But at the time of emancipation, the British granted not the ex-slaves but their former owners "reparation" in the form of a large financial indemnity.
At the time of emancipation about 45 percent of the land was private property and the remainder was held as allotment land, cultivated in units averaging 9.5 acres (3.8 hectares) by the peasant serfs against rent in kind and labour, payable to feudal lords.
My great-great-great-grandfather, George Henry Burt, himself the great-great-grandson of one of the 17th-century settlers, owned 129 of the 19,780 slaves in St Kitts at the time of emancipation and took his share of the £329,393 compensation paid to the slave-owners in St Kitts.
Caribbean officials have not mentioned a compensation figure but Gonsalves and Verene Shepherd, chairwoman of the national reparations commission in Jamaica, both noted that Britain at the time of emancipation in 1834 paid £20m to British planters in the Caribbean, the equivalent of £200bn now.
His father, Dr. Atkinson Pelham, was an Alabama planter with several hundred acres who owned four slaves at John's birth; at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, Dr. Pelham owned 25 or 30.
And around the time of her emancipation from her old self, when she moved out of the house and seemingly took up permanent residence in the high school theatre, that need redoubled.
The 1920's and 30's were a time of sexual emancipation in Europe, and in that atmosphere, Dr. Meyerowitz says, sex change operations were performed in Vienna, and at Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science.
One of those values is the value of the agency and autonomy of the individual and, with it, the value — incredibly hard won, over a very long time — of woman's emancipation, and so with it the belief that you cannot, either literally or symbolically, mask individuals.
Geoff Travis at the Rough Trade record label secured his release from the huge debts and tiny royalties saddled on him by Richard Branson at Virgin, and, for the first time, he felt a degree of emancipation from a music industry that he felt had exploited him from the beginning.
"In France it means simply a gesture against the system, and then after time it became a gesture of emancipation.
Once staunchly opposed to the immediate abolition of slavery, he was the first president who took action in the cause of emancipation and in time, of course, he dedicated the war effort to the goal of freedom.
