Word: slaving
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...British Were Coming was a reason for hope, celebration and action." On the eve of independence, as many as 20% of the rebellious colonies' 2.5 million people were African American. That figure rose to 40% in Virginia, the home of Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who were slave owners all. Then again, so was Lord Dunmore, the last Royal Governor of Virginia and the man who first made the offer of freedom for military service. Schama's book, nuanced, fair-minded and beautifully written, does not pretend that the British, who oversaw their own brutal slave economy...
Schama's subtle history is a webwork of characters: early American abolitionists like Washington's aide-de-camp John Laurens, determined slaves like the self-named "British Freedom" and scoundrels too numerous to mention. His heroes include antislavery pamphleteer Granville Sharp, who subsidized a pivotal English court case on behalf of an American slave who escaped from his master while visiting England...
...abolitionist firebrand like Sharp. But he too had reason to know that blacks were human. His nephew had fathered a child by a black woman. The child, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, lived with Mansfield and his wife. When war came, his much discussed decision in favor of the slave was taken by African Americans as another incentive to wish Britain well...
...enough writing lately to know how [they’ve] influenced me. I can say that we’re reading a book—“Stedman’s Surinam”—and a lot of the descriptions of the treatment of the slaves in this book are very moving, and it’s very likely that that could result in a song that’s an observation of the slave-master relationship...
...Father and Son.” Do you know it? He sings two different characters: in the low octave, he sings the voice of the father, and then he jumps up an octave and sings the voice of the son. So, I could do that same thing with the slave and master...