Escape to the City
Regular price
€91.99
A01=Viola Franziska Muller
African American
African descent
Author_Viola Franziska Muller
black Americans
bondage
Category=JBSL
Category=NHB
Category=NHK
Chesapeake
cities
collective action
collective resistance
curfew
day laborer
disguise identity
docks
economic competition
economic integration
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
escape
European immigrants
exploitation
free status
freedom papers
geography of freedom
German
harbor
illegal migrants
illegal residents
illegality
Irish
jail
laundry
levee
Louisiana
lower class
manumission
Maryland
middle class
Mississippi
networks
penitentiary
police
poor
poor white
poverty
precarious
prison
prostitution
receiving community
receiving society
self-hire
sex work
slave badge
slave hire
slave pass
social control
South Carolina
steamboat
steamship
tobacco factories
unregistered
urban history
urban labor market
Virginia
wage labor
wage worker
washerwomen
workhouse
working class
Product details
- ISBN 9781469671055
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 04 Oct 2022
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Viola Franziska Muller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. While all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migrants, runaway slaves that sought refuge in the urban South were antebellum America's undocumented people, forging lives free from bondage but without the legal status of freedpeople. Spanning from the 1810s to the start of the Civil War, Muller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved African Americans in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities.
Viola Franziska Muller is a social historian at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany.
