Freedom's Promise by Elizabeth Regosin
Emancipation and the citizenship that followed conferred upon former slaves the right to create family relationships that were sanctioned, recognized, and regulated by the laws that governed the families of all American citizens. Elizabeth Regosin explores what the acquisition of this legal familial status meant to former slaves, personally, socially, and politically. The Civil War pension system offers a fascinating source of documentation for this study of ex-slave families in transition from slavery to freedom. Because the provisions made to compensate eligible Union veterans and surviving family members created a vast bureaucracy - pension officials required and verified extensive proof of qualification - former slaves were obliged to reproduce and represent the inner workings of their familial relationships. Regosin reveals through both their personal histories and pension narratives how former slaves constructed identities as individuals and as family members while they negotiated the boundaries of ""family"" as defined by the pension system. The stories told by ex-slaves, their witnesses, and the government officials who played a role in the pension process all serve to provide us with a richer understanding of life for newly emancipated African Americans.
Regosin has produced a major contribution to the literature on the transition from slavery to freedom, using the pension records in an imaginative and intelligent fashion to explore how emancipation set in motion a struggle by former slaves to make their citizenship meaningful on a daily basis- Peter Bardaglio, Goucher College, author of Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South ""An important piece of scholarship, Freedom's Promise represents a closely argued and elegantly written examination of the Civil War pension process as experienced by African-American veterans and their families."" - Joseph P. Reidy, Howard University, author of From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South
Elizabeth Regosin is Assistant Professor of History at St. Lawrence University.
| SKU | Nicht verfügbar |
| ISBN 13 | 9780813920962 |
| ISBN 10 | 0813920965 |
| Titel | Freedom's Promise |
| Autor | Elizabeth Regosin |
| Buchzustand | Nicht verfügbar |
| Bindungsart | Paperback |
| Verlag | University of Virginia Press |
| Erscheinungsjahr | 2002-03-30 |
| Seitenanzahl | 256 |
| Hinweis auf dem Einband | Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden. |
| Hinweis | Nicht verfügbar |