Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All

How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger's radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the jubilee, using fresh sources and texts to build on the leading historical accounts of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Reinstating ex-slaves' own "freedom dreams" in constructing these histories, Roediger creates a masterful account of the emancipation and its ramifications on a whole host of day-to-day concerns for Whites and Blacks alike, such as property relations, gender roles, and labor.

About the Author :
David Roediger is Kendrick Babcock Chair of History at the University of Illinois. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.

Review :
Seizing Freedom persuasively documents the self-emancipation of the enslaved Black folk of the American South. A meticulously researched book, it offers close readings of verbal and visual texts, unfailingly attentive to issues of race, gender, and labor coming together and falling apart. It brilliantly brings together disability studies, race in the Civil War, and the disappearance of the gold standard. A worthy supplement to Du Bois'sBlack Reconstruction. This sparkling book does more than merely restore and underscore the agency of bold worker-slaves in attempts to make the US democratic and free. It aims artfully at the underlying mechanisms of revolutionary transformation: imagination and solidarity, time, labor and the human body, gender, class and race. In Roediger's hands, these are neither dry nor overly abstract categories. The insurgent history of abolition gets resuscitated and used vividly to address a host of stalled contemporary debates and ossified styles of thought. Sweeping in its scope and filled with brilliant and original insights, this book reminds us of how little still is our appreciation both for what slaves accomplished between 1860 and 1865 and how beholden the national labor movement and the woman suffrage campaigns were to the 'general strike' they won...Evocative and inspiring, Seizing Freedom represents a landmark study by one of the foremost scholars of the history of race and labor in our time that will fundamentally challenge the way we understand the moral and practical power of emancipation. Seizing Freedom, David Roediger's spellbinding account of black self-emancipation and the array of movements accelerated by this 'general strike of the slaves' as DuBois put it, reminds us that it is never too late to take up the democratic promise of Radical Reconstruction. In insisting that the emancipation of the slaves has continuing relevance to the human quest for freedom, Roediger invites us to engage in the on-going conversation between past(s) and present(s) that inform all emancipatory struggles. Roediger suggests that we might learn from this period as we observe similar moments of convergence rise and fall...decidedly scholarly in its tone and careful positioning of its assertions. In resurrecting Du Bois' insight, Roediger supplies a useful corrective to overly simplistic, top-down emancipation narratives. Where this book works best is in 'telling a good set of stories usually kept apart' and illustrating how freedom struggles can succeed, as well as how they fail.