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Slavery, Emancipation, and Class Formation in Colonial and Early National New York City
Leslie Harris
Journal of Urban History (2004) 30, p. 339 (16 pages)

In this article, Leslie Harris gives us insight into conditions of slavery and its aftermath in an area we don't typically associate with slavery – New York City. She presents the connections between the slave system and its dissolution and how classes were formed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

200 Years of Forgetting: Hushing up the Haitian Revolution
Thomas Reinhardt
Journal of Black Studies (2005) 35, p. 246 (8 pages)

Thomas Reinhardt discusses the slave-led revolution in Haiti, and explores why this significant historical event is often left out of Western History.

Long Ago and Far Away: How US Newspapers Construct Racial Oppression
Hemant Shah & Seungahn Nah
Journalism (2004) 5, p. 259 (17 pages)

In this article, the authors look at U. S. newspapers' coverage of racial oppression. They see that often it is presented as "long ago and far away," rather than something real, current, and active in U. S. society.

Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery
James Farr
Political Theory 2008 36: 495 (29 pages)

This article first serves as an historical overview of theory making about slavery, and second takes on the theoretical construct of new world slavery as proposed by sociopolitical philosopher John Locke.  Long standing controversy over Locke’s work has focused on the questions of whether Locke intended to justify new world slavery and his role in it, or was his theorizing limited to a natural law theory that explained and justified slavery as a consequence of just war.

Darwin's progress and the problem of slavery
James Moore
Progress in Human Geography 2010 34: 555 (29 pages)

The author addresses Charles Darwin’s possible response “ at three critical moments, in 1838, in 1854 and during the US Civil War in the 1860s, to the greatest moral challenge of his age, the urgent agonizing problem of black chattel slavery” (557).  Illustrating Darwin’s abolitionist beliefs through an examination of his theory of evolution, Moore adroitly reveals that Darwin’s theorizing was both a product of that particular social moment, and of his own moral understandings of the world, grounded in a belief in “a Creator-God, in mechanical laws of nature, in real historical time and in the common descent or ‘brotherhood’ of the human races” (558).

Disposing of Human Property: American Slave Families and Forced Separation in Comparative Perspective
Damian Alan Pargas
Journal of Family History 2009 34: 251 (25 pages)

This article addresses one of the foundational issues for African American families during the period of American slavery: “the dismemberment of slave families that was often the result of their being forcibly and arbitrarily separated by their owners” (252).  The author examines records from two separate communities in the antebellum South, one in northern Virginia and one in southern Louisiana, to support his argument that time and place mattered in the way slave families were treated because the threat of forced separation varied for families living in different communities.

Neither Slave nor Free: The Ideology of Capitalism and the Failure of Radical Reform in the American South
Shirley A. Hollis
Critical Sociology 2009 35: 9 (20 pages)

This article looks at the conditions under which Blacks experienced the “freedoms” of Emancipation in the American South.  Despite being promised “40 acres and a mule,” most freedmen were turned out with little or no possessions, and no prospects to secure either income or land other than sharecropping or moving North.  Hollis argues that “structures of inequality deeply embedded in Southern colonial and post-colonial relations with Europe continued after the Civil War to block changes that would have given access to resources and development opportunities to large sectors of the population, particularly the freed slaves” (11).  She goes on to demonstrate that, rather than being strategies localized to the American South, these forces must best be understood within the ideologies that ground Western capitalism in general.  Rather than granting freedom to slaves as a basic human right, the ultimate aim of Emancipation in the American South was “the diversification of Southern capitalism and the construction of a labor force that was a favorable alternative to slavery” (24).