Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
365 p., As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late 19th Century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Observes the people, places, legislation and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation.
Examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. Establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.