Synopses & Reviews
The history of slavery in early America is a history of suicide. On ships crossing the Atlantic, enslaved men and women refused to eat or leaped into the ocean. They strangled or hanged themselves. They tore open their own throats. In America, they jumped into rivers or out of windows, or even ran into burning buildings. Faced with the reality of enslavement, countless Africans chose death instead.
In The Power to Die, Terri L. Snyder excavates the history of slave suicide, returning it to its central place in early American history. How did peopleandmdash;traders, plantation owners, and, most importantly, enslaved men and women themselvesandmdash;view and understand these deaths, and how did they affect understandings of the institution of slavery then and now? Snyder draws on shipsandrsquo; logs, surgeonsand#39; journals, judicial and legislative records, newspaper accounts, abolitionist propaganda and slave narratives, and many other sources to build a grim picture of slaveryandrsquo;s toll and detail the ways in which suicide exposed the contradictions of slavery, serving as a powerful indictment that resonated throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world and continues to speak to historians today.
Review
“Kammen has a good sense of the details that make historical stories memorable. His occasional flashes of humor add a winsome, professionally geeky element to the telling.”—Dallas Morning News Dallas Morning News
Review
“Teresa Barnett is interested in the survival of public things and personal and what they meant to people. Drawing selectively but constructively upon the evidence, episodes, and theories, Sacred Relics is a very sophisticated and polished piece of work, offering the reader a clear sense of change over time in the realm of reliquaries and their keepers. There is no single work like it in US historiography. It will be must reading in the fields of cultural, intellectual, and social history.”
Review
“In Sacred Relics, Teresa Barnett explores the variety of physical ways that Americans have created avenues to the past through history's remains. Barnett gracefully and clearly guides us through this fascinating look at material culture in America, breaking new ground she goes. This is a very fine book.”
Review
“Teresa Barnett has deaccessioned a museum history of staged tableau and glass-encased artifacts, offering us instead a rich collection of relics dismissed as anachronistic refuse: shards of Plymouth Rock, George Washington’s coat, Abraham Lincoln’s bloodied collar; George Whitefield’s corpse, Pirate Tom Trouble’s arm, Jane McCrea’s teeth; mourning brooches, snuff boxes, buttons, and cannonballs. She trades museal provenance—the prehistory of objects—for the lived lives of relics, affective synecdoches that connect us to the past. With beautiful detail and theoretical sophistication, Barnett makes history proximate. We become antiquarians, touching remainders and relishing their resonance.”
Review
“As deeply researched as it is profoundly argued, Sacred Relics is a window onto the now-historical practice of relic hunting that sought to preserve the past a piece at a time—in advance of the museum and a modern understanding of historic preservation. Sacred Relics offers a new way of seeing the otherwise nondescript shards, chips of wood, and bits of metal pried from memorable things to live forever in the act of personal possession.”
Review
“Teresa Barnett offers a carefully considered account of the creation of historical relics, objects that still occupy a special—and contested—place in the collections of museums and historic sites throughout the United States.”
Review
“Barnetts well-researched and carefully written book helps readers better understand the relics role in understanding the past and how that understanding has changed over time. . . . This brief yet stimulating book is a must-read for scholars of historical memory.”
Review
“Barnett provides readers with an illuminating study about the history of museums and, more broadly, about the history of historical thought. In addition, she offers museum professionals an enlarged interpretative framework from which to reconsider the relic. Barnett has made an impressive contribution to the history of American museums and to the study of the practice of history.”
Review
andldquo;The Power to Die is the first book-length study of the subject of slave suicide. Drawing upon a robust and diverse body of sources, Snyder powerfully argues that it exposed significant rifts and tensions in early modern American society. Ambitious in scope and original in framing, her analysis is careful, trenchant, and insightful. Snyderandrsquo;s ingenious analysis exposes the ways in which slave suicide reflected the duality of slaves as both people and property.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;The Power to Die is an important, innovative, and exceedingly well-researched book. Snyder has done some breathtaking archival work and the sheer variety of sources is astoundingandmdash; drawing on newspapers, antislavery propaganda, ship log books, plantation diaries, account books, and slave narratives, to name a few. This book will be of great interest to many different scholars, including those who work on slavery and early America, but also those eager to know more about law, gender, technology, and early American print culture.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Snyder attends to her subject with great intelligence, care, and sensitivity. Drawing together an impressive variety of sources, she probes the connection between the public interest in slavery and the forbidden private will of the enslaved. This excellent study of mortuary politics confirms that the power to die can be as historically consequential as the power to hold, punish, and kill.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;In this moving and provocative work, Snyder compels us to rethink slavery and suicide and, in the process, greatly expands our comprehension of both phenomena.and#160;Snyderandrsquo;s beautifully written and thoughtful study makes important and unique contributions to the histories of slavery, early America, and medicine. Snyder argues that our current understanding of suicide is profoundly shaped by twentieth century notions of illness, stress, depression, and hopelessness and offers us instead a deeply historicized exploration of suicide and slavery.andrdquo;
Synopsis
With
Digging Up the Dead, Pulitzer Prizeand#8211;winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, skull-fondling, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-knownand#8212;yet surprisingly persistentand#8212;aspect of American history.
and#160;Simultaneously insightful and interesting, masterly and macabre, Digging Up the Dead reminds us that the stories of American history donand#8217;t always end when the key players pass on. Rather, the battleand#8212;over reputations, interpretations, and, last but far from least, possession of the remains themselvesand#8212;is often just beginning.
Synopsis
With Digging Up the Dead, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, skull-fondling, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-known--yet surprisingly persistent--aspect of American history.
Simultaneously insightful and interesting, masterly and macabre, Digging Up the Dead reminds us that the stories of American history don't always end when the key players pass on. Rather, the battle--over reputations, interpretations, and, last but far from least, possession of the remains themselves--is often just beginning.
Synopsis
A piece of Plymouth Rock. A lock of George Washington’s hair. Wood from the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. Various bits and pieces of the past—often called “association items”—may appear to be eccentric odds and ends, but they are valued because of their connections to prominent people and events in American history. Kept in museum collections large and small across the United States, such objects are the touchstones of our popular engagement with history.
In Sacred Relics, Teresa Barnett explores the history of private collections of items like these, illuminating how Americans view the past. She traces the relic-collecting tradition back to eighteenth-century England, then on to articles belonging to the founding fathers and through the mass collecting of artifacts that followed the Civil War. Ultimately, Barnett shows how we can trace our own historical collecting from the nineteenth century’s assemblages of the material possessions of great men and women.
Synopsis
and#147;Suicide,and#8221; writes Terri Snyder, and#147;is central to the history of slavery in early America,and#8221; and slave suicide is itself central to the history of suicide. Snyder digs deep into horrifying contemporary accounts, exploring when and why captured Africans chose suicide, how their captors chose to respond, and the roles of class and status in early American suicides more generally. Over the course of the slavery era, Snyder finds, American society developed a new ambivalence about suicide. The harsh treatment of suicides lessened in the white populationand#151;bodies were no longer desecrated, forfeiture was not enforcedand#151;while on plantations the question of whether dead slaves were primarily property or people heightened awareness of slaveryand#8217;s contradictions and cruelties. Snyder shows how slave suicide pressured slave society to change not only its attitudes toward slaves but its approach toward suicide in all its forms.
About the Author
Michael Kammenis the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prizeand#8211;winning People of Paradox; An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization.
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; A Short History of Reburial: Patterns of Change over Time
2and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Heroes of the Revolution: The Siting and Reciting of Patriotism
3and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Honor, Dishonor, and Issues of Reputation: From Sectionalism to Nationalism
4and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Problematic Graves, Tourism, and the Wishes of Survivors
5and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Disinterred by Devotion: Religion, Race, and Spiritual Repose
6and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Repossessing the Dead Elsewhere in Our Time
Notes
Index