Slavery and the Law

Those specializing in African American genealogical research may be interested in the latest issue of the American Society for Legal History's Law and History Review, a special issue on "Law, Slavery, and Justice." Cambridge Journals Online provides access. Some publications on the site are freely available and some are behind a fee wall. The site allows short-term (48 hour) subscription access as well as full subscriptions for multiple publications. This issue of Law and History Review was freely available on November 15, 2011.

Here is the Table of Contents for Law and History Review, Volume 29, Issue 04:

• Law, Slavery, and Justice: A Special Issue, Introduction by David S. Tanenhaus
  
• Slavery and the Law in Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, and Justice by Rebecca J. Scott
  
• Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname by Natalie Zemon Davis
  
• Prosecuting Torture: The Strategic Ethics of Slavery in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue (Haiti) by Malick W. Ghachem
  
• Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York by Martha S. Jones
  
• Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution by Rebecca J. Scott
  
• Resetting the Legal History of Slavery: Divination, Torture, Poisoning, Murder, Revolution, Emancipation, and Re-enslavement by Walter Johnson
  

Even though you may not find an ancestor's name in these article, the background history is invaluable. Many of the hundreds of footnotes have links to Google Books and/or Google Scholar for easy access to preview text and reviews.

Thanks to Legal History Blog for alerting me to this issue. I love the way the Internet and blogs make cross-discipline studies so much easier than when we had to travel to university libraries to find specialized journals. But all of the recommendations make my "to buy or read" list grow endlessly and never get any smaller.

© 2011, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved

1860 Map of U.S. Slave States

The Map Room is one of my favorite blogs. Mapping American Slavery is a recent post with a link to a very detailed map of the American slave states showing slave and free populations and an article by Susan Schulten. Schulten states the map was even included in a portrait of Lincoln with his cabinet. The image of the portrait in her article is interactive—be sure to move your mouse over the image. I had not heard of Schulten before, but now her book The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002) is on my wish list.

This map (almost 30MB in size) can be extremely useful to genealogists and historians researching the southern states.

© 2010, Debbie Parker Wayne, All Rights Reserved