The era of Emancipation has been studied through multiple points of view including former slaves, abolitionists, politicians and white supremacists. This time period proved to be confusing and complicated for many Americans as they sought to figure out what this meant for the future and how their lifestyle would, or would not, be transformed. Moreover, historians have revealed that emancipation did not begin and end in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation—it was conceptualized well before 1863 and its legacy endured for decades after the Civil War.

The transformation of labor has been a topic of interest for scholars studying Emancipation. Amy Dru Stanley, for instance, has examined the shift from slavery to wage labor and its effects on marriage, the market, and the new employer – employee relationship. Her monograph, From Bondage to Contract, shows how the contract became an integral part of American life following emancipation. Contracts constantly had to be renegotiated as former slaves found themselves feeling that the line between freedom and bondage was not as clear-cut as they had envisioned. David Brion Davis, a leading historian of American slavery and abolition, centralized free blacks as the key to slave emancipation in his book The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.  He argues it was free blacks who convinced white abolitionists that the colonization movement was a racist cause. Furthermore, he stresses his belief that slavery was not a dying institution during the Age of Emancipation but instead an economically successful institution.

Kidada Williams and Crystal Feimster shed light on the violence that persisted in the years following emancipation. Feimster’s Southern Horrors details campaigns for women’s rights and against rape during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—at the height of lynching in the American South. She does this through the lens of two southern women, Rebecca Latimer Felton, an elite white slaveholding woman, and Ida B. Wells, a black woman born of enslaved parents both of whom campaigned for women’s safety from violence in contrasting ways. Williams analyzes “ordinary violence” against African Americans from emancipation to WWI and the drive for anti-lynching legislation in They Left Great Marks on Me. She argues that African Americans’ battled racial violence discursively and set the foundation for the future civil rights movement of the 1960s. Williams and Feimster both highlight previously marginalized groups in their monographs such as, poor white women, black women, former slaves, and slaves.

The study of emancipation is more than just about the act of freeing enslaved peoples—it is about the enduring slave culture; it is about how and why people’s lives changed; it is about how American culture was transformed—for blacks and whites—and it is about how even a seemingly liberating act had its limitations.