Summary
Using New York State's Hudson Valley as a backdrop, this book provides a regional perspective on black identity from the colonial period to the present. Through racialized struggles and varying experiences of black residents, a black presence in the region has persisted. Factors such as religious structures and cosmologies, ethnicity, legal systems, economic patterns, class, gender, family structures, and leaders have uniquely influenced black identity.The religion-inspired metamorphosis of celebrated antebellum black resident Isabella Van Wagenen, later known as Sojourner Truth, illustrates how the abandonment of her slave identity and her refusal to call her new employer "master, " was a liberation for blacks -- a "mighty change." Moving from the colonial period to the present, this book underscores the mighty change in the identity of blacks in the region over nearly a four-hundred-year period -- from captive to slave, from slave to free, from northern-born to southern-influenced, from pre-industrial to post-industrial, from multi-ethnic to multi-national. Like Isabella, in her successful determination to reclaim her son who had been wrongfully forced into slavery, black people within the region have stood "tall within."
Author Biography
At Bard College, Myra B. Young Armstead is Professor of History, Co-Chair of the American Studies Program, and Chair of the Multiethnic Studies Program
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments |
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ix | |
Introduction: Conceptualizing Black Identity in the Hudson Valley |
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1 | (12) |
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The Emergence of a New Black Religious Identity in New York City and Eastern New Jersey, 1624--1807 |
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13 | (28) |
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``Living in a Material World'': African Americans and Economic Identity in Colonial Albany |
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41 | (17) |
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Laboring for Freedom in Dutchess County |
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58 | (22) |
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A Geography of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum Ulster County and New York City: Isabella Van Wagenen and Her Family |
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80 | (15) |
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The Kinship System in The Hills, An African American Community in Westchester, New York, in the Mid-Nineteenth Century |
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95 | (26) |
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The Rise and Fall of Skunk Hollow |
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121 | (15) |
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136 | (27) |
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Black Neighborhood Formation in Poughkeepsie during the Great Migration, 1950--1970 |
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163 | (12) |
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Race and Class Politics in a Black Middle-Class Suburb |
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175 | (15) |
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Representations of Racial Identity in a Contemporary Pinkster Celebration |
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190 | (20) |
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Spaces, Places, and Fields: The Politics of West African Trading in New York City's Informal Economy |
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210 | (22) |
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Something in Between: Locating Identity among Second-Generation West Indians in New York City |
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232 | (31) |
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Sherri-Ann P. Butterfield |
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Appendix: The Black Presence in the Hudson River Valley, 1790 to 2000: A Demographic Overview |
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263 | (18) |
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Contributors |
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281 | (4) |
Index |
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285 | |