The House on Bitterness Street: Maternity, Slavery and a Fragile Freedom

Adding to an impressive body of work exploring slavery and emancipation in Cuba, New Orleans, Brazil, and other parts of the Caribbean and Atlantic World, Professor Rebecca Scott's latest project examines the dynamics of the social and legal processes of enslavement and challenges to it in the nineteenth-century.  She analyzes the cases of three women of color in New Orleans, all refugees from Cuba, who had claims to freedom yet faced the risk of being sold as slaves in the New Orleans slave market.  Among other goals, this book demonstrates the limits of “freedom by prescription,” a legal doctrine through which freedom claims rested on living in good faith as free.

Professor Scott is the Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.  She is the immediate past president of the American Society for Legal History, and has received recognition from the Guggenheim foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the MacArthur Foundation (the “Genius” Award), among others.  For her most recent book, Professor Scott received every award from the American Historical Association for which the book was eligible.