A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in - download pdf or read online

From the inception of slavery as a pillar of the Atlantic global economic climate, either Europeans and Africans feared their mass extermination via the opposite in a race conflict. within the usa, says Kay Wright Lewis, this ingrained dread nourished a preoccupation with slave rebellions and might later aid gasoline the Civil conflict, thwart the goals of Reconstruction, justify Jim Crow, or even tell civil rights stream technique. And but, says Lewis, the historiography of slavery is all yet silent on extermination as a class of study. additionally, little of the present sparse scholarship interrogates the black point of view on extermination. A Curse upon the Nation addresses either one of those issues.

To clarify how this trust in an coming near near race warfare formed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American politics, tradition, and trade, Lewis examines quite a lot of texts together with letters, newspapers, pamphlets, go back and forth money owed, slave narratives, executive records, and abolitionist tracts. She foregrounds her readings within the lengthy checklist of exterminatory battle in Europe and its colonies, putting lopsided reprisals opposed to African slave revolts—or even rumors of revolts—in a continuum with previous brutal incursions opposed to the Irish, Scots, local americans, and different teams out of fashion with the empire. Lewis additionally indicates how extermination grew to become entwined with principles approximately race and freedom from early within the means of enslavement, making survival an enormous type of resistance for African peoples in America.

For African american citizens, enslaved and unfastened, the potential of one-sided violence used to be constantly current and deeply annoying. This groundbreaking learn reevaluates how extermination formed black knowing of the Atlantic slave alternate and the political, social, and fiscal worlds during which it thrived.