AT A GLANCE

Slavery

4 articles on Slavery

  • Slavery

    Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

    Word Count: 4739      Includes:  Bibliography

    In 1841 Frederick  Douglass was a fugitive, barely three years out of slavery. Those years had been marked by great changes. The slave, Frederick  Augustus  Washington  Bailey, had become a free man with a new name. He had married and become a father twice over, but events late that summer would change his life as fully as freedom itself had. In August Douglass attended a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on the island of Nantucket and, although he was a stranger to those gathered there, one of the white abolitionists prevailed upon him to address the convention. He was not a confident public speaker and had never done what he was called on to do. Yet, at first with hesitation and then with great self-assurance, the former slave told his story, detailing the life of a human being who had been treated and regarded as a thing, a piece of property, ...
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  • Slavery

    Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition

    The first black women to come to the British colony of Virginia probably arrived in 1619 , part of a divided parcel of contraband slaves taken on by the English ship Treasurer that “happened upon” a Spanish frigate with a cargo of Africans from Angola on their way to their enslavement in the Spanish West Indies. The crews of the Treasurer and a Dutch ship pirated the cargo of slaves for themselves. When the Dutch man-of-war arrived at Jamestown in August of 1619 , it carried twenty of the original one hundred slaves taken aboard; a few were women. One had been named Isabel. The Treasurer, which had taken the other part of the African cargo, landed only one slave in Virginia, “Angela.” A separate shipment arrived in 1622 with a woman they

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  • Slavery

    Source: The Oxford Companion to American Military History

    Word Count: 13     

    See Civil War: Causes of; Emancipation Proclamation. ...
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  • Slavery

    Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History

    Economically, slavery has been most important as an institution by which labor can be extracted from marginalized persons although in many slave-using societies, slaves have had few productive roles. The questions of who is a slave and who is not and of what terms in different languages should be translated as “slave” have often been subject to debate. Generally, definitions of slavery have stressed either the slave as property or the slave as a person withdrawn from kinship structures and thus lacking in social identity. For Dutch ethnographer H. J. Nieboer (Slavery as an Industrial System, The Hague, 1910), the slave is property and performs compulsory labor. For Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Slavery in Africa, Madison, 1977), the African slave is a fictive kinsman. For Orlando Patterson ...
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