Publisher Description

This book addresses reconstruction-era struggles for civil rights and citizenship. Most studies of emancipation's consequences have focused on the South. Moving the discussion to the North, Leslie Schwalm enriches our understanding of the national impact of the transition from slavery to freedom. ""Emancipation's Diaspora"" follows the lives and experiences of thousands of men and women who liberated themselves from slavery, made their way to overwhelmingly white communities in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and worked to live in dignity as free women and men and as citizens.Schwalm explores the hotly contested politics of black enfranchisement as well as collisions over segregation, civil rights, and the more informal politics of race - including how slavery and emancipation would be remembered and commemorated. She examines how gender shaped the politics of race, and how gender relations were contested and negotiated within the black community. Based on extensive archival research, ""Emancipation's Diaspora"" shows how in churches and schools, in voting booths and Masonic temples, in bustling cities and rural crossroads, black and white Midwesterners - women and men - shaped the local and national consequences of emancipation.

Author Biography

LESLIE A. SCHWALM is associate professor of history, women's studies, and African American studies at the University of Iowa. She is author of A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina.

Review

This book's regional focus and its attention to gender and women's experiences make it a crucial contribution to an ongoing reevaluation of black history, racial politics, and sectional identity in the nineteenth-century North. . . . Schwalm deftly uses archival and published military records. . . . An invaluable entry in a growing body of scholarship on the impact of slavery and its legacies outside the South.--Civil War History Schwalm presents the history of the black diaspora into the Reconstruction Midwest with impressive skill, learning, and insight....practic[ing] cultural history skillfully without succumbing to the obtuse language often associated with it....Schwalm has expanded the traditional story of Reconstruction in new and exciting ways.--Journal of Social History Not since Leslie Harris's In the Shadow of Slavery (2003) has a historian examined the story of slavery, Civil War, and freedom above the Mason Dixon line with such productive results....Let us hope that Emancipation's Diaspora brings Reconstruction and its reverberations into the orbit of today's excitement around 'freedom North' scholarship." --Journal of American History Expand[s] our historical understanding of black migration and presence in the Midwest after the Civil War. . . . [The] diversity of sources . . . creates an especially rich base of evidence that tells the story of Iowa, but also of the region and the country as a whole. . . . An important book for all scholars of midwestern history.--Annals of Iowa Confirms US Reconstruction's national dimensions. . . . Recommended.--Choice Breadth and ingenuity in research, historiographical sophistication, and a lucid prose style make this study a major contribution.--American Historical Review An engaging, multi-faceted study of 'place' in the 'post-emancipation nation, ' Emancipation's Diaspora provides a window into the emerging national history of the transition from slavery to freedom.--The Journal of African American History An engaging analysis of a region that historians of race have neglected. . . . [An] important book.--Journal of Southern History A much needed addition to the growing historiography on emancipation and Reconstruction. . . . Innovative. . . . Persuasively demonstrates that historians would be remiss to ignore the consequences of emancipation and its subsequent diaspora in regions outside of the slave South--specifically, the Upper Midwest.--Indiana Magazine of History [Schwalm] has done historians of race, slavery, and Reconstruction a great service by locating her study in a veritable no-man's land [the Midwest]. . . . Impressive.--H-Net Reviews [A] remarkable book. . . . Relying on an impressive array of manuscript collections, newspapers, census data, diaries, letters, army records, and memoirs, Schwalm makes a case that is undeniable. . . . The book is especially strong in bringing into focus the lives of black women.--Minnesota History Emancipation's Diaspora successfully demolishes the insistence of some authors that emancipation really did not change anything, but it is also exquisitely sensitive to the very complicated nature of emancipation's impact on ideas about race in the United States. . . . It is impossible to finish this book and not see slavery, race, and emancipation as truly national questions whose repercussions continued to reverberate throughout the entire nineteenth century and beyond.--Journal of Illinois History Emancipation's Diaspora is ambitious and rewarding, making tangible the personal and political impact of slavery beyond the South and beyond 1865. . . . Although other historians have studied northern states during Reconstruction, none begins with the insight that they too faced emancipation. . . . Schwalm achieves a geographical and chronological reorientation through her remarkable rendering of the grief, joys, and longings of ordinary people.--Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Review Quote

This book's regional focus and its attention to gender and women's experiences make it a crucial contribution to an ongoing reevaluation of black history, racial politics, and sectional identity in the nineteenth-century North. . . . Schwalm deftly uses archival and published military records. . . . An invaluable entry in a growing body of scholarship on the impact of slavery and its legacies outside the South.-- Civil War History

Promotional "Headline"

" Emancipation's Diaspora explores blacks' experiences of Civil War and Reconstruction in the upper Midwest, a history that has received too little scholarly attention. Schwalm's story emerges in the voices of African Americans themselves, drawing on a broad range of archival sources, from memoirs to black newspapers. This is a terrific book that makes an important contribution to the historiographies of black Reconstruction and Midwestern slavery and emancipation."--Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky

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