Freedom Has a Face : Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson's Virginia

Kirt von Daacke

ISBN 10: 081395360X / ISBN 13: 9780813953601

Editore: University Of Virginia Press Apr 2025, 2025

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Codice articolo 9780813953601

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Freedom Has a Face : Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson's Virginia
• Editore: University Of Virginia Press Apr 2025
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 081395360X
• ISBN 13: 9780813953601
• Rilegatura: Taschenbuch
• Condizione: Neu
• Dimensioni: 228 L x 153 A x 19 P (millimetri) 228 millimetri di larghezza per 153 millimetri di altezza per 19 millimetri di profondità
• Peso: 434 grammi

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

In his examination of a wide array of court papers from Albemarle County, a rural Virginia slaveholding community, Kirt von Daacke argues against the commonly held belief that southern whites saw free blacks only as a menace. Von Daacke reveals instead a more easygoing interracial social order in Albemarle County that existed for more than two generations after the Revolution—stretching to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond—despite fears engendered by Gabriel’s Rebellion and the Haitian Revolution.

Freedom Has a Face tells the stories of free blacks who worked hard to carve out comfortable spaces for existence. They were denied full freedom, but they were neither slaves without masters nor anomalies in a society that had room only for black slaves and free white citizens. A typical rural Piedmont county, Albemarle was not a racial utopia. Rather, it was a tight-knit community in which face-to-face interactions determined social status and reputation. A steep social hierarchy allowed substantial inequalities to persist, but it was nonetheless an intimately interracial society. Free African Americans who maintained personal connections with white neighbors and who participated openly in local society were perceived as far more than stereotypical dangerous blacks.

Based on his work building a cross-referenced database containing individual records for nearly five thousand documents, von Daacke reveals a detailed picture of daily life in Albemarle County. With this reinsertion of individual free blacks into the neighborhood, community, and county, he exposes a different, more complicated image of the lives of free people of color.

Informazioni sull?autore

Kirt von Daacke is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.