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Every book within our collection is tagged with specific Subject Headings that describe what the book is about. Try one of the following Subject Headings to locate books about the history of the African American Family:
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 by
An exhaustively researched history of black families in America from the days of slavery until just after the Civil War.
The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation by
Wilma Dunaway contends that studies of the U.S. slave family are flawed by the neglect of small plantations and export zones and the exaggeration of slave agency. Using data on population trends and slave narratives, Dunaway identifies several profit-maximizing strategies that owners implemented to disrupt and endanger African-American families. These effective strategies include forced labor migrations, structural interference in marriages and childcare, sexual exploitation of women, shortfalls in provision of basic survival needs, and ecological risks. This book is unique in its examination of new threats to family persistence that emerged during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Families and Freedom by
Through the letters and testimony of freed slaves, this work tells the story of the remaking of the black family during the tumultuous years of the American Civil War era. Former slaves, free blacks and their contemporaries recount the elation accompanying the reunion of brothers and sisters separated for half a lifetime and the anguished realization that time lost could never be made up. There is also the satisfaction of legitimizing a marriage once denied by law and the unspeakable sadness of discovering that a long-lost spouse had remarried, the pride of establishing an independent household and the shame of not being able to protect it.
Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow by
The forces that shaped the institution of slavery in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after slavery was abolished. Toiling in sweltering Virginia tobacco factories or in the kitchens of white families in Chicago, black women felt a stultifying combination of racial discrimination and sexual prejudice. And yet, in their efforts to sustain family ties, they shared a common purpose with wives and mothers of all classes. In Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, historian Jacqueline Jones offers a powerful account of the changing role of black women, lending a voice to an unsung struggle from the depths of slavery to the ongoing fight for civil rights.
Stolen Childhood by
"More than simply a window into the world of younger slaves, StolenChildhood offers an informed and moving narrative that assists us in understandingthe people and the system that shaped many of the social patterns in Americanlife." -- Quarterly Black Review Booktalk "This powerfulbook should be read by everyone interested in understanding American character andculture at its most basic level. It is a significant contribution to the growingbody of international works on the history of childhood." -- PaedagogicaHistorica ..." evocative new study about children inslavery.... movingly written, carefully documented... King's provocative thesisconcerning the deliberate and long-lasting race- and caste-linked theft of childhoodin the antebellum United States should give us pause and encourage us to think moredeeply about the heritage of abuse and deprivation and its effects through manygenerations." -- Adele Logan Alexander, Washington Post BookWorld ..." the slaves' voices emerge strongly and oftenpoignantly... " -- New York Times Book Review "Withmoral authority and appreciation for the telling anecdote, Wilma King takes up theneglected story of black slave children in the American South." -- MaryWarner Marien, The Christian Science Monitor "This is aremarkably well researched volume." -- Journal of AmericanHistory "King's deeply researched, well-written, passionatestudy places children and young adults at center stage in the North American slaveexperience." -- Choice ..." King provides a jarringsnapshot of children living in bondage. This compellingly written work is atestament to the strength and resilience of the children and their parents, whotaught them necessary survival skills, self-respect, and love, despite nightmarishexistences." -- Booklist ..." King has here remapped oldand familiar terrain to lay out promising directions for fresh inquiry. Highlyrecommended... " -- Library Journal Wilma King sheds light ona tragic aspect of slavery in the United States -- the wretched lives of themillions of children enslaved in the nineteenth-century South. King follows theslave child's experience through work, play, education, socialization, resistance toslavery, and the transition to freedom.
Help Me to Find My People by
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade. Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.
Til Death or Distance Do Us Part by
Conventional wisdom tells us that marriage was illegal for African Americans during the antebellum era, and that if people married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is an impression that imbues beliefs about black families to this day. But it's a perception primarily based on documents produced by abolitionists, the state, or other partisans. It doesn't tell the whole story. Drawing on a trove of less well-known sources including family histories, folk stories, memoirs, sermons, and especially the fascinating writings from the Afro-Protestant Press, 'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part offers a radically different perspective on antebellum love and family life. Frances Smith Foster applies the knowledge she's developed over a lifetime of reading and thinking. Advocating both the potency of skepticism and the importance of story-telling, her book shows the way toward a more genuine, more affirmative understanding of African American romance, both then and now.