In search of liberty : African American internationalism in the nineteenth century Atlantic world In Search of Liberty engages ways in which African Americans since the founding of the United States have understood their struggle for freedom and liberty as a feature of changes within the Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture how African Americans grappled with those questions as the struggle for liberty in the United States continued through the end of the nineteenth century when new regimes of power implemented systems of racial oppression that truncated what the historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries calls Freedom Rights for freedmen and women after the passing of the Thirteenth Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This book charts the diverse ways in which African Americans utilized the Atlantic world in search of the ideals of liberty that they were denied at home. Black internationalism included emigration abroad lecture tours in Europe denouncing slavery and missionary activity in King Leopolds Congo illustrating an international consciousness among black Americans. In Search of Liberty is the only edited collection on Black Internationalism during the nineteenth century. The contributors represented in this volume come from diverse localities scholarly interest and backgrounds. By breaking from the imposition of traditional periodization this book shows how black freedom struggles in the US are rooted in a Pan African identity prior to the movements of the 20th century. Publisher Caribbean The British emigration scheme and the African American emigration movement to the Caribbean Dexter J. Gabriel A reinterpretation of African Americans and Haitian emigration Brandon R. Byrd Frederick Douglass and debates over the annexation of the Dominican Republic Claire Bourhuis Mariotti Europe African American women in Europe Pia Wiegmink Black abolitionists in Ireland and the challenge of universal reform Angela F. Murphy Epilogue Gerald Horns. Prologue James Sidbury Introduction Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power Greene North America On the edge of freedom : the reenslavement of Elizabeth Watson in Nova Scotia Franco Paz and Harvey Amani Whitfield A scheme to desert : the Louisiana Purchase and freedom seekers in the Louisiana Texas borderlands 1804 1806 Mekala Audain Looking for freedom in the borderlands : U.S. black refugees from slavery in Early Independent Mexico 1821 1836 Thomas Mareite Africa The international migration of South Carolinian free people of color 1780 1865 Lawrence Aje Liberia as a theater : performance race making and the Liberian nationality Caree A. Banton