Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
Audiobook30 hours
The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition
Written by Manisha Sinha
Narrated by Allyson Johnson
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this audiobook
Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive new history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe.
Author
Manisha Sinha
Manisha Sinha is associate professor of Afro-American studies and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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Reviews for The Slave's Cause
Rating: 4.184210526315789 out of 5 stars
4/5
19 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5High quality, well-researched and beautifully written—academic history at its best written in a way anyone can understand
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I may not have been the right audience for this book dedicated to arguing that abolitionism wasn’t a white movement, but rather constantly influenced and guided by African-American voices, and otherwise more open to appeals to women’s rights and worker’s rights than it has sometimes been portrayed. (I'm not the right audience because I'm not embedded in that literature.) Sinha makes the case that self-emancipation—escape from slavery—produced some of the most influential voices on behalf of enslaved people. I also did learn this wonderful line from Frederick Douglass: “What O’Connell said of the history of Ireland may with greater truth be said of the negro’s. It may be ‘traced like a wounded man through a crowd, by the blood.’” (I hear Douglass is doing great things recently.)