Abstract
Slavery in what became the United States endured for more than 250 years. The European international slave trade to what became the US lasted for almost 200 years, and after it was legally abolished in 1808, the domestic trade in enslaved people (the so-called ‘interstate trade’) within the US continued for more than 55 years. During the international trade at least 800,000 Africans were kidnapped, transported, or landed in the US. From the 1770s to the 1860s, the ‘interstate trade’ involved the sale of more than 650,000 enslaved African Americans from the Upper South to the Lower South. Another 1.3 million were sold locally in the South. Ports from New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, to Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina thrived on the basis of this trade in humans (Eltis and Richardson, 2010). Political power and economic wealth across the South was largely based on ownership of enslaved property, and legal enforcement or support for slavery. Religious organizations and civic life were almost inextricable from slavery. The entire system was enforced with the power of the state.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Alderman, D. H. (2006) ‘Street Names as Memorial Arenas: The Reputational Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King Jr., in a Georgia County’ in R. C. Romano and L. Raiford (eds) The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press).
Autry, R. K. (2008) ‘Desegregating the Past: The Transformation of Public Imagination at South African and American Museums’ (Madison: PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison).
Blight, D. (2001) Race and Reunion. The Civil War in American History (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
Blight, D. (2002) Beyond the Battlefield. Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press).
Brundage, W. F. (ed.) (2000) Where These Memories Grow. History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press).
Brundage, W. F. (2005) The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
Bunch, L. G., III (2010) Call the Lost Dream Back. Essays on History, Race and Museums (Washington, DC: The AAM Press, American Association of Museums).
Clark, K. A. (2005) Defining Moments. African American Commemoration & Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
Craft, E. and W. Craft (1999) Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press).
Eichstedt, J. L. and S. Small (2002) Representations of Slavery. Race, Ideology and Southern Plantations Museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press).
Eltis, D. and D. Richardson (2010) Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Frankenberg, R. (1993) White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Glymph, T. (2003) ‘Liberty Dearly Bought: The Making of Civil War Memory in African American Communities in the South’ in C. M. Payne and A. Green Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism (New York: New York University Press).
Glymph, T. (2008) Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press).
Harrison, A. Y. (2008) ‘Reconstructing Somerset Place: Slavery, Memory and Historical Consciousness’ (Durham, NC: PhD Dissertation, Department of History, Duke University).
Horton, J. and L. Horton (eds) (2006) Slavery and Public Memory: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (New York: New Press).
Jones, J. (1986) Labour of Love, Labour of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books).
Katz, H. and M. Katz (1965) Museums USA: A History and Guide (New York: Doubleday & Company).
Lipsitz, G. (1998) The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press).
McElya, M. (2007) Clinging to Mammy. The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press).
Mills, G. B. (1977) The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press).
Modlin, E. A., Jr., D. H. Alderman and G. W. Gentry (2011) ‘Tour Guides as Creators of Empathy: The Role of Affective Inequality in Marginalizing the Enslaved at Plantation House Museums’, Tourist Studies, 11 (3), 3–19.
Nimako, K. and S. Small (2012) ‘Collective Memory of Slavery in Great Britain and The Netherlands’ in M. Schalkwijk and S. Small (ed.) New Perspectives on Slavery and Colonialism in the Caribbean (The Hague: Amrit Publishers).
Nimako, K. and G. Willemsen (2011) The Dutch Atlantic: Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (London: Pluto Press).
Romano, R. C. and L. Raiford (2006) The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press).
Savage, K. (1997) Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Small, S. (1997) ‘Contextualizing the Black Presence in British Museums: Representations, Resources and Response’ in E. H. Greenhill (ed.) Museums and Multiculturalism in Britain (Leicester: Leicester University Press).
Small, S. (2009) ‘Twenty First Century Antebellum Slave Cabins in Louisiana: Race, Public History, and National Identity’. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians, 26–29 March, Seattle, Washington.
Small, S. (2011a) ‘Multiple Methods in Research on 21st Century Plantation Museums and Slave Cabins in the South’ in J. H. Stanfield II (ed.) Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press).
Small, S. (2011b) ‘Slavery, Colonialism and the Transformation of Museum Representations in Great Britain: Old and New Circuits of Migration’, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, IX (4) (Fall), 27–38.
Small, S. (2012) ‘Still Back of the Big House: Slave Cabins and Slavery in Southern Heritage Tourism’, Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment, DOI: 10 .1080/14616688.2012.723042, 1–19.
Trouillot, M-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press).
Vlach, J. M. (1993) Back of the Big House; The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
Wilson, M. O. (2012) Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Yuhl, S. E. (2005) A Golden Haze of Memory. The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Stephen Small
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Small, S. (2015). Social Mobilization and the Public History of Slavery in the United States. In: Araújo, M., Maeso, S.R. (eds) Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292896_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292896_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45098-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-29289-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)