In 1982, when the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) began to publish the results of its research in the National Archives, the Project’s editors forecast that the multivolume publication would eventually include five series. To date, six volumes in three series have appeared, though much about the project has changed, including the editors, the titles of some series, and the press that is now releasing the door-stopping volumes. Yet two constants remain: the subtitle of this multivolume project is still A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, and the title of the anthology as a whole is still one word, Freedom.1 The contributors to Beyond Freedom are unsettled by that one-word title and seek, in turn, to unsettle the history of emancipation. On the one hand, this volume’s editors acknowledge the debt that all historians of emancipation owe to Freedom. The book is dedicated to “all the past and present editors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project,” and three of its contributors belong to that group (p. v). Still, in the twenty-five years that passed between the first volume of Freedom and the appearance of Beyond Freedom, the very documents uncovered by the FSSP have encouraged many scholars to reassess freedom’s utility as an over-arching paradigm. This collection joins monographs such as Steve Kantrowitz’s More Than Freedom (2012) or Jim Downs’s Sick from Freedom (2012) and review essays such as Carole Emberton’s “Unwriting the Freedom Narrative” (2016) in marking a historiographical moment: whereas Freedom once seemed an appropriate big-tent term for the history of emancipation from 1861 to 1867, it is now (to borrow from another title in this growing historiography) a troubled refuge.2

中文翻译：

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自由的问题

1982 年，当自由人和南方社会项目 (FSSP) 开始在国家档案馆发表其研究结果时，该项目的编辑预测多卷出版物最终将包括五个系列。迄今为止，已经出版了三个系列的六卷，尽管该项目的很多内容都发生了变化，包括编辑、某些系列的标题以及现在正在发布门禁卷的媒体。然而有两个不变：这个多卷本项目的副标题仍然是解放的纪录片史，1861-1867，整个选集的标题仍然是一个词，自由。1 超越自由的贡献者对此感到不安——字题，反过来，又要扰乱解放的历史。一方面，本书的编辑们承认所有解放历史学家都欠自由的债。这本书献给“自由人和南方社会项目的所有过去和现在的编辑”，其中三位贡献者属于该组织（p. v）。尽管如此，在《自由》第一卷和《超越自由》问世之间的 25 年里，FSSP 所发现的文件本身就鼓励许多学者重新评估自由作为一种总体范式的效用。该合集与 Steve Kantrowitz 的 More Than Freedom (2012) 或 Jim Downs 的 Sick from Freedom (2012) 等专着以及 Carole Emberton 的“Unwriting the Freedom Narrative” (2016) 等评论文章一起，标志着一个历史时刻：