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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The astonishing transformation of the abolitionist movement during the Civil War proved enormously consequential both for the cause of abolitionism and for the nation at large. Drawing on a cast of famous and obscure figures from Frederick Douglass to Moncure Conway, Frank J. Cirillo’s The Abolitionist Civil War explores how immediate abolitionists contorted their arguments and clashed with each other as they labored over the course of the conflict to create a more perfect Union. Cirillo reveals that immediatists’ efforts to forge a morally transformed nation that enshrined emancipation and Black rights shaped contemporary debates surrounding the abolition of slavery but ultimately did little to achieve racial justice for African Americans beyond formal freedom.
Jesse Olsavsky’s The Most Absolute Abolition tells the dramatic story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground Railroad and revolutionized the abolitionist movement. These groups, based primarily in northeastern cities, defended Black neighborhoods from police and slave catchers. As the urban wing of the Underground Railroad, they helped as many as ten thousand refugees, building an elaborate network of like-minded sympathizers across boundaries of nation, gender, race, and class. Olsavsky reveals how the committees cultivated a movement of ideas animated by a motley assortment of agitators and intellectuals, including famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Henry David Thoreau, who shared critical information with one another. Formerly enslaved runaways—who grasped the economy of slavery, developed their own political imaginations, and communicated strategies of resistance to abolitionists—serve as the book’s central focus. The dialogues between fugitives and abolitionists further radicalized the latter’s tactics and inspired novel forms of feminism, prison reform, and utopian constructs. These notions transformed abolitionism into a revolutionary movement, one at the heart of the crises that culminated in the Civil War.