Nat Turner's identify jewelry via American background with a strength all its personal. chief of an important slave uprising on those shorelines, variously considered as a assassin of unarmed girls and youngsters, an encouraged non secular chief, a fanatic--this difficult determine represents the entire poor complexities of yank slavery. And but we don't recognize what he appeared like, the place he's buried, or maybe no matter if Nat Turner used to be his genuine name.
In Nat Turner: A Slave uprising in background and Memory, Kenneth S. Greenberg gathers twelve distinctive students to supply provocative new perception into the fellow, his uprising, and his time, and his position in heritage. The historians right here discover Turner's slave neighborhood, discussing the help for his rebellion in addition to the non secular and literary context of his flow. They study where of ladies in his insurrection, and its far-reaching effects (including a unprecedented 1832 Virginia debate approximately ridding the nation of slavery). listed below are discussions of Turner's non secular visions--the directions he bought from God to kill all of his white oppressors. Louis Masur areas him opposed to the backdrop of the nation's sectional difficulty, and Douglas Egerton places his rebellion within the context of rebellions around the Americas. We hint Turner's passage via American reminiscence via interesting interviews with William Styron on his landmark novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and with Dr. Alvin Poussaint, one of many "ten black writers" of the Nineteen Sixties who bitterly attacked Styron's imaginative and prescient of Turner. eventually, we stick to Nat Turner into the realm of Hollywood.
Nat Turner has constantly been arguable, a logo of the searing wound of slavery in American existence. This publication bargains a clear-eyed examine the most effective identified and least understood figures in our history.