The Ragged Edge of Freedom explores the long shadow of slavery in the Lower Midwest. In the decades after the Civil War, elites in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois constantly raised the specter of "cheap" Black labor to divide workers, discipline markets, and gain political advantage. At the same time, powerful outsiders depicted the borderland as dirty and degraded, pathologizing the region's working poor through a rising capitalist ideology that linked a human's worth to their economic productivity. Desperate to maintain their precarious standing and avert the phantasma of "negro invasion," countless Lower Midwesterners envisioned a republic of "free white labor" predicated on the ruthless exclusion of Black "competition."
Yet, as Matthew Stanley demonstrates, racial division is only one part of this story, as class-based interracialism materialized in unlikely places and against impossible odds. In the heat of border-making and white supremacist violence, ordinary people challenged the free white labor consensus—through bottom-up struggle over shared material goals. From settler dispossession through the age of mass incarceration and deindustrialization, this absorbing book recounts dramatic and previously neglected clashes between workers and the formidable bastions of wealth and power. Stanley excavates the stories of abolitionists, freedpeople, agrarian populists, militant coal miners, and socialists, Black and white, who risked everything in defiance of the region's restrictive boundaries and its racial capitalist grip. Against a backdrop of blood-stained civil wars and riveting industrial battles in a pivotal yet often overlooked American region, The Ragged Edge of Freedom is a people's history—one of inspiration and urgency and complex resistance from below.
eBook - PDF
The Ragged Edge of Freedom
Race, Capitalism, and Class Struggle in Slavery’s Borderland
- 473 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
The Ragged Edge of Freedom
Race, Capitalism, and Class Struggle in Slavery’s Borderland
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Border Thinking
- Part I: Fortress Free Labor
- Part II: Dumping Ground
- Part III: The Ghost of Negro Competition
- Part IV: The Buffer Problem
- Part V: The Vanguard
- Part VI: Race Wars
- Epilogue: The Present State
- Notes
- Index
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Yes, you can access The Ragged Edge of Freedom by Matthew E. Stanley in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & African American History. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.