Mansion House Of Liberty

Detailed account of England at war.

First published in 1975, Liberty’s is the biography of a shop and its various owners in London. Responding to the social pressures, class patterns, and governmental policies, the developments in the shop mimic the social changes taking place in London. It is affected by war and depressions, by trade booms and enemy bombs, by changes in fashions and taste. Liberty’s not only reflected these changes but also contributed to the artistic movements and the development of fashionable taste. This book will be of interest to students of history, fashion and sociology.

The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power. Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places Black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington, D.C., and the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America.