How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger’s radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the jubilee, using fresh sources and texts to build on the leading historical accounts of Emancipation and Reconstruction.
Reinstating ex-slaves’ own “freedom dreams” in constructing these histories, Roediger creates a masterful account of the emancipation and its ramifications on a whole host of day-to-day concerns for Whites and Blacks alike, such as property relations, gender roles, and labor.
“Roediger shows how this massive self-emancipation from below set in motion 'radiating impulses toward freedom,' promoting literacy for freedmen, a pursuit of family ties and a new sense of social motion...Slenderly packed scholarship conveying provocative ideas.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Seizing Freedom persuasively documents the self-emancipation of the enslaved Black folk of the American South. A meticulously researched book, unfailingly attentive to issues of race, gender, and labor. It brilliantly brings together disability studies, race in the Civil War, and the disappearance of the gold standard. A worthy supplement to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.” —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
“This sparkling book does more than merely restore and underscore the agency of bold worker-slaves in attempts to make the United States democratic and free. It aims artfully at the underlying mechanisms of revolutionary transformation: imagination, solidarity, time, labor, the human body, gender, class, and race. In Roediger’s hands, these are neither dry nor overly abstract categories. The insurgent history of abolition gets resuscitated and used vividly to address a host of stalled contemporary debates and ossified styles of thought.” —Paul Gilroy, King’s College London
“Sweeping in scope and filled with brilliant and original insights, this book reminds us of how little still is our appreciation both for what slaves accomplished between 1860 and 1865 and how beholden the national labor movement and the woman suffrage campaigns were to the ‘general strike’ they won. Evocative and inspiring, Seizing Freedom represents a landmark study by one of the foremost scholars of the history of race and labor.” —Thavolia Glymph, Duke University
“Roediger’s spellbinding account of black self-emancipation and the array of movements accelerated by this ‘general strike of the slaves’, as Du Bois put it, reminds us that it is never too late to take up the democratic promise of Radical Reconstruction.” —Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz
“In insisting that the emancipation of the slaves has continuing relevance to the human quest for freedom, Roediger invites us to engage in the on-going conversation between past(s) and present(s) that inform all emancipatory struggles.” —Peter Rachleff, East Side Freedom Library, St. Paul, MN
