Footnote:
In English
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web
Description:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- A Note on Currency and Orthography -- Introduction to the English-Language Edition -- Foreword to the Brazilian Edition -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- ONE Slaves and Masters on Sugar Plantations in the Last Decades of Slavery -- TWO Tension and Conflict on a Recôncavo Sugar Plantation -- THREE Crossroads of Slavery and Freedom, 1880-1888 -- FOUR May 13, 1888, and Its Immediate Aftermath -- FIVE Heads Spinning with Freedom -- SIX After Abolition: Tension and Conflict on Recôncavo Sugar Plantations -- SEVEN Trajectories of Slaves and Freed People on Recôncavo Sugar Plantations -- EIGHT Community and Family Life among Freed People -- NINE Other Post-emancipation Itineraries -- Epilogue In the Centuries to Come: Projections of Slavery and Freedom -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index
By 1870 the sugar plantations of the Recôncavo region in Bahia, Brazil, held at least seventy thousand slaves, making it one of the largest and most enduring slave societies in the Americas. In this new translation of Crossroads of Freedom-which won the 2011 Clarence H. Haring Prize for the Most Outstanding Book on Latin American History-Walter Fraga charts these slaves' daily lives and recounts their struggle to make a future for themselves following slavery's abolition in 1888. Through painstaking archival research, he illuminates the hopes, difficulties, opportunities, and setbacks of ex-slaves and plantation owners alike as they adjusted to their postabolition environment. Breaking new ground in Brazilian historiography, Fraga does not see an abrupt shift with slavery's abolition; rather, he describes a period of continuous change in which the strategies, customs, and identities that slaves built under slavery allowed them to navigate their newfound freedom. Fraga's analysis of how Recôncavo's residents came to define freedom and slavery more accurately describes this seminal period in Brazilian history, while clarifying how slavery and freedom are understood in the present