BOOK TALK: The Ragged Edge of Freedom: Race, Capitalism, and Class Struggle in Slavery’s Borderland
Matthew E. Stanley in Conversation with Dr Milly Williamson & Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper
Monday October 12 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
A stirring and thoroughly necessary reflection on the histories of slavery, poverty and class solidarity in the American Midwest.
The Ragged Edge of Freedom explores the long shadow of slavery in the Lower Midwest. In the decades after the Civil War, elites in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois constantly raised the specter of “cheap” Black labor to divide workers, discipline markets, and gain political advantage. At the same time, powerful outsiders depicted the borderland as dirty and degraded, pathologizing the region’s working poor through a rising capitalist ideology that linked a human’s worth to their economic productivity. Desperate to maintain their precarious standing and avert the phantasma of “negro invasion,” countless Lower Midwesterners envisioned a republic of “free white labor” predicated on the ruthless exclusion of Black “competition.”
Yet, as Matthew Stanley demonstrates, racial division is only one part of this story, as class-based interracialism materialized in unlikely places and against impossible odds. In the heat of border-making and white supremacist violence, ordinary people challenged the free white labor consensus—through bottom-up struggle over shared material goals. From settler dispossession through the age of mass incarceration and deindustrialization, this absorbing book recounts dramatic and previously neglected clashes between workers and the formidable bastions of wealth and power. Stanley excavates the stories of abolitionists, freed people, agrarian populists, militant coal miners, and socialists, Black and white, who risked everything in defiance of the region’s restrictive boundaries and its racial capitalist grip. Against a backdrop of blood-stained civil wars and riveting industrial battles in a pivotal yet often overlooked American region, The Ragged Edge of Freedom is a people’s history—one of inspiration and urgency and complex resistance from below.
We are delighted that Matthew is stopping by Housmans during his visit in the UK to talk about this essential new book. He will be joined in conversation by Adam Eliott-Cooper and Milly Williamson from Queen Mary and Goldsmiths colleges, University of London.
Our Speakers:
Matthew E. Stanley is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, and the author or editor of four books, including the award-winning, The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America.
Adam Elliott-Cooper received his PhD from the Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Oxford, in 2016. He has previously worked as a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at UCL, as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and as a research associate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His first monograph, Black Resistance to British Policing, was published by Manchester University Press in May 2021. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021).
Dr Milly Williamson is interested in the relationship between the media and citizenship and the mediated means by which individuals and social groups are either marginalised or validated. Her research thus spans key questions of our time – from the growth of racism to the huge rise of promotional content and the growth of celebrity culture in online and offline media. Her book include Celebrity: Capitalism and the Making of Fame (Polity) and The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, fiction and fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy (Columbia).
As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.
If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.
Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.
