Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915University of Massachusetts Press, 2003 - 339 páginas With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for a day of publick thanksgiving to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the ensuing century, black leaders built on this foundation and constructed a distinctive and vibrant tradition through their celebrations of the end of slavery in New York State, the British West Indies, and eventually the United States as a whole, In this revealing study, Mitch Kachun explores the multiple functions and contested meanings surrounding African American emancipation celebrations from the abolition of the slave trade to the fiftieth anniversary of U.S. emancipation. Excluded from July Fourth and other American nationalist rituals for most of this period, black activists used these festivals of freedom to encourage community building and race uplift. Kachun demonstrates that, even as these annual rituals helped define African Americans as a people by fostering a sense of shared history, heritage, and identity, they were also sites of ambiguity and conflict. Freedom celebrations served as occasions for debate over black representations in the public sphere, struggles for group lea |
Referencias a este libro
Chords of Freedom: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery J. R. Oldfield Sin vista previa disponible - 2007 |
Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860 Harvey Amani Whitfield Vista previa limitada - 2006 |