By 1870 the sugar plantations of the Recôncavo region in Bahia, Brazil, held at least seventy thousand slaves, making it one of the largest and most enduring slave societies in the Americas. In this new translation of Crossroads of Freedom—which won the 2011 Clarence H. Haring Prize for the Most Outstanding Book on Latin American History—Walter Fraga charts these slaves' daily lives and recounts their struggle to make a future for themselves following slavery's abolition in 1888. Through painstaking archival research, he illuminates the hopes, difficulties, opportunities, and setbacks of ex-slaves and plantation owners alike as they adjusted to their postabolition environment. Breaking new ground in Brazilian historiography, Fraga does not see an abrupt shift with slavery's abolition; rather, he describes a period of continuous change in which the strategies, customs, and identities that slaves built under slavery allowed them to navigate their newfound freedom. Fraga's analysis of how Recôncavo's residents came to define freedom and slavery more accurately describes this seminal period in Brazilian history, while clarifying how slavery and freedom are understood in the present.   

"Mary Ann Mahony has adeptly translated one of the best monographic histories of slaves for the vast sugar lands of Brazil. . . . This book extends Fraga’s 2004 dissertation and is a must read for specialists of slavery, emancipation, or Brazil, and, if contextualized, should be compelling to undergraduates and general readers as well. Highly recommended." - Choice

"“This rich collection of documents constitutes a major contribution to the literature on post-emancipation Brazil.”" - EIAL

"[C]arefully researched ... Crossroads of Freedom provides unique insights into what happened next following the emancipation of the slaves from the sugar plantations of Recôncavo." - Latin American Review of Books

"Crossroads of Freedom is a pleasure to read and a tremendous contribution to the study of slavery and abolition." - Journal of Latin American Studies

"A masterful translation. . . . Crossroads of Freedom provides valuable insight into not only slavery and freedom in the Recôncavo of Bahia and Brazil by extension, but also how these social forces informed Brazilian race relations more generally and the directives of the black liberation struggle in terms of battling persistent patterns of social inequality." - Bulletin of Latin American Research

"Walter Fraga's book is undoubtedly one of the most important results of Brazilian social history that has been produced in the past 15 years." - European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies