Calling Out Liberty The Stono Slave Rebellion And The Universal Struggle For Human Rights Jack Shuler by Jack Shuler 9781604732733, 1604732733 instant download after payment.

On Sunday, September 9, 1739, twenty Kongolese slaves armed themselves by breaking into a storehouse near the Stono River south of Charleston, South Carolina. They killed twenty-three white colonists, joined forces with other slaves, & marched toward Spanish Florida. There they expected to find freedom. One report claims the rebels were overheard shouting, "Liberty!" Before the day ended, however, the rebellion was crushed, & afterwards many surviving rebels were executed. South Carolina rapidly responded with a comprehensive slave code. The Negro Act reinforced white power through laws meant to control the ability of slaves to communicate & congregate. It was an important model for many slaveholding colonies & states, & its tenets greatly inhibited African American access to the public sphere for years to come.  

The Stono Rebellion serves as a touchstone for Calling Out Liberty, an exploration of human rights in early America. Expanding upon historical analyses of this rebellion, Jack Shuler suggests a relationship between the Stono rebels & human rights discourse in early American literature. Though human rights scholars & policy makers usually offer the European Enlightenment as the source of contemporary ideas about human rights, this book repositions the sources of these important & often challenged American ideals. 

Jack Shuler is an assistant professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, & the author of The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose. Shuler's criticism, interviews, reviews, & poems have appeared in the Columbia Journal of American Studies, Southern Studies, the South Carolina Review, the Brooklyn Review, & elsewhere. jackshulerauthor.com