This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recentres our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did it mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Some of the essays disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation.

David W. Blight (Editor)
DAVID W. BLIGHT is a professor of history at Yale University, the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, and the author of several books, most recently, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.

Jim Downs (Editor)
JIM DOWNS is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America.