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- Title
Bundles, Passes, and Stolen Watches: Interpreting the Role of Material Culture in Escape.
- Authors
Greer, Matthew C.
- Abstract
Throughout the history of slavery in the Americas, African Americans resisted their bondage by attempting to escape it, usually through running away. Advertisements placed in local newspapers in order to return these bondspeople to their owners have tremendously aided our ability to understand the African American past. While the conditions surrounding these enslaved runaways were often highly individualistic, several themes, such as the strategies used in escape, unify the stories of these "plantation rebels." A recent compiling of runaway slave advertisements from Mississippi identified 225 individual who materially equipped themselves with items ranging from spare clothes to travel passes while preparing for their escape. This article will interpret the strategies of mobility, physical survival, and social survival that escapees could utilize as a result of the objects that they took with them, and which can aid in our understanding of the experience of slave escape in the antebellum South.
- Subjects
MISSISSIPPI; SOUTHERN States; UNITED States; FUGITIVE slaves; HISTORY of enslaved persons; SLAVERY in the United States; HISTORY of material culture; STOLEN goods; SOCIAL networks; NEWSPAPER advertising; NINETEENTH century; HISTORY; SOCIAL history; HISTORY of slavery
- Publication
Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South, 2014, Vol 21, Issue 1, p87
- ISSN
0735-8342
- Publication type
Article