Freedom's Mirage (eBook)

Virgil Bennehan's Odyssey from Emancipation to Exile

Sydney Nathans (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
208 Seiten
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
9781469679075 (ISBN)

Infos

Freedoms Mirage traces the exceptional life of Virgil Bennehan, born in bondage in 1808 in Piedmont North Carolina, who rose to become an enslaved doctor on one of the Souths largest plantations and to view himself as a friend to Black and white people alike. Emancipated in 1848 but required to leave the state to be free, he was sent to Liberia. Though richly endowed and royally welcomed, he found himself subject to new rulers and mired in the worst medical catastrophe in Liberian history. Recrossing the Atlantic, he boldly returned to North Carolina to warn slave owners that Liberia was a death trap. Yet again exiled from his native state, he declared in March 1849 his intention to go to gold rush California, the one place at midcentury that seemed to offer an open field, even to a man of color.Intrepidly researched and grippingly told, Virgil Bennehans story reveals the complexity and fragility of human relationships within bondage. Once liberated, Bennehan led a tumultuous life that dramatized the fleeting promise and pervasive limits of Black freedom in the era of slaveryand foreshadowed the future for generations that followed.

Autor

Sydney Nathans is emeritus professor of history at Duke University.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.11.2024
• Reihe/Serie: Critical Indigeneities
• Zusatzinfo: 25 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
• Verlagsort: Chapel Hill
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 160 x 160 mm
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Regional- / Landesgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie
• Schlagworte: American Colonization Society • Black calls for voluntary emigration • “Black laws” in slave and free states • Blacks in gold-rush California • Colonization • Emancipation • emigration to Liberia • enslaved physician • free Blacks in Illinois • free Blacks in Ohio • “heroic medicine” • land clearing and malaria • Liberia to 1850 • malaria in Africa • mortality in Liberia • Moses Fleetwood (Fleet) Walker • Paul Cameron • plantation medical care • privileged bondsman • race relations in slave and free states • return migration from Liberia • Slavery in North Carolina • Stagville plantation of North Carolina • Thomas Bennehan • Virgil Bennehan—biography
• ISBN-13: 9781469679075 / 9781469679075