The Power to Die

Download or read book The Power to Die written by Terri L. Snyder and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-08-28 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acts of suicide by enslaved people carried significant cultural, legal, and political implications in the emerging slave societies of British America and, later, the United States. This study features a wide range of evidence from ship logs and surgeon's journals, legal and legislative records, newspapers, periodicals, novels, and plays, abolitionist print and slave narratives in order to consider the intimate circumstances, cultural meanings, and political consequences of enslaved peoples' acts of self-destruction in the context of early American slavery.