Shows that the law of freedom, not slavery, determined the way that race developed over time in three slave societies.

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim f

Becoming Free in the Cotton South challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the e

Louisiana state law was unique in allowing slaves to contract for their freedom and to initiate a lawsuit for liberty. Judith Kelleher Schafer describes the ing

Anthropologists widely agree that identities_even ethnic and racial ones_are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities