"This collection of photographic portraits traces 150 years of U.S. history through the lives of well-known abolitionists, artists, scientists, writers, statesmen, entertainers, and sports figures. Drawing on the photography collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Deborah Willis celebrates the ways in which these images furthered recognition and equality in America, and even today challenge us all to uphold America's highest ideals and promises." --Book Jacket.
One of America's most prominent historians and a noted feminist bring together the most important political writings and testimonials from African-Americans over three centuries.
A collection of twenty of Frederick Douglass’s most important orations This volume brings together twenty of Frederick Douglass’s most historically significant speeches on a range of issues, including slavery, abolitionism, civil rights, sectionalism, temperance, women’s rights, economic development, and immigration. Douglass’s oratory is accompanied by speeches that he considered influential, his thoughts on giving public lectures and the skills necessary to succeed in that endeavor, commentary by his contemporaries on his performances, and modern-day assessments of Douglass’s effectiveness as a public speaker and advocate.
Henry Highland Garnet launched the African Civilization Society in the fall of 1858 to promote black settlement in West Africa. Garnet (1815-1882) was a black Presbyterian minister and leader. Schor discusses Garnet's role in the vanguard of black abolitionists, explores his frequent disagreements with Frederick Douglass, and shows that though Garnet's views were ahead of his contemporaries, ' they were eventually adopted by them.
A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico. The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historianAlice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.
A new wave of research in black classicism has emerged in the 21st century that explores the role played by the classics in the larger cultural traditions of black America, Africa and the Caribbean. Addressing a gap in this scholarship, Margaret Malamud investigates why and how advocates for abolition and black civil rights (both black and white) deployed their knowledge of classical literature and history in their struggle for black liberty and equality in the United States. African Americans boldly staked their own claims to the classical world: they deployed texts, ideas and images of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt in order to establish their authority in debates about slavery, race, politics and education. A central argument of this book is that knowledge and deployment of Classics was a powerful weapon and tool for resistance-as improbable as that might seem now-when wielded by black and white activists committed to the abolition of slavery and the end of the social and economic oppression of free blacks. The book significantly expands our understanding of both black history and classical reception in the United States.
This novel addresses the experiences and deeply felt personal values of a group of four college students from an Upstate New York state college visiting the historic Civil War town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Conducting field research with their college professor and mentor, Dr. Jeremiah Angel Shiloh, will prove to be not only exciting but also challenging for their preset views on a host of issues, both contemporary and historic. For example, though their summer field research project is scheduled to afford them the opportunity to see, walk amid, and examine artifacts from this mid-nineteenth-century Southern American town, clearly the unfolding experience of conducting this research project will be not only interesting but, for some, also personally challenging. They soon realize that for many field researchers, one's personality may in fact be either a restrictive, challenging, or enhanced advantage when attempting to understand the past or comprehend the possible favorable or unfavorable future. However, central to this novel are the students' thought-provoking discussions and efforts to connect previous notions of the important, strategic role of Harpers Ferry in the American Civil War and the importance of the attack on the town in October 1859 by armed Black and White insurgents under the leadership of antislavery activist John Brown. Of even more significance in this novel is the role the five Black insurgents in this attack and of one in particular who will survive the ordeal. With that in mind, this two-part novel provides the reader with a clearer understanding of the sinews of historical research and the often-tantalizing intrigues it offers.
