Problem: The complex history of slavery often depicts a system that bound the entire nation-free and slave, North and South-together in an interconnected economic and cultural web of coercion and capital. How does Melvin Ely's portrait of Israel Hill in Virginia require a reexamination of that reality? How does Ely nuance our understanding of the boundaries between slavery and freedom in the nineteenth century?
The book that is used is Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom From the 1790s Through the Civil War by: Melvin Ely