Review by Choice Review
Eschewing the iconography of emancipation, the nine essays in this volume from a 2013 conference offer "new ways" of understanding slavery's demise in the US: e.g., Lincoln's 1863 edict did not end slavery, but began freedom's long journey; emancipation impacted all Southerners, not just former slaves; the emancipation state continued its territorial expansion and conquest into the US West; emancipation remained contested terrain by radicals and liberals in the US and diasporic Africans in the Americas. The volume sits within an evolving historiography of "factors, contingencies, and individual efforts" shaping emancipation. Acknowledging this rich and vital scholarship on links between war and emancipation does raise questions about the novelty of the perspective. Missing are essays on lingering unfreedoms in the post-emancipation South, like convict leasing and racial violence, as well as a broader comparison of US emancipation with slavery's demise (or slow death) elsewhere in the 19th-century Atlantic world. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. --Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Howard University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
