Chronicling the career of Beriah Green (1795-1874), theologian, educator, reformer, and one of New York's most important abolitionists, this book is the first published history of Green and his attempt to create a model biracial society.
Reprinted from the Garland series: Slavery, Race, and the American Legal System, 1700-1872. The facsimiles of antebellum pamphlets in these volumes deal with slave revolts and efforts to help slaves escape bondage. Most involve rebel slaves and "slave stealers," others deal with activities of white journalists and divines that were considered inflammatory. "[The volumes in this series] belong in every library used for research, and in particular at all law school libraries. They will prove valuable to historians, lawyers, law teachers and students, and all persons interested in the problems of slavery and race in American experience.": William M. Wiecek, American Journal of Legal History 33 (1989) 187.
The anti-slavery movement, which followed in the wake of the European slave trade, has attracted much less attention than the latter. This is particularly true for the abolition movement in the French colonies.
Examines the life of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg through the lens of both Blackness and latinidad. A Black Puerto Ricanborn scholar, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (18741938) was a well-known collector and archivist whose personal library was the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He was an autodidact who matched wits with university-educated men and women, as well as a prominent Freemason, a writer, and an institution-builder. While he spent much of his life in New York City, Schomburg was intimately involved in the cause of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. In the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, he would go on to cofound the Negro Society for Historical Research and lead the American Negro Academy, all the while collecting and assembling books, prints, pamphlets, articles, and other ephemera produced by Black men and women from across the Americas and Europe. His curated library collection at the New York Public Library emphasized the presence of African peoples and their descendants throughout the Americas and would serve as an indispensable resource for the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. By offering a sustained look at the life of one of the most important figures of early twentieth-century New York City, this first book-length examination of Schomburgs life suggests new ways of understanding the intersections of both Blackness and latinidad.
In the secular, contemporary world, many people question the relevance of religion. Many also wonder whether religiously-informed speech and beliefs should be tolerated in the public square, and whether religions hinder freedom. In this volume, Wendell Bird reminds us that our basic freedoms are the important legacies of religious speech arising from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Bird demonstrates that religious speech, rather than secular or irreligious speech based on other belief systems, historically made the demands and justifications for at least six critical freedoms: speech and press, rights for the criminally accused, higher education, emancipation from slavery, and freedom from discrimination. Bringing an historically-informed approach to the development of some of the most important freedoms in the Anglo-American world, this volume provides a new framework for our understanding of the origins of crucial freedoms. It also serves as a powerful reminder of an aspect of history that is steadily being forgotten or overlooked-that many of our basic freedoms are the historical legacies of religious speech arising from Judeo-Christian faiths.
Winch has written the first full-length biography of James Forten, a hero of African American history and one of the most remarkable men in 19th-century America. Born into a free black family in 1766, Forten served in the Revolutionary War as a teenager. By 1810 he had earned the distinction of being the leading sailmaker in Philadelphia. Soon after Forten emerged as a leader in Philadelphia's black community and was active in a wide range of reform activities. Especially prominent in national and international antislavery movements, he served as vice-president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and became close friends with William Lloyd Garrison to whom he lent money to start up the Liberator. His family were all active abolitionists and a granddaughter, Charlotte Forten, published a famous diary of her experiences teaching ex-slaves in South Carolina's Sea Islands during the Civil War. This is the first serious biography of Forten, who stands beside Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the pantheon of African Americans who fundamentally shaped American history.
The Puritans of popular memory are dour figures, characterized by humorless toil at best and witch trials at worst. “Puritan” is an insult reserved for prudes, prigs, or oppressors. Antebellum American abolitionists, however, would be shocked to hear this. They fervently embraced the idea that Puritans were in fact pioneers of revolutionary dissent and invoked their name and ideas as part of their antislavery crusade. Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination reveals how the leaders of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement—from landmark figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson to scores of lesser-known writers and orators—drew upon the Puritan tradition to shape their politics and personae. In a striking instance of selective memory, reimagined aspects of Puritan history proved to be potent catalysts for abolitionist minds. Black writers lauded slave rebels as new Puritan soldiers, female antislavery militias in Kansas were cast as modern Pilgrims, and a direct lineage of radical democracy was traced from these early New Englanders through the American and French Revolutions to the abolitionist movement, deemed a “Second Reformation” by some. Kenyon Gradert recovers a striking influence on abolitionism and recasts our understanding of puritanism, often seen as a strictly conservative ideology, averse to the worldly rebellion demanded by abolitionists.
The clearly and concisely written entries in this reference work chronicle the campaign to end human slavery in the United States, bringing to life the key events, leading figures, and socioeconomic forces in the history of American antislavery, abolition, and emancipation. The struggle to abolish human slavery is one of the most important reform campaigns in history. The eventual success of this decades-long struggle serves as an inspiring example that even the most deeply rooted social wrongs can be corrected. This valuable reference work details the history of antislavery, abolition, and emancipation to illustrate the various forms of these forces and the courses they followed in the bitterly contested struggle against the institution of slavery, affording readers the most current compendium of the diverse scholarship of this important historical topic. Geared toward readers seeking to learn about antislavery and abolition in U.S. or African American history, Abolition and Antislavery: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic addresses a period of particular significance: the years that shaped the sectional debates leading up to the Civil War. The coverage encompasses both white abolitionists such as Theodore Dwight Weld and William Lloyd Garrison and black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, and Sojourner Truth. Each alphabetically organized entry contains cross-references as "See Also" at the end of each entry text. An introductory essay ensures that all readers have a clear framework for understanding the subject, regardless of their previous background knowledge.