Documents the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom, identifying the vibrant urban culture that developed in New York City and profiling the works of the African Company, a troupe of former slaves who performed Shakespeare and other productions for mixed-race audiences.

Product Description: Book by White, Shane

Collects songs, speeches, and sermons that provide a revealing window into the sufferings of slaves, as well as some of the most revealing of such documents from the 1700s through the 1850s.

When Shane finally travels back home after years of being away and making a life for himself, his mind is flooded with the memories of his blue-collar family under tremendous pressure and pushed to the breaking point by alcoholism and abuse. Mature.

Describes African American clothing, hairstyles, gesture, and movement from slavery to the 1940s, and argues that they represented a form of self-expression and covert resistance to racism.

Shane White creatively uses a remarkable array of primary sources—census data, tax lists, city directories, diaries, newspapers and magazines, and courtroom testimony—to reconstruct the content and context of the slave's world in New York and its environs during the revolutionary and early republic periods. White explores, among many things, the demography of slavery, the decline of the institution during and after the Revolution, racial attitudes, acculturation, and free blacks' "creative adaptation to an often hostile world."