Opis: The Power to Die - Terri Snyder

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 people-traders, plantation owners, and, most importantly, enslaved men and women themselves-view and understand these deaths, and how did they affect understandings of the institution of slavery then and now? Snyder draws on ships' logs, surgeons' journals, judicial and legislative records, newspaper accounts, abolitionist propaganda and slave narratives, and many other sources to build a grim picture of slavery'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. "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. Snyder s ingenious analysis exposes the ways in which slave suicide reflected the duality of slaves as both people and property. --David Silkenat "author of Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina ""

Szczegóły: The Power to Die - Terri Snyder

Tytuł: The Power to Die
Autor: Terri Snyder
Wydawnictwo: Chicago University Press
ISBN: 9780226280561
Rok wydania: 2015
Ilość stron: 256
Oprawa: Twarda
Waga: 0.52 kg

Recenzje: The Power to Die - Terri Snyder