African-American Activism before the Civil War is the first collection of scholarship on the role of African Americans in the struggle for racial equality in the northern states before the Civil War. Many of these essays are already known as classics in the field, and others are well on their way to becoming definitive in a still-evolving field. Here, in one place for the first time, anchored by a comprehensive, analytical introduction discussing the historiography of antebellum black activism, the best scholarship on this crucial group of African American activists can finally be studied together.

African-American Activism before the Civil War is the first collection of scholarship on the role of African Americans in the struggle for racial equality in the northern states before the Civil War. Many of these essays are already known as classics in the field, and others are well on their way to becoming definitive in a still-evolving field. Here, in one place for the first time, anchored by a comprehensive, analytical introduction discussing the historiography of antebellum black activism, the best scholarship on this crucial group of African American activists can finally be studied together.

Between the Revolution and Civil War, African-American writing became a prominent feature of both black protest culture and American public life. Although denied a political voice in national affairs, black authors produced a wide range of literature to project their views into the public sphere.
The editors examine the important and previously overlooked pamphleteering tradition and offer new insights into how and why the printed word became so important to black activists during this critical period. This is the first book to capture the depth of black print culture before the Civil War.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, African-American writing became a prominent feature of both black protest culture and American public life. Although denied a political voice in national affairs, black authors produced a wide range of literature to project their views into the public sphere. Autobiographies and personal narratives told of slavery's horrors, newspapers railed against racism in its various forms, and poetry, novellas, reprinted sermons and speeches told tales of racial uplift and redemption.
The editors examine the important and previously overlooked pamphleteering tradition and offer new insights into how and why the printed word became so important to black activists during this critical period. An introduction by the editors situates the pamphlets in their various social, economic and political contexts. This is the first book to capture the depth of black print culture before the Civil War by examining perhaps its most important form, the pamphlet.

Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vaenus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country's postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vaenus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maraechal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France's need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

Even though there were relatively few people of colour in post-revolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Venus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country's post-revolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Venus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat by examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harboured by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Marechal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewellery fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonizations of Jeanne Duval, long-time lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France's need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure's centrality to the practices and production of diaspora.Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Goree Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers' narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian Vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure's manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.

In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas's mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara. Dorothy Thomas's story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered in Enterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain's Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.

Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery nationwide. Rael immerses readers in the mix of social, geographic, economic, and political factors that shaped this unique American experience. He not only takes a far longer view of slavery's demise than do those who date it to the rise of abolitionism in 1831, he also places it in a broader Atlantic context. We see how slavery ended variously by consent or force across time and place and how views on slavery evolved differently between the centers of European power and their colonial peripheries-some of which would become power centers themselves. Rael shows how African Americans played the central role in ending slavery in the United States. Fuelled by new Revolutionary ideals of self-rule and universal equality-and on their own or alongside abolitionists-both slaves and free blacks slowly turned American opinion against the slave interests in the South. Secession followed, and then began the national bloodbath that would demand slavery's complete destruction.

Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery nationwide. Rael immerses readers in the mix of social, geographic, economic, and political factors that shaped this unique American experience. He not only takes a far longer view of slavery's demise than do those who date it to the rise of abolitionism in 1831, he also places it in a broader Atlantic context. We see how slavery ended variously by consent or force across time and place and how views on slavery evolved differently between the centers of European power and their colonial peripheries-some of which would become power centers themselves. Rael shows how African Americans played the central role in ending slavery in the United States. Fuelled by new Revolutionary ideals of self-rule and universal equality-and on their own or alongside abolitionists-both slaves and free blacks slowly turned American opinion against the slave interests in the South. Secession followed, and then began the national bloodbath that would demand slavery's complete destruction.

In this study of antebellum African American print culture in transnational perspective, Erica L. Ball explores the relationship between antislavery discourse and the emergence of the northern black middle class.
Through innovative readings of slave narratives, sermons, fiction, convention proceedings, and the advice literature printed in forums like "Freedom's Journal," the "North Star," and the "Anglo-African Magazine," Ball demonstrates that black figures such as Susan Paul, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany consistently urged readers to internalize their political principles and to interpret all their personal ambitions, private familial roles, and domestic responsibilities in light of the freedom struggle. Ultimately, they were admonished to embody the abolitionist agenda by living what the fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward called an "antislavery life."
Far more than calls for northern free blacks to engage in what scholars call "the politics of respectability," African American writers characterized true antislavery living as an oppositional stance rife with radical possibilities, a deeply personal politics that required free blacks to transform themselves into model husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, self-made men, and transnational freedom fighters in the mold of revolutionary figures from Haiti to Hungary. In the process, Ball argues, antebellum black writers crafted a set of ideals--simultaneously respectable and subversive--for their elite and aspiring African American readers to embrace in the decades before the Civil War.
Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

In this study of antebellum African American print culture in transnational perspective, Erica L. Ball explores the relationship between antislavery discourse and the emergence of the northern black middle class. Through innovative readings of slave narratives, sermons, fiction, convention proceedings, and the advice literature printed in forums like Freedom's Journal, the North Star, and the Anglo-African Magazine, Ball demonstrates that black figures such as Susan Paul, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany consistently urged readers to internalize their political principles and to interpret all their personal ambitions, private familial roles, and domestic responsibilities in light of the freedom struggle. Ultimately, they were admonished to embody the abolitionist agenda by living what the fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward called an "antislavery life." Far more than calls for northern free blacks to engage in what scholars call "the politics of respectability," African American writers characterized true antislavery living as an oppositional stance rife with radical possibilities, a deeply personal politics that required free blacks to transform themselves into model husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, self-made men, and transnational freedom fighters in the mold of revolutionary figures from Haiti to Hungary. In the process, Ball argues, antebellum black writers crafted a set of ideals-simultaneously respectable and subversive-for their elite and aspiring African American readers to embrace in the decades before the Civil War. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

This title discusses about religion and race in the British Atlantic. This study offers a new and challenging look at Christian institutions and practices in Britain's Caribbean and southern American colonies. Focusing on the plantation societies of Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, Nicholas M. Beasley finds that the tradition of liturgical worship in these places was more vibrant and more deeply rooted in European Christianity than previously thought. In addition, Beasley argues, white colonists' attachment to religious continuity was thoroughly racialized. Church customs, sacraments, and ceremonies were a means of regulating slavery and asserting whiteness. Drawing on a mix of historical and anthropological methods, Beasley covers such topics as church architecture, pew seating customs, marriage, baptism, communion, and funerals. Colonists created an environment in sacred time and space that framed their rituals for maximum social impact, and they asserted privilege and power by privatizing some rituals and by meting out access to rituals to people of color. Throughout, Beasley is sensitive to how this culture of worship changed as each colony reacted to its own political, environmental, and demographic circumstances across time. Local factors influencing who partook in Christian rituals and how, when, and where these rituals took place could include the structure of the Anglican Church, which tended to be less hierarchical and centralized than at home in England; the level of tensions between Anglicans and Protestants; the persistence of African religious beliefs; and, colonists' attitudes toward free persons of color and elite slaves. This book enriches an existing historiography that neglects the cultural power of liturgical Christianity in the early South and the British Caribbean and offers a new account of the translation of early modern English Christianity to early America.

Considering Baltimore and Philadelphia as part of a larger, Mid-Atlantic borderland, The Politics of Black Citizenship shows that the antebellum effort to secure the rights of American citizenship was central to black politics-it was an effort that sought to exploit the ambiguities of citizenship and negotiate the complex national, state, and local politics in which that concept was determined. In the early nineteenth century, Baltimore and Philadelphia contained the largest two free black populations in the country, separated by a mere hundred miles. The counties that lie between them also contained large and vibrant freeblack populations in this period. In 1780, Pennsylvania had begun the process of outlawing slavery, while Maryland would cling desperately to the institution until the Civil War, and so these were also cities separated by the legal boundary between freedom and slavery. Despite the fact that slavery thrived in parts of the state of Maryland, in Baltimore the free black population outnumbered the enslaved so that on the eve of the Civil War there were ten times as many free blacks in the city of Baltimore as there were slaves. In this book Andrew Diemer examines the diverse tactics that free blacks employed in defense of their liberties-including violence and the building of autonomous black institutions-as well as African Americans' familiarity with the public policy and political struggles that helped shape those freedoms in the first place.

No fewer than seven hundred Civil War films have been made by Hollywood from early silent days to the present, from the epoch-making "Birth of a Nation," through "The Red Badge of Courage" and "Gone With the Wind" to the recent "Glory," "Ride with the Devil" and "Cold Mountain." This readable and innovative book on the American Civil War as presented in Hollywood cinema goes deep into the best of these films, arguing that rather than belonging to a single genre, Civil War films are to be found across genres, as domestic melodramas, Westerns or combat films for example. As such, they have fresh insights to give into the war and into America's sense of itself. "Shooting the Civil War" shows how these films create an American ancestor who is blameless and undertakes a process of reinscription into the American historical family. It also makes the remarkable revelation that no Civil War film yet made has had a central black character who survives the war, fathers the children of the future, and can stand as representative of the whole American people. To this extent, the book is saying, the Civil War remains a work in progress.

Early black protest thought and its contribution to black self-definition; Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany - these figures stand out in the annals of black protest for their vital antislavery efforts. But what of the rest of their generation, the thousands of other free blacks in the North? Patrick Rael explores the tradition of protest and sense of racial identity forged by both famous and lesser-known black leaders in antebellum America and illuminates the ideas that united these activists across a wide array of divisions. In so doing, he reveals the roots of the arguments that still resound in the struggle for justice today. Mining sources that include newspapers and pamphlets of the black national press, speeches and sermons, slave narratives and personal memoirs, Rael recovers the voices of an extraordinary range of black leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century. He traces how these activists constructed a black American identity through their participation in the discourse of the public sphere and how this identity in turn informed their critiques of a nation predicated on freedom but devoted to white supremacy. His analysis explains how their place in the industrializing, urbanizing antebellum North offered black leaders a unique opportunity to smooth over class and other tensions among themselves and successfully galvanize the race against slavery.

No fewer than seven hundred Civil War films have been made by Hollywood from early silent days to the present, from the epoch-making "Birth of a Nation," through "The Red Badge of Courage" and "Gone With the Wind" to the recent "Glory," "Ride with the Devil" and "Cold Mountain." This readable and innovative book on the American Civil War as presented in Hollywood cinema goes deep into the best of these films, arguing that rather than belonging to a single genre, Civil War films are to be found across genres, as domestic melodramas, Westerns or combat films for example. As such, they have fresh insights to give into the war and into America's sense of itself. "Shooting the Civil War" shows how these films create an American ancestor who is blameless and undertakes a process of reinscription into the American historical family. It also makes the remarkable revelation that no Civil War film yet made has had a central black character who survives the war, fathers the children of the future, and can stand as representative of the whole American people. To this extent, the book is saying, the Civil War remains a work in progress.