Freedmen and Southern Society Project

FAIN: RQ-50851-14

University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
Leslie S. Rowland (Project Director: January 2014 to present)

Preparation for publication of Volume 7, Law and Justice, and editorial work on Volume 8, on family and kinship, for the anticipated nine-volume series, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. (24 months)

The Freedmen and Southern Society Project is editing Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, a nine-volume documentary history of the transition from slavery to freedom in the U.S. South. The edition documents a critical juncture in American history: the moment four million slaves gained their freedom. It constitutes a social history in the words of emancipated slaves and their contemporaries. Six of the nine volumes have been published, and the seventh will be submitted to the press at the beginning of the proposed grant period. Each volume of FREEDOM is between 800 and 1,100 pages long, twice the size of the volumes in most editions. The editors have published four additional volumes for general audiences and use in the classroom, as well as several article-length collections of documents. The project's web site provides both documents (transcribed and annotated) and other interpretive material; it has been designated one of the best sites for humanities education.

Associated Products

Freedom and Southern Society Project (Web Resource)
Title: Freedom and Southern Society Project
Author: Leslie Rowland
Abstract: No event in American history matches the drama of emancipation. More than a century later, it continues to stir the deepest emotions, and properly so. In the United States, emancipation accompanied the defeat of the world's most powerful slaveholding class and freed a larger number of slaves than did the end of slavery in all other New World societies combined. Clothed in the rhetoric of biblical prophecy and national destiny and born of a bloody civil war, it accomplished a profound social revolution. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project was established in 1976 to capture the essence of that revolution by depicting the drama of emancipation in the words of the participants: liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and the elite, Northerners and Southerners
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.freedmen.umd.edu

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