History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)

Book Description

Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources.

Customer Reviews:

Calculations are only as good as your numbers.......2007-08-03

Yes, we can all agree that mainstream history is nearly 100% BS due to politics, economics, ego, problems with dating techniques, and various conspiracies. Agreed. But, I've been researching the distinct possibility that human history (in terms of civilizations) are much more ancient than we've been told, so coming across this book was very interesting to me. I wondered how Fomenko could be wrong (if at all) because he is very persuasive in his presentations. Then it dawned on me. If at previous times in prehistory, due to the various catastrophies that are well documented (comets, asteroids, planetary disruptions, plasma discharge, pole reversals, etc) the Earth was in a different position in relation to the sun, different tilt on its axis, different orbit, different rotation (in terms of velocity and DIRECTION), and the continents were in different positions, then would this not cause the ancients to see the sky (constellations) differently? In other words, is Fomenko making erronious assumptions about the physics of the Earth in pre-history, which then corrupt his data with regards to dating the relevant astrology? The last event to seriously disrupt our planet occured roughly 3500 years ago, according to other good researchers, so is it possible Fomenko has been confused by this? The vastly different physics of our planet in the not so distant past may explain this confusion, which is not to say the "mainstream" version of history is correct; on the contrary. I am not an expert in these fields, but wanted to see if this idea could spark discussion.

Pants on fire?.......2007-07-19

Will people ever read before spamming? Yes, Jesuits could not rewrite world history alone, they had help. Anyway, Dr Prof Acad A.Fomenko does not point to jesuits as the driving force of world wide history manipulation in published volumes 1,2,3;, actually he barely mentions the poor devils. Check it with 'Search inside' feature, please. China is rarely mentioned either, in fact, Dr Fomenko is completely eurocentric. Right, his theory contradicts all mainstream schools of history, because in their actual state they are all built on blatantly erroneus chronology. You don't need a mysterious cabal (conspiracy) to falsify history, the falsification is its modus operandi. It is inherent to history(ians) to falsify (distort) events, as it is inherent to humans to boast as it is inherent to power (authority) to legimize itself by referrring to glorious past made to its own order. Dr Prof Fomenko and team have identified scores of instances of such manipulation in Russian, European, etc.. history, and delivered valid statistical proof thereof. His own 'reconstruction' is completely another story. Forget c14 as a valid method of dating. W.Libby has initially discovered a brilliant method of INDEPENDENT dating. Too bad, c14 method has become a joke after a forced marrige with dendrochronology with consensual chronological scale inbuilt. Radiocarbon method can't stand blind tests, but is so very productive as a rubberstamp.

Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed. .......2007-04-09

There is no doubt that history as most know it is a sham, & institution's version of History both University & Church is fradulent & inaccurate. Everything was established with an agenda, The real "Dark Ages" are now when we have access to incredible amounts of information past authorities & more important 'common folk' didn't have but our institutions & educators are slow to evolve because of what has ignorantly & arrogantly been taught for too long. This is on many subjects not just Chronology.

For anyone to question "Why would a Mathematician have anything credible to say of History?" The answer is from Dr. Fomenko's preface in the book: "It would be worthwhile to remind the reader that in the XVI-XVII century Chronology was considered to be a subdivision of Mathematics." These volumes could possibly be some of the most important works to date & should be read by everyone with an interest in History, especially professors & educators who have a duty to the public. I have read both books & must say that 'Chronology 1' has some very eye opening & revolutionary information. Even if these volumes are part true the implications are profound & opens the doors to further investigations & questions which must be done. I speak several different lanquages & must say the logic Dr. Fomenko uses with "inflection" of words & words being read from left to right in one region & right to left in another then written backwards, the removal of vowels & get down to basics of words, or different cities & locations having the same name etc. is correct. Vowel usage has always been optional & varied, actually complicating linquistics & study. The first thing one has to understand is that words never had a fixed spelling in history like we do now, the spelling of words was mutable & regional, as well as names & titles of people were vast, varied & changed, NOTHING WAS FIXED or understood linear. Matters of Life & Death as well as financial profiteering yesterday & today were & are made with ignorant, illogical & conspiratorial views of history & reality, it's time people get closer to the Truth & society collectively grow up.

Very Interesting.......2007-03-07

It is a good proposal and I believe it will mature into something even better in the future. I think it deserves to be read.

History as Science Fiction.......2007-01-10

Anatoly Fomenko has written a very intriguing book, full of pictures, charts, and computer 'proof' of his thesis: backwards of AD900 we don't really know what happened or when. Between AD900 and AD1600 there is more certainty, but there is still a lot of fuzzy ground, and things don't get reliable until we get past the 1600's where the printing press made it very difficult for the perpetrators of this timeline manipulation to change anything that had been committed to print. The Dark Ages did not happen. Books were burned for a reason. One organization has doubled the actual length of its existence by expanding the real chronology. Read why.

I had always wondered why Christ died about AD33 and yet men waited until the 11th century to form the Knights Templar, the Cathars, etc and go after the Holy Land by force. Why the 1000 year gap? Turns out there wasn't more than a 10-12 year gap and he proves it using astronomy. This also implies that the planet is not as old as we have been told, and current Christian and other creationist scientists are already championing that idea without being aware of Fomenko's book. The two groups, creationist scientists and the Russian mathematical analysts corroborate each other. Fascinating.

Of course, all this flies in the face of what we have been told traditionally is the 'proper' chronology of western civilization, and most readers will experience 'cognitive dissonance' in reading this book. It means that our history going backwards from AD1600 becomes progressively more incorrect and unreliable until it cannot be trusted at all... in the space of 700-800 years.

Naturally, the curious, open-minded reader will want to know WHO did this, WHY, and did any of the events we think of as really ancient ever happen?
Dr. Fomenko is a respected scientist/mathematician at Moscow State University who has already answered these questions to the satisfaction of his initially skeptical colleagues. Most of them are now believers, a few still refuse to believe (the usual diehards), and of course the western press has ignored Fomenko's work -- for obvious reasons when you read the book. The ones who perpetrated this chronology ruse have a lot to answer for. They are still with us. That's why this book is a well-kept secret.

I gave the book a 4-star rating because I was unable to check out some of his claims; those I checked were as he said. But if even 1/3 of his claims are true, this punches a big hole in what we think is our history, the meaning of western civilization, our educational process (for repeating the ruse as gospel), and the trustworthiness of the organization that perpetrated this ruse, well-intentioned or not.

This book relates to current research into a Young Earth paradigm, to John Keel's discoveries about our planet, and Fr Malachi Martin's insights (in his now out-of-print books). We are indeed sheep who are manipulated and kept ignorant -- for a reason. While knowing what these men have to say may be the "booby prize" (as in: 'what can you do with this knowledge?'), it will provide interesting reading. Didn't someone say: "...and the Truth will set you free."?? For you to judge if this book contains the truth.

Six Women's Slave Narratives (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers)

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Six womens slave narratives critique
Why not read 'The Slave Narratives' and get 2500, not 6
Completely moving, gain a deeper understanding of the past.

Six Women's Slave Narratives (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers)

Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0195060830

Book Description

Written by six black women, these stories embody most of the predominant themes and narrative forms found in African-American women's autobiographies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), the first female slave narrative from the Americas, recounts one woman's suffering and courage in the pursuit of freedom. The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866) not only tells of a quest for personal freedom, but also concludes with a family reunion in the North after the Civil War. The Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Coloured Woman (1863) blends the traditions of the slave narrative and the spiritual autobiography together in a tale of a ninety-seven-year-old ex-slave who becomes a preacher. Lucy A. Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom (c. 1891) records a former slave's life achievements in the quarter-century following the end of the Civil War. Kate Drumgoold, in A Slave Girl's Story, and Annie L. Burton, in Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days, also describe their successes in the postwar North while eulogizing black motherhood in the antebellum South. Each of these stories reveals the black woman's ability to recover in past oppression the hope for a better day.

Customer Reviews:

Six womens slave narratives critique.......2005-11-13

An overall good read, however, it was longer than it should have been. This book gave an insightful view of slavery through the eyes of six slaves and the people in their lives. At some points in the book I gasped at the thought of how these women were treated. I was intrigued to continue reading in some spots, but in others I chose to skip over entire paragraphs. I would recommend this book to anyone writing a paper on slaves and the cruelity in which they were treated, and also how slaves percieved themselves in the early 19th century.

Why not read 'The Slave Narratives' and get 2500, not 6.......2001-08-22

If you will read 'The Slave Narratives' you will get to read interviews with over 2500 former slaves who were still living in the mid-thirties, and also their views and feelings about life in the old South. Why limit yourself to just a handpicked 6 stories when there are 2500 out there? Hmmm?

Completely moving, gain a deeper understanding of the past........2000-04-25

Six Women's Slave Narritives is an absolute must for any historian or seeker of truth. You will cry and shivers will run down your spine as you feel the past rush through you with every turn of the page. This is a compilation of 19th century Black women writers in different situations. Interestingly, the typeface changes slightly throughout the book, imitating the possibility of time travel. Some of the women are educated, and some are simply expressive. The editors notes help clarify confusing issues and questions. If you are studying history, women, black history or slavery, you will be engrossed by this heartrenching and soul-moving collection of personal exposure. Be ready to cry, wince, and change your outlook on life.

Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military : Includes New United Nations Human Rights Report (Science and Human Rights Series, 1)

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Japan's other "forgotten" Holocaust
remembering the past is the only way to redemption
A shameful episode
I am sorry, but these claims are all invalidated.

Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military : Includes New United Nations Human Rights Report (Science and Human Rights Series, 1)

Manufacturer: Holmes & Meier Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0841914133

Book Description

During World War II, an estimated 200,000 girls and young women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese imperial military, which was authorized by the highest levels of Japan's wartime government. This system resulted in the largest, most methodical and most deadly mass rape of women in recorded history.

Japan's Kem pei tai political police and their collaborators tricked or abducted females as young as eleven years old and imprisoned them in military rape camps known as "comfort stations," situated throughout Asia. These "comfort women" were forced to service as many as fifty Japanese soldiers a day. They were often beaten, starved, and made to endure abortions or injections with sterilizing drugs. Only a few of the women survived, and those that did suffered permanent physical and emotional damage.

Little was known about the true scope of this crime against humanity until 1991, when after almost fifty years of silence, seventy-four-year-old Kim Hak-soon bravely told the world of her experiences as a comfort woman. Her testimony gave others the strength to tell their stories. The Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues (WCCW) carefully transcribed and translated the stories of nineteen survivors, which are now presented in this book.

These courageous women have shared their experiences to document a crime that must never be repeated. They seek a formal apology and reparation from Japan's government for the horrors it imposed on them. Thus far, that government has responded with gestures that many survivors regard as a new and more subtle form of the same degradation they have faced throughout their lives.

This is not simply a history book. COMFORT WOMEN SPEAK documents the lives of nineteen courageous women who continue to fight to bring to account one of the most powerful governments in the world.

Customer Reviews:

Japan's other "forgotten" Holocaust.......2007-08-03

Having lived in Japan for twenty-three years, I have seen too much
whitewashing and denial by the Japanese government whenever there's any
attempt by outside scholars or journalists to report on wartime atrocities
carried out by the Japanese Imperial Army against its former colonial or
imperial subjects. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe prevented Japan's national
television station NHK from broadcasting even a one-hour documentary about
the heinous comfort stations and Japan's brutal wartime system of sex
slavery and serial rape. The sex slaves were twice victimized. First by
Japanese soldiers in the field who looked upon these enslaved women and children as nothing more than "masturbation machines", the diseased or broken "machines" were taken out and disposed of with a gunshot to the head. After Japan's half-hearted surrender in l945, the thousands of
'liberated' sex slaves were victimized again by the total whitewashing or denial of these atrocities by postwar Japan. Shinzo Abe and his ilk are no better than those Europeans who deny the Holocaust when they deceitfully suggest that the women forced into Japan's wartime hell of sex slavery were just "common prostitutes", which I have heard in Japan a number of times. Abe is certainly just a very common politician, bought
and paid for. Part of the problem has also been America's Eurocentric
focus for far too long. The crimes against these former sex slaves were
all but ignored during the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in the late l940's.
Justice delayed is justice denied. Thankfully the U.S. House of Representatives saw fit to offer the last surviving sex slaves some measure of justice by passing the sex slave Congressional Resolution this
past week (Aug. 1st, 2007). The Resolution soundly condemns Japan's
wartime involvement in mass serial rape and sex slavery on a scale that
has never before been seen in the annals of mankind's inhumanity. The
Resolution states in no uncertain terms that Japan must make a very formal apology to the last surviving sex slaves for the suffering and
inhumane brutality inflicted upon them during the long war years (Japan
began invading Asia in l931!). And most importantly, the Resolution wants
Japan to include accurate accounts of the sex slave atrocities in the
nation's Ministry of Education high school history textbooks. High school students in Japan learn little or nothing about WWII, except
Hiroshima. This is by design. The government wants all Japanese to think
of themselves as victims of "white man's colonialism" and that Japan
fought WWII to "liberate" all of Asia from the yoke of western imperialism. Korea, China, the Philippines, Malayasia, Indonesia, and
even Vietnam are fed up with Japan's revisionist lies and self-serving
distortions. I am a former English teacher at Japan's elite Waseda University. Students at that school admitted to me that they never learn
about "greater East Asian War" because there is no time during the academic year to include such information on the university entrance exams! Japanese professors at both Tokyo University and Asia University
completely deny the Rape of Nanking as just communist Chinese propaganda.
Many Japanese prefer the revisionist version of WWII and feel that this
is the best way to deal with the past. The rest of Asia is fed up.
And many Americans too with such denials. The same Japanese leaders
who deny the atrocities at Nanking or the suffering of the sex slaves
enjoy paying homage to 14 Class A war criminals, including Tojo Hideki, at Tokyo's now infamous Yasukuni Shrine. Please read the
book "Comfort Women Speak". Just as survivors of the Holocaust have given
testimony to the world so that the world will know and never forget, so
we owe it to the victims of Japanese wartime racism and aggression to
never forget their "season in hell" either. Read also "Silence Broken:
the Korean Comfort Women". The euphemism "comfort woman" was introduced
by the Japanese to avoid dealing in an intellectually honest way with the
horrors of sex slavery, prison camps, and serial rape. Based on this sort of deceitful historiography, Auschwitz concentration camp was just a "holiday work camp".
The Japanese love to dissemble and lie about past atrocities. But the world is beginning to wake up to the truth. I wrote a letter to Sen.
Edward Kennedy in l987 to protest Japan's whitewashing of the sex slave
atrocities. Finally after twenty years the U.S. government responded.
Read "Comfort Women Speak" and find out why Mike Honda urged his fellow
Congressional representatives to pass the resolution. In time even the
Japanese might see the wisdom of such a resolution. Review by Naomi's husband, Robert McKinney.

remembering the past is the only way to redemption.......2004-02-09

This is a painful book to read. Everytime I heard the victims' voice I trembled. But the review from Hiromo is THE MOST shockingly inhumane voice/action since the end of the war - which according to her didn't kill millions, nor did it raped tens of thousands, angered a whole Asia and its people for the past half century. The more denial of the unthinkable crime, the longer it takes to forgive. I am the third generation of Japanese war victim and I am shooting a film about comfort woman, or the denial of it, right this moment. I don't want my grandchild to fight for the same justice 50 years later, and you may not want your grandchild to defend it as you did on all major Amazon Japanese war crime books, which by the way, thanks to you, now I know what books to get for my film research.

Shame for those of you who found all the denial reviews "useful", while considered all the praise ones "Not helpful". The other day at my library in San Francisco one of you people stole all my comfort women topic books but left the rest untouched. COMFORT WOMEN SPEAK is one of them. So for serious reader, definitely read this book and see what the "patriotic Japanese" are defending for/or scared of.

Another book to help you understand the issue in depth is YUKI TANAKA's Japan's Comfort Women. It tackles the US occupation and their own use of the "comfort station" system. Again, just like to deny that Atomic Bombing in Hiroshima ever happened, Japanese women never raped by Allies soldiers or the ordinary Japanese don't deserve peace, dignity and fairness would be unthinkable, to deny the value of voices from the last victims of the War is to deprieve the right to redemption of young Japanese generations to come.

This

A shameful episode.......2004-01-15

Stark and moving. The sheer numbers of women dragged into sex slavery, the extreme youth of many, and the brutality of their experience... That a handful of courageous women were allowed to tell their story is the first step to justice for the comfort women. It demands our attention.

I'm curious, what in Japanese society prompted them to establish such an "institution"? Even today, Japanese sex culture is problematic, to say the least, with its manga and Lolita fetish.

The sad thing is the American government has opposed the suit against Japan brought by some comfort women in the California courts, based on what it claims is the settlement of all claims in the 1951 treaty. I'll bet no Koreans and Filipinos were represented there.

The reviewer below should be ashamed at his atrocity denial. Elsewhere on Amazon he denies the Nanking incident. Civilized people would not tolerate such unreconstructed behavior from a German, and the same standard should apply to Japanese.

Contrary to Hiromi's assertions, the Japanese government apologized not to save Korean face, but its own. Imagine the national shame if this controversy kept appearing in the headlines, and Japan had to pay reparations. Ishihara is hardly a bleeding-heart liberal, if he was party to such concessions the truth must have been damning.

"They had picnic, sports-day, fun evening and diner [sic] party with Japanese soldiers"? This lame attempt at justification makes me ill. He doesn't refute the kidnapping, the 11-year-old sex slaves, nor the frequency of debasement these women faced.

"...there are unbelievable amount of propaganda spreaded by so-called anti-Japanese Japanese out there." So if a person questions the actions of his government, past or present, we should not believe him? I can see Hiromi would have made a good life during the fascist era. False patriotism - the last refuge of a scoundrel.

I am sorry, but these claims are all invalidated........2003-11-17

It is true that the Secretary-General of the Cabinet of Japan, Yohei Kono, admitted that there were evidences that show the Japanese Army kidnapped women to force them into "sex-slaves" and apologized to the ex-comfort women. Nevertheless, it is also true that, in fact, Kono had no evidences that substantiate the accusation and the ex-comfort women were never cross-examined. Later, the vice-Secretary-General, Nobuo Ishihara, admitted to a journalist that there was a "deal" between the South Korean government and the Japanese government to make the apology for saving South Korea's face so afterwards South Korean would never demand compensations as the government.
Many Japanese scholars and researchers on this issue examined the ex-comfort women's testimonies and concluded that none of them were reliable and substantiated.
Let us look into other testimonies made by comfort women and recorded by the U.S. force. Those women's photo is shown in this book at the page opposite of "contents".
They confided in those American soldiers that they lived comparatively "luxurious" lives thanks to the good money the Japanese soldiers paid for the "comfort" they provided. They had enough money to go to shopping in larger cities and the Japanese always gave them presents. They had picnic, sports-day, fun evening and diner party with Japanese soldiers. The Japanese Army tightly controlled traders who run the comfort stations so that the women would never be physically or financially abused.
This document is found in the book called "Documents of the Comfort Women" edited by Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a leading proponent of the accusation of kidnapping and forcing those women to the sex-slave state by the Japanese Army. On the contrary to the accusation, The women were paid three times more of average Japanese soldiers and some of them went home after working for a few years and built a big house. Most Japanese soldiers were always thankful to them. Some even married to the comfort women. However different those facts are from what you had believed, it is true and, actually, well documented.
Still, you may think the report of Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy to the United Nations in this book (p112) authentic, but it is based on those invalid testimonies and a sole testimony of an ex-Japanese soldier, Seiji Yoshida who claimed that he was working in woman hunt operations which was later debunked and he publicly admitted it was a lie. Another book Ms. Coomaraswamy relied on is G.Hicks's "Comfort Women" which had already debunked by many scholars and researchers. Furthermore, Ms. Coomaraswamy's academic consultant is above-mentioned Yoshiaki Yoshimi, who also debunked and admitted in a TV debate programme that he had no evidences at all. So, now you know even a Special Rapporteur for the United Nations is not free of prejudice.
I urge everyone who are interested in this issue to know that there are unbelievable amount of propaganda spreaded by so-called anti-Japanese Japanese out there. And works of scholars are no exception.

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Takes a while to get started
Chimamanda Adichie's comments on Unburnable
A Must Read
Not a Fluff Read!
Long Story Short

Unburnable: A Novel
Marie-elena John
Manufacturer: Amistad
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0060837578
Release Date: 2006-04-11

Book Description

In this riveting narrative of family, betrayal, vengeance, and murder, Lillian Baptiste is willed back to her island home of Dominica to finally settle her past. Haunted by scandal and secrets, Lillian left Dominica when she was fourteen after discovering she was the daughter of Iris, the half-crazy woman whose life was told of in chanté mas songs sung during Carnival: Matilda Swinging and Bottle of Coke; songs about a village on a mountaintop and bones and bodies; songs about flying masquerades and a man who dropped dead. Lillian knew the songs well. And now she knows these songs -- and thus the history -- belong to her. After twenty years away, Lillian returns to face the demons of her past, and with the help of Teddy, the man she refused to love, she will find a way to heal.

Set partly in contemporary Washington, D.C., and partly in post-World War II Dominica, Unburnable weaves together West Indian history, African culture, and American sensibilities. Richly textured and lushly rendered, Unburnable showcases a welcome and assured new voice.

Customer Reviews:

Takes a while to get started.......2007-09-07

I took a little while for me to get into this book. I, quite frankly, didn't care about Lillian the main character until I was almost a third of the way through. The most dimensional and complex characters were of course Matilda and Iris. Once the novel's focus shift primarily to them, it becomes a page turner. If you feel like investing the time to get to the heart of this tale, give it a read.

Chimamanda Adichie's comments on Unburnable.......2007-07-23

Chimamanda Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus: A Novel) had these wonderful things to say about UNBURNABLE in the book review section of London's Guardian newspaper on Saturday June 23, 2007:

"I read Marie-Elena John's novel Unburnable on the plane from New York to Copenhagen. I laughed aloud so often reading this wondrously intelligent book about Dominica and the United States and Africa, about gender, class and race, about love and sexuality, that the bespectacled man sitting next to me put his Wall Street Journal down and leaned over to see what the title was. He asked what it was about. I could have told him how it dealt honestly with issues without ever forgetting to keep character and soul as its centre, but instead I told him a tiny anecdote from the book about black women and thongs. And I much enjoyed his blush."

A Must Read.......2007-03-27

This is a great book to kick back in silence and just immerse yourself into suspense, deep thinking, and a few tears. I was just a little disappointed with the ending, but all in all this was a great read.

Not a Fluff Read!.......2007-01-14

I have been blessed enough in the last week to read not one but TWO great books this one being the greater. I will admit I wasn't wrapped up in the book by page two but by page ten I was all caught up in this story. Marie-Elena John is an EXCELLENT story teller. Her words are beautiful and her descriptions come off the page so effortlessly. I could've easily believed this was her third novel instead of her first. I laughed, I cried and I called all my friends and advised them to please read this book. I did not know anything about Dominica before picking up this novel and now I cannot learn enough. This book intrigued me to no end and I cannot wait to read future publishings from Marie-Elena John. This story is not in the least predictable and her knowledge on the subject matter is outstanding! If you are looking for a mind challenging novel that will shock and educate you at the same time then look no further.

Long Story Short.......2006-11-08

Interesting story, you have to continue to read this book and not stop or you might get side tracked if you put it down for too long.

Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies)

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Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies)
Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0313308381

Book Description

The neo-slave narrative is an important development in American literary history and has serious revisionist intentions at its foundation. This book examines how contemporary African American women writers have shaped the genre. These authors have written neo-slave narratives to reinscribe history from the perspective of the African American woman, most specifically the nineteenth century enslaved mother. The writers considered in this study--Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler--explore American slavery through the lens of gender, both to interrogate the myth that enslaved women, denied the privilege of having a gender identity by the institution of slavery, were in fact genderless, and to celebrate the acts of resistance which enabled enslaved women to mother in the fullest sense of the term. The volume begins with an overview of historical representations of slavery in America, from the slave narrative itself to the revisionist scholarship of the 1960s. The book then examines several individual neo-slave narratives, such as Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966), Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), Morrison's Beloved (1987), Cooper's Family (1991), Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Butler's Kindred (1979). What the women in these novels have in common is the fact that they mother; what the writers have in common is a tendency to utilize subversive strategies such as reversal, blurring, and the creation of myth to dramatize gender identity and to highlight the varied nature of motherhood as enslaved women experienced it. The final chapter evaluates the influence of the neo-slave narrative on American literature in general and on popular perceptions and misperceptions of African American women.

The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier

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Review of the Captor's Narrative

The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier
William Henry Foster
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Americas | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0801440599

Book Description

Between 1690 and 1760, close to two thousand New Englanders were taken captive by French Canadians and their Native American allies during five intercolonial wars. Puritan propagandists reacted by evoking the vulnerability of New England's homes and Protestant faith with images of captive women in sexual peril, a titillating vision only amplified in popular Victorian and modern portrayals of female captives as stock literary figures.

In The Captors' Narrative, William Henry Foster demonstrates that the majority of Anglo-American captives taken along the New England frontier were, in fact, men. Free French Canadian women (both secular and monastic) routinely became the men's captors and benefited from their labor when they were brought to New France. In testimonials written by returning male captives, Foster finds fascinating instances of protest and resistance against the female authority that Protestant New England deemed "illegitimate."

In the tales of Catholic women captors, Foster uncovers evidence that the control of male captive domestic labor expanded the public roles of the women in charge. The author painstakingly reconstructs the lived experience of both captors and captives to show that captivity was always intertwined with gender struggles. The Captors' Narrative provides a novel perspective on the struggles over female authority pervasive in the early modern Atlantic world.

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Colleague review.......2005-08-31

New England captivity narratives---accounts by those early Americans who had been captured by Indians or French raiders and later ransomed or escaped their captivity---have become recently popular among historians and literary studies scholars for the information they contain about gender. The prevailing image of the captive is that of a young woman. Several of these women remained with their captors despite the payment of ransom and the pressures of their families to return to America because they found in French Catholic Canada empowerment denied them in Puritan America. Despite the stereotype, Bill Foster has found that boys and men constituted more than 80% of those taken from 1675-1763. Bill's discovery and scholarship significantly and importantly opens up the gender discussion for early American history because these Puritan men found themselves working for and taking orders from French and former American Catholic women many of whom were quite young. This condition the men found shameful and degrading and only a handful became assimilated to the French Catholic culture. Those who returned frequently would not name their captor because of the shame of having been bossed by a woman. Bill's research in the archives in Canada and the U.S. sheds new light on these highly prejudiced male captivity narratives.

Review of the Captor's Narrative.......2003-06-11

As an amateur historian, I found this book a carefully considered and refreshingly factual historical evaluation of an important topic in early American History. The author, a sophisticated prose stylist, writes in a muscular style that carries the reader with ease through the narrative. His wry turn of phrase belies his deep understanding of the complexities of this time period. I heartily recommend this book.

Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (Bedford Cultural Editions)

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The Reality Hits Us ALL
rediscovered classic, gets the treatment it deserves

Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (Bedford Cultural Editions)
William Wells Brown
Manufacturer: Bedford/St. Martin's
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0312152655

Book Description

William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), the first novel written by an African American, was published in London while Brown was still legally regarded as "property" within the borders of the United States. The documents in this edition include excerpts from Brown's sources for the novel--fiction, political essays, sermons, and presidential proclamations; selections that illuminate the range of contemporary attitudes concerning race, slavery, and prejudice; and pieces that advocate various methods of resistance and reform.

Customer Reviews:

The Reality Hits Us ALL.......2001-07-25

This is a exemplary novel that also deals with the harsh realities of slavery. This novel distinctly tells a true story, which is relevant to ALL Americans (believe it or not. This is a must reader for ALL.

rediscovered classic, gets the treatment it deserves.......2001-02-21

This, reader, is an unvarnished narrative of one doomed by the laws of the Southern States to be a slave. It tells not only its own story of grief, but speaks of a thousand wrongs and woes beside, which never see the light; all the more bitter and dreadful, because no help can relieve, no sympathy can mitigate, and no hope can cheer. -William Wells Brown, Clotel, or The President's Daughter

Clotel would have historic interest simply by virtue of the fact that William Wells Brown appears to have been the first African American to write a novel. But it's not merely a literary curiosity; it is also an eminently readable and emotionally powerful, if forgivably melodramatic, portrait of the dehumanizing horrors of slave life in the Ante-bellum South. Brown, himself an escaped slave, tells the story of the slave Currer and her daughters, Clotel and Althesa, and of their attempts to escape from slavery. The central conceit of the story is that the unacknowledged father of the girls is Thomas Jefferson himself.

There is an immediacy to the stories here--of slave auctions, of families being torn apart, of card games where humans are wagered and lost, of sickly slaves being purchased for the express purpose of resale for medical experimentation upon their imminent deaths, of suicides and of many more indignities and brutalities--which no textbook can adequately convey. Though the characters tend too much to the archetypal, Brown does put a human face on this most repellent of American tragedies. He also makes extensive use (so extensive that he has been accused, it seems unfairly, of plagiarism) of actual sermons, lectures, political pamphlets, newspaper advertisements, and the like, to give the book something of a docudrama effect.

The Bedford Cultural Edition of the book, edited by Robert S. Levine, has extensive footnotes and a number of helpful essays on Brown and on the sources, even reproducing some of them verbatim. Overall, it gives the novel the kind of serious presentation and treatment which it deserves, but for obvious reasons has not received in the past. Brown's style is naturally a little bit dated and his passions are too distant for us to feel them immediately, but as you read the horrifying scenes of blacks being treated like chattel, you quickly come to share his moral outrage at this most shameful chapter in our history.

Book Description

"Fleischner offers intricate, multilayered readings of nineteenth-century women's writings about the institution of slavery. In treatments of autobiographical accounts by former slaves, Fleischner traces narrative paths of great personal loss and mourning for family, for home, for memory, and shows how these intriguing texts manifest their authors' negotations with identity and family, race and gender. Mastering Slaveryopens further the many difficult questions that women's texts about slavery raise concerning the relations of gender and race to social networks of power."
--Minrose C. Gwin, author of Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

"Mastering Slavery casts new light on the psychological dynamics of the slave narrative. Especially welcome is the way Jennifer Fleischner restores such writers as Elizabeth Keckley, Kate Drumgoold, and Julia A. J. Foote to their rightful place alongside Harriet Jacobs as founding mothers of a literary/historical/psychological tradition that reaches down to the present time."
--James Olney, Voorhies Professor of English, Louisiana State University

"Though Nathan Huggins, Nell Painter, Gerald Early, and Deborah McDowell have called for psychological readings of the slavery experience, Jennifer Fleischner is the first literary critic to fully engage with the literature of the peculiar institution in this way. In her readings of Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs and her little-known brother John, Elizabeth Keckley, Julia Foote, and Kate Drumgoold, Fleischner shows remarkable literary and psychological sensitivity that makes her novel interpretations compelling and at times moving. Mastering Slavery is an accomplishment of the first order."
--Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies

"Mastering Slavery is a stunning achievement, an instance in which a heretofore marginal literature is revealed in its astonishing complexity by a critical method not before applied to those very texts. The result is a study that will be heralded, I venture to say, both as one of the very best critical studies of African American literature and one of the best explorations of race and psychoanalysis. . . . Professor Fleischner is destined to emerge as a central figure in American literary studies, and in race and psychoanalytic studies."
--Henry Louis Gates Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Chair, Afro-American Studies Department, Harvard University

In Mastering Slavery, Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how the slave narratives--in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction--yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal. Her study exposes the impact of the entangled relations among master, mistress, slave adults and slave children on the sense of identity of individual slave narrators. She explores the ways in which our of the social, psychological, biological--and literary--crossings and disruptions slavery engendered, these autobiographers created mixed, dynamic narrative selves.

Customer Reviews:

Mastering Slavery is a book which has many layers of scholar.......1998-10-21

Mastering slavery is an excellent book. Jennifer Fleischner has written a truly interdisciplinary account of a subject that is too often simplified. The intensely complex relationships that existed in the plantation system are examined in this book through the lens of psychoanalysis and literary history, a unique treatment of the subject, as far as I can tell. Fleischner, a former professor of mine at SUNYA, brings to her writing the same rigor she demanded in her classroom, a space where scholarship still matters.

Women's Slave Narratives (Dover Thrift Editions)

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Women's Slave Narratives

Women's Slave Narratives (Dover Thrift Editions)
Annie L. Burton
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0486445550

Book Description

Unflinching accounts of slavery in the antebellum American South are presented in moving testimonies of five African-American women. Covering a wide range of narrative styles, the voices provide authentic recollections of hardship, frustration, and hope — from Mary Prince's groundbreaking account of a lone woman's tribulations and courage to Annie Burton's eulogy to motherhood.

Customer Reviews:

Women's Slave Narratives.......2007-03-08

Being a peason that looks into Slave narratives,They were in some cases to short, an incomplete.Remember these are my feelings.

Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865

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Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865
Kari J. Winter
Manufacturer: University of Georgia Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0820317888

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