- Description
- 241 pages : illustrations, portraits, charts; 23 cm.
- Summary
- "In Black Elders, Frederick C. Knight explores the experiences of African Americans with aging and in old age during the eras of slavery and emancipation. Though slavery put a premium on young labor, elders worked as caregivers, domestics, cooks, or midwives and performed other tasks in the margins of Southern and Northern economies. Looking at black families, churches, mutual aid societies, and homes for the aged, Knight demonstrates the pivotal role of elders in the history of African American community formation through Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, including slave narratives, plantation records, letters, diaries, meeting minutes, and state and federal archives, Knight also examines how blacks and whites, men and women, and the young and the old developed competing ideas about age and aging, differences that shaped social relations in coastal West and West Central Africa, the Atlantic and domestic slave trades, colonial and antebellum Southern slave societies, and emancipation in the North and South. Black Elders offers a unique window into the individual and collective lives of African Americans, the day-to-day struggles they waged around their experiences of aging, and how they drew upon these resources to define the meaning of family, community, and freedom"--
- Series Statement
- Early American studies
- Uniform Title
- Early American studies.
- Alternative Title
- Meaning of age in American slavery and freedom
- Subject
- Genre/Form
- History
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (pages [191]-229) and index.
- ISBN
- 9781512825664
- 1512825662
- 9781512825671 (canceled/invalid)
- LCCN
- 2023035271
- OCLC
- YBP 2023035271
- Author
Knight, Frederick C., author.
- Title
Black elders : the meaning of age in American slavery and freedom / Frederick C. Knight.
- Publisher
Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2024]
- Copyright Date
©2024
- Type of Content
text
- Type of Medium
unmediated
- Type of Carrier
volume
- Series
Early American studies
Early American studies.
- Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [191]-229) and index.
- Chronological Term
To 1877