Bøger af Jeff Forret

A prizewinning historian uncovers the first instances of reparations in America--ironically, though perhaps not surprisingly, paid to slaveholders, not former slaves"A spectacular achievement of historical research. Forret shows for the first time just how far the American government went to secure reparations."--Robert Elder' author of Calhoun: American HereticIn 1831, the American ship Comet, carrying 165 enslaved men, women, and children, crashed onto a coral reef near the shore of the Bahamas--then part of the British Empire--where slavery had been outlawed. Shortly afterwards, the Vice Admiralty Court in Nassau, over the outraged objections of the ship's owners, set the rescued captives free. American slave owners and the companies who insured the liberated human cargoes would spend years lobbying for reparations, not for the emancipated slaves, of course, but for the masters deprived of their human property.In a work of profoundly relevant research and storytelling, historian and Bancroft Award finalist Jeff Forret uncovers how the Comet--as well as similar episodes that unfolded over the antebellum era--resulted in the first direct slavery reparations payments made by the U.S. government, establishing a precedent that has never been fully explored. The Price They Paid shows how, unlike their former owners and insurers, neither the survivors of the Comet and other vessels, nor their descendants, have ever received reparations for the price they paid in their lives, labor, and suffering during slavery.Any accounting of reparations today requires a fuller understanding of how the debts of slavery have been paid, and to whom. The Price They Paid represents a major step forward in that effort.

In the first-ever comprehensive analysis of violence between slaves in the antebellum South, Jeff Forret challenges persistent notions of slave communities as sites of unwavering harmony and solidarity.

Covering a broad geographic scope from Virginia to South Carolina between 1820 and 1860, Jeff Forret scrutinizes relations among rural poor whites and slaves, a subject previously unexplored and under-reported. Forret's findings challenge historians' long-held assumption that mutual violence and animosity characterized the two groups' interactions.

Examines numerous controversies related to the history of slavery, including slavery and the American Revolution, the Constitution and Bible as pro- or antislavery documents, the transatlantic slave trade, colonization of free blacks, abolition, slave resistance and uprisings, slavery and western expansion, and whether escaping slaves should be accepted by Union forces during the Civil War.