Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness And Suffering During The Civil War And Reconstruction - Couverture souple

Downs, Jim

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0190218266 ISBN 13 : 9780190218263

Editeur : Oxford University Press, 2015

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

Sick from Freedom is a welcome corrective to the prevailing triumphalist view of emancipation, providing a much-needed perspective on its tragic epidemiological impact. (Peter McCandless, American Historical Review,)

One comes away from this book with no doubt that the path out of slavery was a minefield of death and disease that needs its proper acknowledgement in histories of reconstruction. (Journal of the History of Medicine)

An important challenge to our understanding of an event that scholars and laypeople alike have preferred to see as an uplifting story of newly liberated people vigorously claiming their long-denied rights. (The New York Times)

A major turning point in how we understand the African-American past, the nation's past, and their intertwining. (The Journal of Interdisciplinary History)

Based on extensive research, particularly in the Freedman's Bureau's Medical Division records, the book details the enormity of the public health crisis that afflicted freed people during and after the Civil War... This is revisionist history at its finest, and it deserves a wide audience. Highly recommended. (Choice)

Jim Downs' exceptional research has resulted in a major study... Highly recommended. (Civil War News)

Sick from Freedom is a welcome addition to the literature on the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, medicine, and public health... [T]hought-provoking. (The Journal of American History)

Sick from Freedom is beautifully written... The author dedicates this work to 'all those who were emancipated but never made it to freedom'. He honors their memories in this excellent and haunting book. (Arkansas Historical Quarterly)

As Jim Downs makes clear in this carefully documented work, the Union leadership, domestic and military, was wholly unprepared to deal with the breakdown of the system of slavery that followed the Union army with every foray into southern soil... One comes away from this book with no doubt that the path out of slavery was a minefield of death and disease that needs its proper acknowledgment in histories of reconstruction. (Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences)

A signal contribution to the vastly understudied question of freedpeople's health and a formidable challenge to the dominant analytical framework that has heretofore framed our understanding both of the transition from slavery to freedom in the American South and the meaning of death and dying in the era of the Civil War. It, quite simply, remaps a field. (Thavolia Glymph, Duke University)

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freedpeople. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Oxford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0190218266
• ISBN 13: 9780190218263
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 280