New Books In Critical Theory

Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. Her book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) centers the role of African Americans in ending slavery in the US by detailing the actions they took, the ideas they generated, and the ways they influenced white abolitionists. Acts of Black rebellion including the Haitian Revolution, escapes from bondage and slave revolts shaped the analysis and trajectory of the movement. Drawing on extensive archival research that spans centuries and nations, Sinha paints a complex picture of the transnational and radical movement to end slavery in the US from the 1500s to the Civil War. Previous historical scholarship on abolitionism focused on white participants in the “second wave” of abolitionism, depicting them as paternalistic middle-class reformers who b