William G. Thomas
A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War
A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War
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- More about A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War
The longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history is the subject of William Thomas' book, A Question of Freedom, which won the Mark Lynton Prize in History. It recounts the story of enslaved families in Prince Georges County, Maryland, who filed hundreds of suits for their freedom between 1787 and 1861, challenging the legitimacy of slavery in American law and putting it on trial in the nation's capital. The book explores the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.
Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 432 pages
Publication date: 01 February 2022
Publisher: Yale University Press
Winner of the Mark Lynton Prize in History—the story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history
A rich, roiling history that Thomas recounts with eloquence and skill. . . . The very existence of freedom suits assumed that slavery could only be circumscribed and local; what Thomas shows in his illuminating book is how this view was eventually turned upside down in decisions like Dred Scott.
Freedom was local, Thomas writes. Slavery was national. —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
Gripping. . . . Profound and prodigiously researched. —Alison L. LaCroix, Washington Post
For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince Georges County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation's capital.
Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown.
A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.
Weight: 540g
Dimension: 157 x 235 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780300261509
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