 1813, and the final third contains a fascinating trove of documents, ranging from the "Virginia Law of Slavery" of 1905, to Phillis Wheatley's poetry and letters, to an excerpt from a 2008 speech by then-Senator Barack Obama. Some of these sources, such as the daily diaries of plantation owner William Byrd II, tell of unimaginable abuse in a matter-of-fact manner. Countryman makes a genuine effort to paint a picture of how excruciating the process of emancipation was in the years following 1776, but although his stated hope was that the book would present how "black people used the opportunities presented to them," the volume is more frequently a profile of black leaders who emerged at the time, from mathematician Benjamin Banneker to Richard Allen, the founder of the Mother Bethel church. Though thoroughly researched and thoughtful, Countryman's latest ultimately amounts to a brief but lifeless examination of a dynamic period in American history.
