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9780199758722

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<br> Jim Downs's Sick from Freedom charts new, darker, and profoundly revealing paths into the history of the American emancipation in the Civil War. In a work of medical, social, labor, and military history all at once, Downs shows that achieving freedom for American slaves was a signal triumph, but only through a horrible passage of disease, suffering and death. A 'new' history of emancipation is emerging, and Downs is one of its most talented and innovative craftsmen. This book demonstrates that emancipation is real history and not mere sentimental celebration. --David W. Blight, author of American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era <br><p><br> In Sick from Freedom, Jim Downs paints a startling and little known portrait of African American emancipation in which struggles for health and survival must be factored alongside the political and economic history of the period. --Sharla Fett, Occidental College <br><p><br> Sick from Freedom by Jim Downs traces a shrouded chapter of American history: the mass death and medical devastation that visited African Americans in the immediate wake of legal emancipation. Downs compellingly reveals how the confluence of racial slander, government indifference, and medical malign neglect proved widely fatal, and in doing so he paints a detailed and disheartening portrait of man's inhumanity to man. --Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present <br><p><br> James Downs' Sick from Freedom is a signal contribution to the vastly understudied question of freedpeople's health and a formidable challenge to the dominant analytical framework that has heretofore framed our understanding both of the transition from slavery to freedom in the American South and the meaning of death and dying in the era of the Civil War. It, quite simply, remaps a field. Against an archival record of statistics--of so many bodies sick orr

<br> An important challenge to our understanding of an event that scholars and laypeople alike have preferred to see as an uplifting story of newly liberated people vigorously claiming their long-denied rights. - The New York Times<p><br> In Sick from Freedom, Jim Downs paints a startling and little known portrait of African American emancipation in which struggles for health and survival must be factored alongside the political and economic history of the period. --Sharla Fett, Occidental College <br><p><br> Sick from Freedom by Jim Downs traces a shrouded chapter of American history: the mass death and medical devastation that visited African Americans in the immediate wake of legal emancipation. Downs compellingly reveals how the confluence of racial slander, government indifference, and medical malign neglect proved widely fatal, and in doing so he paints a detailed and disheartening portrait of man's inhumanity to man. --Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present <br><p><br> James Downs' Sick from Freedom is a signal contribution to the vastly understudied question of freedpeople's health and a formidable challenge to the dominant analytical framework that has heretofore framed our understanding both of the transition from slavery to freedom in the American South and the meaning of death and dying in the era of the Civil War. It, quite simply, remaps a field. Against an archival record of statistics--of so many bodies sick or dying and denied access to local and state hospitals and asylums--Downs gives us the story of a people, of individual men, women and children 'dying to be free.' -- Thavolia Glymph, Duke University <br><p><br> A fresh and ambitious account of the Civil War era that not only interrogates the transition from slavery to freedom in new and unsettling ways but also invites us to rethink the geographical dimensions of Reconstruc

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Jim Downs is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Connecticut College. He is the editor of Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism and Why We Write: The Politics and Practice of Writing for Social Change.

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