Raising Freedom's Child is February eBook of the Month
DUBLIN, Ohio, USA, January 30, 2009—In celebration of African-American History month, NYU Press and NetLibrary are pleased to announce that
Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery will be available as the February eBook of the Month.
The end of slavery in the United States inspired conflicting visions of the future for all Americans in the nineteenth century, black and white, slave and free. In Raising Freedom's Child, author Mary Niall Mitchell demonstrates how the black child became a figure upon which people projected their hopes and fears about slavery’s abolition. As a member of the first generation of African Americans raised in freedom, the black child—freedom’s child—offered up the possibility that blacks might soon enjoy the same privileges as whites: landownership, equality, autonomy. Yet for most white southerners, this vision was unwelcome, even frightening. Many northerners, too, expressed doubts about the consequences of abolition for the nation and its identity as a white republic.
From the 1850s and the Civil War to emancipation and the official end of Reconstruction in 1877, Raising Freedom’s Child examines slave emancipation and opposition to it as a far-reaching, national event with profound social, political, and cultural consequences. Mitchell analyzes multiple views of the black child—in letters, photographs, newspapers, novels, and court cases—to demonstrate how Americans contested and defended slavery and its abolition.
With each chapter, Mitchell narrates an episode in the lives of freedom’s children, from debates over their education and labor to the future of racial classification and American citizenship. Raising Freedom’s Child illustrates how intensely the image of the black child captured the imaginations of many Americans during the upheavals of the Civil War era. Through public struggles over the black child, Mitchell argues, Americans by turns challenged and reinforced the racial inequality fostered under slavery in the United States. Only with the triumph of segregation in public schools in 1877 did the black child lose her central role in the national debate over civil rights, a role she would not play again until the 1950s.
Provided through the generous support of NYU Press, Raising Freedom's Child will be available through more than 16,000 participating libraries February 1-28. To help libraries promote the February eBook of the Month, NetLibrary has developed a tool kit of free promotional resources that includes print-on-demand bookmarks, a sample press release and electronic support materials. More information is available at:
http://www.netlibrary.com/Librarian/ToolsAndResources/eBookOfTheMonth.aspx
About the Author
Mary Niall Mitchell is Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Orleans.
About NYU Press
NYU Press publishes approximately 100 new books each year, enjoys a backlist of over 2000 titles, and was described recently by the Chronicle of Higher Education as “a major player in academic publishing.” The Press distributes its books both domestically and internationally through its agents in Britain, Europe, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Australia, and Latin America. Learn more at: http://www.nyupress.org/about.php#History
About NetLibrary
OCLC NetLibrary provides content and technical delivery solutions to institutional libraries, corporations and government agencies that facilitate the purchase, management and distribution of research, reference, digital learning and general interest content via Web-based technologies. NetLibrary’s eContent solution is the most broadly adopted in the market, making more than 180,000 eBooks, 6,000 eJournals, 10,000 eAudiobooks, and 83 databases available through more than 16,000 libraries worldwide. For more information, visit www.oclc.org/netlibrary/.
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