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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies
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Word by Word - Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Paperback)
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Word by Word - Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Paperback)
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One of the cruelest abuses of slavery in America was that slaves
were forbidden to read and write. Consigned to illiteracy, they
left no records of their thoughts and feelings apart from the few
exceptional narratives of Frederick Douglass and others who escaped
to the North-or so we have long believed. But as Christopher Hager
reveals, a few enslaved African Americans managed to become
literate in spite of all prohibitions, and during the halting years
of emancipation thousands more seized the chance to learn. The
letters and diaries of these novice writers, unpolished and
hesitant yet rich with voice, show ordinary black men and women
across the South using pen and paper to make sense of their
experiences. Through an unprecedented gathering of these forgotten
writings-from letters by individuals sold away from their families,
to petitions from freedmen in the army to their new leaders, to a
New Orleans man's transcription of the Constitution-Word by Word
rewrites the history of emancipation. The idiosyncrasies of these
untutored authors, Hager argues, reveal the enormous difficulty of
straddling the border between slave and free. These unusual texts,
composed by people with a unique perspective on the written word,
force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom.
For African Americans at the end of slavery, learning to write
could be liberating and empowering, but putting their hard-won
skill to use often proved arduous and daunting-a portent of the
tenuousness of the freedom to come.
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