Synopses & Reviews
The end of slavery in the United States inspired conflicting visions of the future for all Americans in the nineteenth century, black and white, slave and free. The black child became a figure upon which people projected their hopes and fears about slaverys abolition. As a member of the first generation of African Americans raised in freedom, the black child—freedoms child—offered up the possibility that blacks might soon enjoy the same privileges as whites: landownership, equality, autonomy. Yet for most white southerners, this vision was unwelcome, even frightening. Many northerners, too, expressed doubts about the consequences of abolition for the nation and its identity as a white republic.
From the 1850s and the Civil War to emancipation and the official end of Reconstruction in 1877, Raising Freedoms Child examines slave emancipation and opposition to it as a far-reaching, national event with profound social, political, and cultural consequences. Mary Niall Mitchell analyzes multiple views of the black child—in letters, photographs, newspapers, novels, and court cases—to demonstrate how Americans contested and defended slavery and its abolition.
With each chapter, Mitchell narrates an episode in the lives of freedoms children, from debates over their education and labor to the future of racial classification and American citizenship.Raising Freedoms Child illustrates how intensely the image of the black child captured the imaginations of many Americans during the upheavals of the Civil War era. Through public struggles over the black child, Mitchell argues, Americans by turns challenged and reinforced the racial inequality fostered under slavery in the United States. Only with the triumph of segregation in public schools in 1877 did the black child lose her central role in the national debate over civil rights, a role she would not play again until the 1950s.
Review
“An engaging and informative history of the Reconstruction era.”
- Journal of American History
Review
“Mary Niall Mitchell achieves a singular feat, setting herself apart from other historians of childhood.”
-Journal of Southern History,
Review
“
Raising Freedoms Child demonstrates the importance of childhood studies for understanding the nations political, economic, and social history. In this carefully researched book, Mitchell keeps the black child at the center of the struggle to define freedom in the aftermath of Civil War and emancipation.”
- Marie Jenkins Schwartz, University of Rhode Island
Review
“An engaging and informative history of the Reconstruction era.”
- Journal of American History
Review
“Like the best writing on the history of children, Raising Freedoms Child uses children and youth to suggest new paradigms for thinking about the past and for getting at the ways in which historical actors thought about the present....Mitchell has succeeded in making original contributions to several fields..”
-The North Carolina Historical Review,
Review
“Mitchells sophisticated, nuanced reading of a wealth of previously untapped documents and period photographs casts a dazzling, fresh light on the way that abolitionists, educators, missionaries, planters, politicians, and free children of color envisioned the status of African Americans after emancipation.”
-Steven Mintz,University of Houston
Review
“A nuanced and multilayered narrative illuminating the key role African American children played in the fight to end slavery and in the struggle to survive during Reconstruction.”
“An engaging and informative history of the Reconstruction era.”
“Mary Niall Mitchell achieves a singular feat, setting herself apart from other historians of childhood.”
“Like the best writing on the history of children, Raising Freedom’s Child uses children and youth to suggest new paradigms for thinking about the past and for getting at the ways in which historical actors thought about the present….Mitchell has succeeded in making original contributions to several fields..”
“Mitchell’s sophisticated, nuanced reading of a wealth of previously untapped documents and period photographs casts a dazzling, fresh light on the way that abolitionists, educators, missionaries, planters, politicians, and free children of color envisioned the status of African Americans after emancipation.”
Review
“By complicating current representations of Latino/a lives and communities, this groundbreaking work provides a more global, transnational and fluid understanding of barrios both as physical spaces and as metaphors. A smart and engaging intervention on some of the most critical questions surrounding Latinos' citizenship, sexuality, activism and cultural politics.”
-Arlene Dávila,author of Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race
Review
“This interdisciplinary collection contests Latinos' problematic hypervisibility by exploring their expressions of agency related to citizenship and nationalism, gender and sexuality, and community activism in multiple sites. The fascinating case studies illuminate how Latinas and Latinos of diverse origins negotiate complex local and transnational power relations.”-Patricia Zavella,University of California, Santa Cruz
Review
"Raising Freedom's Child provides an exceptional analysis of the centrality of African American children to the major historical debates of Reconstruction...Mitchell effectively connects the nation's failures to integrate public schools, to invalidate the apprenticeship system, and to acknowledge black parental authority to the dimming of Reconstruction's birght promises and to the coming of the sobering years of Jim Crow."-Allyson Hobbs,Journal of American Ethnic History
Synopsis
View the Table of Contents
Read the Introduction
aMitchell's sophisticated, nuanced reading of a wealth of previously untapped documents and period photographs casts a dazzling fresh light on the way that abolitionists, educators, missionaries, planters, politicians, and free children of color envisioned the status of African Americans after emancipation.a
--Steven Mintz, University of Houston
aRaising Freedomas Child demonstrates the importance of childhood studies for understanding the nationas political, economic, and social history. In this carefully researched book, Mitchell keeps the black child at the center of the struggle to define freedom in the aftermath of Civil War and emancipation.a
--Marie Jenkins Schwartz, University of Rhode Island
The end of slavery in the United States inspired conflicting visions of the future for all Americans in the nineteenth century, black and white, slave and free. The black child became a figure upon which people projected their hopes and fears about slaveryas abolition. As a member of the first generation of African Americans raised in freedom, the black child--freedomas child--offered up the possibility that blacks might soon enjoy the same privileges as whites: landownership, equality, autonomy. Yet for most white southerners, this vision was unwelcome, even frightening. Many northerners, too, expressed doubts about the consequences of abolition for the nation and its identity as a awhitea republic.
Synopsis
Freighted with meaning, “el barrio” is both place and metaphor for Latino populations in the United States. Though it has symbolized both marginalization and robust and empowered communities, the construct of el barrio has often reproduced static understandings of Latino life; they fail to account for recent demographic shifts in urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, and in areas outside of these historic communities.
Beyond El Barrio features new scholarship that critically interrogates how Latinos are portrayed in media, public policy and popular culture, as well as the material conditions in which different Latina/o groups build meaningful communities both within and across national affiliations. Drawing from history, media studies, cultural studies, and anthropology, the contributors illustrate how despite the hypervisibility of Latinos and Latin American immigrants in recent political debates and popular culture, the daily lives of America's new “majority minority” remain largely invisible and mischaracterized.
Taken together, these essays provide analyses that not only defy stubborn stereotypes, but also present novel narratives of Latina/o communities that do not fit within recognizable categories. In this way, this book helps us to move “beyond el barrio”: beyond stereotype and stigmatizing tropes, as well as nostalgic and uncritical portraits of complex and heterogeneous range of Latina/o lives.
About the Author
Gina M. Pérez is associate professor in the Comparative American Studies program at Oberlin College. She is the author of
The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families. Frank A. Guridy is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow.
Adrian Burgos, Jr., is an associate professor of US Latino history at the University of Illinois. He is the author of Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line.