The claims of kinfolk : African American property and community in the nineteenth-century South /

Historians long have known that African American slaves acquired property through an "informal" economy, and that such possessions carried both material and symbolic meaning to the freedpeople upon their emancipation. Penningroth (Northwestern Univ.), however, is the first scholar to examine the meaning of slave property accumulation and post-emancipation claims for property within the framework of black families and communities. He draws on comparative perspectives from African history and anthropology by employing records of the Southern Claims Commission, court records from the West African city-states of Fante (modern Ghana), and federal and state records in the US, and by utilizing various fugitive slave narratives, travelers' accounts, memoirs of former masters, and archaeologists' reports. Penningroth concludes that while postbellum whites defined property in legal and capitalist terms, ex-slaves often interpreted property through extralegal practices and complex kinship and social networks. Just as the freedpeople struggled against their former masters over contested property, they argued vehemently among themselves over issues of property and labor. Emancipation for both Fantes and African Americans provided new opportunities to acquire property and reestablish and expand family networks, and to struggle over the broad meaning of kinship. For university collections. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. D. Smith North Carolina State University