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Terry Alford

Autor/a de Prince among Slaves

4 obres 250 Membres 6 Ressenyes

Sobre l'autor

Terry Alford is Professor of History at Northern Virginia Community College

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I fel a bit cheated. The book contained mostly biographical information on Edwin Booth and some of the other family members. There were longer pieces on a couple of clairvoyants/mediums, but very little about their interactions with either the Lincolns or Booth.That said, there were a couple of things I hadn't encountered before, like a meeting between Tad and Booth and a story about booth and a gypsy, almost certainly apocryphal.
 
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cspiwak | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Mar 6, 2024 |
Large portions of this book revisits familiar history -- Booth's assassination of Lincoln, surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant. Less prominent history is covered in Edwin Booth's rise to fame. Biographies within the book covers the life of Adam Badeau -- a friend to both Booths, adjunct to the staff of Ulysses S. Grant. Wisely, the author, Terry Alford, makes only passing reference to Badeau's closeted gay life and its brief manifestations. Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln are given considerable print. The actual confluence of common spiritualists in the lives of Edwin, John Booth and the Lincolns is given less proportion to print than expected (considering this the theme of the book). That the Booths and Lincolns both resided in Washington for a time, and that Lincoln attended the theater 83 times in his four years in office makes this less surprising than it sounds. Still, the author offers some coincidences. One of John Wilkes Booth compatriots slept in the very bed in which Lincoln died cannot help but oblige our attention. Fort Theater where Lincoln was shot was cursed when the then church was sold to John Ford who rebuilt it to the Ford Theater. On the day of Edwin Booth's funeeral, three floors of the Ford theater -- now rebuilt to government offices -- collapsed, killing 20 people. A number of the spiritualists were exposed as charlatans -- no surprise. Charles Colchester is given prominent print for his tactics. Mumler, the spirit photographer, stands dubious for his photo of Lincoln standing over his widowed wife. Alford offers an implied correlation between Mary Todd Lincoln's later insanity and her immersion in the spiritualist life style. My limit of three stars is relfected in the tedium in some of the details in the lives. We are given a detailed list of items sold off after Adam Badeau's death. To be fair, some of these details are significant. Badeau -- litiginous thorughout his life -- sued Grant's family for reimbursement as the editor of Grant's memoirs. This is a detail we want to be appraised about -- it shed light on Badeau's nuanced and complex character. Though gay, Badeau later entered a marriage where it is implied that profit was the motivation. One qualifier to this book. The author, in writing about the confluence in the lives of the Booths and Lincolns, offers a factual account of the life and death of John Wilkes Booth. In doing so, he gives a not unsympathetic account of the most notorious assassin in our history. Even the soldiers who captured and killed Booth declared him to be uncommonly courageous. We are left to run with our own spectulation when we read how John Wilkes descends into delusion about his misperception that Lincoln intended to become a dictator -- based on Lincoln getting a second term("don't change horses in the middle of the stream," as the campaign delcared at the time). Alford misses a significant opportunity when he fails to ask the question: Had John Wilkes Booth acted the part of Brutus so often that, combined with his southern sympathies, he fell into the delusional reality of Lincoln the Ceasar, and he the hero, Brutus. And yet, when a freed African-American, Randall, who had accompanied Bandeau from New Orleans to New York was in danger from the draft rioters, Booth offered to hide with Randall in the cellar and defend him with his life if necessary. Yet Lincoln's delcared intent to give the franchise to recently freed African-Americans seemed to lock Booth into his decsion to assassinate the 16th preisdent. Upshot. Booth was not an all-or-nothing evil character. He possessed the same nuance and complexity as most realities and most lives, current right-left political dogma to the contrary. If nuance and complexity is a reality you, the reader, are comfortable to navigate, the book is worth the reading, especially if you are interested in Lincoln and his times… (més)
 
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forestormes | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Dec 25, 2022 |
I learned a lot about the Lincolns and the Booths, so I’m glad I read this. Going by the title, I was thinking there would be more in the book about spiritualism than there was. The author made a good point at the end of the book about why spiritualism was so popular at the time (so much death due to war/disease/living conditions=lots of grieving people ready to believe they could get in touch with their loved ones). In that light, it’s really no surprise these two families had their adherents. Other coincidental connections were just as interesting to me, if not more so, such as Edwin Booth saving Robert Lincoln when he fell off a train platform, or 10-year-old Tad Lincoln going backstage to meet John Wilkes after a performance and the actor giving him a rose.
The writing is easy to follow in terms of the author’s ability to draw the reader in and bring these historical figures to life. Less easy to follow was the way it was organized and how many people were mentioned because they had something to do with both families. Here’s an example: by the time I got to the epilogue and read several paragraphs about Joe Jefferson, I couldn’t remember why he was even in the book. Luckily there’s an index, so I found where he was mentioned earlier in the book in an anecdote about Lincoln (when he was a lawyer) helping out Jefferson’s family of actors with some fine they were supposed to pay. Now, that may be down to me—my aging brain not retaining as much, or how long it took me to get through the book. That aside, there was a lot of jumping back and forth between Lincoln family members, Booth family members, and a host of folks connected with both. It was an interesting collection of bits and pieces, but the lack of cohesion (or my failure to perceive it) was distracting and made it harder to follow and remember who was who.
… (més)
 
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Harks | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Dec 17, 2022 |
[Prince among slaves] provides not only an outline of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima's life, but a glimpse of the local politics of the late eighteenth century in the area we now know as Guineau, into slavery as practiced in Mississippi in the late 18th-early 19th century, and into the stumbling blocks to repatriating an enslaved African to his homeland.

Ibrahima, the son of a Fulani ruler, is educated at Timbuktu. At age 26 while returning from battle he is captured and sold into slavery, ending up in Natchez, Mississippi on the plantation of Thomas Foster. He rises to act as overseer for Foster, is married to another slave, Isabella, and they raise 9 children.

After about 30 years in slavery, a repatriation effort full of errors in communication eventually results in Ibrahima and Isabella being sent to Liberia.

This is more and less than a biography. I say it's less because there isn't as much documentation of what Ibrahima thought (and said) as I'm used to seeing in a biography. (Of course, that's because he didn't write English, and not many people valued his words enough to record and keep them.)

It's more than a biography in that it focuses more on the context in which Ibrahima lived because that is more easily documented, and on how and why he was eventually released from slavery, yet how who he was and where he was from weren't understood by the people who helped him.

I also enjoyed the foreward ("Why") that told of how Alford ran across a document related to Ibrahima's life as a graduate student and the years of research and writing that went into the book, as well as the afterword discussing the (non) reception of the book by the academic community.

Read for Muslim Journeys, American stories discussion at my local library
… (més)
½
 
Marcat
markon | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Feb 5, 2014 |

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Obres
4
Membres
250
Popularitat
#91,401
Valoració
½ 3.6
Ressenyes
6
ISBN
11

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