Kirt von Daacke is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.
Description
Kirt von Daacke richly documents a central paradox of the Old South. Whites denied full citizenship to free people of color and regularly deprecated them as a group, yet whites and blacks often interacted harmoniously, and some free African Americans became respected figures in the larger community. --Melvin Patrick Ely, Bancroft Prize-winning author of Israel on the Appomattox Closely researched and nuanced in its assertions, Freedom Has a Face continues to advance historians' understanding of the complexities of race relations before the Civil War.-- "Journal of American History" (3/1/2014 12:00:00 AM) Freedom Has a Face is a fine example of how deep, meticulous research in local records often yields the most path-breaking interpretations that are also applicable to other areas. Von Daacke is to be commended for an excellent book that brings fresh and revealing insight to the nature of black freedom in a slave society in the decades before the Civil War." --John Zaborney, University of Maine at Presque Isle Freedom Has a Face is an essential part of the developing literature on free people of color in the pre-Civil War United States. --Warren E. Milteer, Virginia Polytechnic Institute A riveting, unsurpassed portrait of the tangled lives of individual free people of color, slaves, and whites in Jefferson's Virginia neighborhood during the post-Revolutionary decades. Drawn from unprecedented, exhaustive, and path-breaking research in records that lay ignored and undeciphered, Freedom Has a Face traces--much like a Dickens novel--the startling connections among obscure people who, in the aggregate, reveal a world all too real but seldom appreciated by modern scholars. Kirt von Daacke implicitly cautions scholars to be wary of beloved analytical categories that do not respect the fascinating and bedeviling complexity of human beings. In all, a triumph of the historian's craft. --Michael Johnson, Johns Hopkins University