| Description |
1 online resource (xix, 380 pages) : illustrations, maps |
| Contents |
Part I. Captured and caged : and still they built new worlds -- 1. Black bodies : white minds, and the irony of liberty -- 2. Black hands : native lands, and the making of Mount Vernon -- 3. Black minds : blueprints, and the enslaved and free Black artisans of Federal City -- 4. Black builders : slave pens, and the construction of the national seat of government -- 5. Black laborers : prophetic abolitionists, and iconic institutions in the nation's capital -- Part II. Blessing the wings : a call for a national memorial -- 6. Black lives : co-opted memorials, and the paradox of not mattering -- 7. Black memory : Black market, and the transatlantic slave trade |
| Summary |
"Black Hands, White House documents and appraises the role enslaved women and men played in building the US, both its physical and its fiscal infrastructure. The book highlights the material commodities produced by enslaved communities during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These commodities--namely tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton, among others--enriched European and US economies; contributed to the material and monetary wealth of the nation's founding fathers, other early European immigrants, and their descendants; and bolstered the wealth of present-day companies founded during the American slave era. Critical to this study are also examples of enslaved laborers' role in building Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Washington's Mount Vernon. Subsequently, their labor also constructed the nation's capital city, Federal City (later renamed Washington, DC), its seats of governance--the White House and US Capitol--and other federal sites and memorials. Given the enslaved community's contribution to the US, this work questions the absence of memorials on the National Mall that honor enslaved, Black-bodied people. Harrison argues that such monuments are necessary to redress the nation's historical disregard of Black people and America's role in their forced migration, violent subjugation, and free labor. The erection of monuments commissioned by the US government would publicly demonstrate the government's admission of the US's historical role in slavery and human-harm, and acknowledgment of the karmic debt owed to these first Black-bodied builders of America. Black Hands, White House appeals to those interested in exploring how nation-building and selective memory, American patriotism and hypocrisy, racial superiority and mythmaking are embedded in US origins and monuments, as well as in other memorials throughout the transatlantic European world. Such a study is necessary, as it adds significantly to the burgeoning and in-depth conversation on racial disparity, race relations, history-making, reparations, and monument erection and removal."--ProQuest website |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [325]-362) and index |
| Notes |
Description based on online resource; title from resource home page (ProQuest Ebook Central, viewed on October 13, 2021) |
| Subject |
Slavery -- United States -- History.
|
|
Slavery
|
|
United States
|
| Genre/Form |
History
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
1506474683 |
|
9781506474687 |
|
