Description: This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did it mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Some of the essays disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation.
Brief description: DAVID W. BLIGHT is a professor of history at Yale University, the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, and the author of several books, most recently, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.
Review Quotes: An excellent collection of essays by leading scholars in the field who provide well-researched and nuanced portraits of emancipation and the historical context in which it functioned.--Karen Cook Bell "The Journal of African American History"