Ebook: Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community

The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion

The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time. Her analysis recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion's immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831.

A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.

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Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Author's Note on Language and Sources Prologue Introduction: An Intimate Rebellion 1. Geographies of Surveillance and Control 2. Enslaved Women and Strategies of Evasion and Resistance 3. Free Issues: Free People of Color in Antebellum Southampton County 4. Generation, Resistance, and Survival: African American Children and the Southampton Rebellion 5. Surviving Southampton: Geographies of Survival Conclusion Notes Index Back cover|

"Surviving Southampton insists that women's voices be heard, heeded, and remembered in understanding and commemorating the Southampton Rebellion and provides a model for revisiting slave revolts and other moments of rupture." —Black Perspectives

"Vanessa Holden successfully moves our attention from Nat Turner to his community at a time when the appeal for uncovering societies of resistance has never been more apparent." —Civil War Monitor

"With intricate research and deft analysis, Vanessa M. Holden presents a bold new exploration into Nat Turner's Southampton Rebellion of 1831 and the imperative roles women and children played in the ongoing fight for Black survival. " —Ms.
|Vanessa M. Holden is an assistant professor of history at the University of Kentucky.