Sarah Jane Foster of Gray, Maine, was one of the hundreds of northerners who headed South to teach former slaves after the Civil War. In addition to seven months of her 1866 diary, this volume includes 23 letters she wrote while in West Virginia and South Carolina to a Portland, Maine, newspaper between 1865 and 1868, as well as some samples of her published fiction and poetry. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
"Sarah Jane Foster of Gray, Maine, was one of the hundreds of northerners who went South to teach the freedmen after the Civil War. Armed with missionary zeal and formidable courage, they set forth to attend to the souls as well as the minds of the former slaves. Like Foster, they often faced privation and occasionally danger from local whites in the politically charged atmosphere of the Reconstruction-era South. Here for the first time is Sarah Jane Foster's account of her teaching experiences in Martinsburg and Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. There, her devotion to the principle of living according to her belief in the equality of the races led to her public disgrace and the loss of her teaching position with the Freewill Baptist Home Mission Society. Her determination to teach the freedmen yielded another commission with the American Missionary Association a year later. Exiled to a black-operated farm in a rural corner of Charleston, South Carolina, she contracted yellow fever at the end of the school year and died upon returning to her home in Maine at the age of twenty-eight. In addition to seven months of her 1866 diary, the volume includes twenty-three letters she wrote to a Portland, Maine newspaper during 1865-68 from West Virginia and South Carolina and some samples of her published fiction and poetry"--Page 4 of cover.
From the author of What This Cruel War Was Over, a vivid portrait of the Union army’s escaped-slave refugee camps and how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States. Chandra Manning casts in a wholly original light what it was like to escape slavery, how emancipation happened, and how citizenship in the United States was transformed. This reshaping of hard structures of power would matter not only for slaves turned citizens, but for all Americans. Integrating a wealth of new findings, this vivid portrait of the Union army’s escaped-slave refugee camps shows how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States. Drawing on records of the Union and Confederate armies, the letters and diaries of soldiers, transcribed testimonies of former slaves, and more, Manning allows us to accompany the black men, women, and children who sought out the Union army in hopes of achieving autonomy for themselves and their communities. It also raised, for the first time, humanitarian questions about refugees in wartime and legal questions about civil and military authority with which we still wrestle, as well as redefined American citizenship, to the benefit, but also to the lasting cost of, African Americans.
Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Forten, Kate Chopin, Sarah Jane Foster, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were 19th century young women who grew up to be novelists, poets, essayists, or journalists. Keeping a private diary helped each girl find her public voice. "A collection of seven literary biographies liberally sprinkled with brief quotations from the subjects' diaries, written when they were young adults." - School Library Journal, starred review "Lyons writes with style and feeling, creating a strong sense of each individual life story, even as she gives us a social history of what it was like to be a woman at that time. ... Any teen who keeps a journal will recognize what the title implies: the private world behind the mask of duty." - Booklist
During the Civil War, traditional history tells us, Afro-Christianity proved a strong force for slaves' perseverance and hope of deliverance. In Slavery, Civil War and Salvation, however, Daniel Fountain raises the possibility that Afro-Christianity played a less significant role within the antebellum slave community than most scholars currently assert. Fountain presents a new timeline for the African American conversion experience, insisting that only after emancipation and the fulfillment of the predicted Christian deliverance did African Americans more consistently turn to Christianity. Freedom, Fountain contends, brought most former slaves into the Christian faith.
Who was Ann Plato? Apart from circumstantial evidence, there's little information about the author of Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, published in 1841. Plato lived in a milieu of colored Hartford, Connecticut, in the early nineteenth century. Although long believed to have been African American herself, she may also, Ron Welburn argues, have been American Indian, like the father in her poem "The Natives of America." Combining literary criticism, ethnohistory, and social history, Welburn uses Plato as an example of how Indians in the Long Island Sound region adapted and prevailed despite the contemporary rhetoric of Indian disappearance. This study seeks to raise Plato's profile as an author as well as to highlight the dynamics of Indian resistance and isolation that have contributed to her enigmatic status as a literary figure.
During Reconstruction, former abolitionists in the North had a golden opportunity to pursue true racial justice and permanent reform in America. But after the sacrifice made by thousands of Union soldiers to arrive at this juncture, the moment soon slipped away, leaving many whites throughout the North and South more racist than before. Edward J. Blum takes a fresh look at the reasons for this failure in Reforging the White Republic, focusing on the vital role that religion played in reunifying northern and southern whites into a racially segregated society. A blend of history and social science, Reforging the White Republic offers a surprising perspective on the forces of religion as well as nationalism and imperialism at a critical point in American history.
Written in an engaging narrative style these philosophical investigations undermine racist hierarchies along with false natualistic conceptions of the meanings of race and universalistic understandings of gender, by considering whiteness as it shapes and is infused by gender, class, sexuality, and culture. Central to this project are questions about how it is that culture and the state create such a wide range of different people who understand themselves as white. The essays collected here discuss how one learns to be a good white Southern woman, what it means to pass as white, and whether there really is a dilemma that accompanies white privilege.
