Liberating Sojourn
Liberating Sojourn

Author: Alan J. Rice

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780820321295

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Still in his twenties but already famous for his fiery orations and controversial autobiography, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass traveled to Great Britain in 1845 on an eighteen-month lecture and fund-raising tour. This book examines how that visit affected transatlantic reform movements and Douglass’s own thinking. The first book dedicated specifically to the trip, it features the work of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic--including Douglass biographer William McFeely and abolitionist scholar R. J. M. Blackett--who use Douglass’s visit to reexamine aspects of his life and times. The contributors reveal the visit’s significance to an understanding of transatlantic gender relations, religion, radicalism, and popular views of African Americans in Britain and also examine such topics as Douglass’s attitudes toward the Irish and his campaign against the Free Church of Scotland for accepting southern money. Together, these essays show that Douglass’s journey was a personal and political triumph and a key event in his development, leaving him better prepared to set the strategies and ideologies of the abolitionist movement.

The Frederick Douglass Papers
The Frederick Douglass Papers

Author: Frederick Douglass

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2009-12-08

Total Pages: 723

ISBN-13: 0300135602

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This volume of The Frederick Douglass Papers represents the first of a four-volume series of the selected correspondence of the great American abolitionist and reformer. Douglass’s correspondence was richly varied, from relatively obscure slaveholders and fugitive slaves to poets and politicians, including Horace Greeley, William H. Seward, Susan B. Anthony, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The letters acquaint us with Douglass’s many roles—politician, abolitionist, diplomat, runaway slave, women’s rights advocate, and family man—and include many previously unpublished letters between Douglass and members of his family. Douglass stood at the epicenter of the political, social, intellectual, and cultural issues of antebellum America. This collection of Douglass’s early correspondence illuminates not only his growth as an activist and writer, but the larger world of the times and the abolition movement as well.

Smashing the Liquor Machine
Smashing the Liquor Machine

Author: Mark Lawrence Schrad

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 753

ISBN-13: 0190841575

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When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event.Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad's counterintuitiveglobal history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "Americanexceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberalself-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical Americanevangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations ofthe American west.Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers havebeen led to believe.