During one of the darkest periods of U.S. history, when white supremacy was entrenching itself throughout the nation, the white writer-jurist-activist Albion W. Tourgee (1838-1905) forged an extraordinary alliance with African Americans. Acclaimed by blacks as ""one of the best friends of the Afro-American people this country has ever produced,"" and reviled by white Southerners as a race traitor, Tourgee offers an ideal lens through which to reexamine the often caricatured relations between progressive whites and African Americans. He collaborated closely with African Americans in founding an interracial civil rights organization eighteen years before the inception of the NAACP, in campaigning against lynching alongside Ida B. Wells and Cleveland Gazette editor Harry C. Smith, and in challenging the ideology of segregation as lead counsel for people of color in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. Here, Carolyn L. Karcher provides the first in-depth account of this collaboration. Drawing on Tourgee's vast correspondence with African American intellectuals, activists, and ordinary folk; on African American newspapers; and on his newspaper column, ""A Bystander's Notes,"" in which he quoted and replied to letters from his correspondents, the book also captures the lively dialogue about race that Tourgee and his contemporaries carried on.

Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times is the provocative story of an upperclass white woman who marries an Indian chief, has a child, then leaves him--with the child--for another man. This novel, originally published in 1824, is a powerful first among antipatriarchal and antiracist novels in American literature. In addition, this collection contains seven remarkable short stories; an extract on Indian women from Child's groundbreaking History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835); a selection from her best-selling volume of journalistic sketches, Letters from New-York (1843); and her eloquent Appeal for Indians (1868). This revised edition of ""Hobomok"" and Other Writings on Indians includes three new stories: ""The Church in the Wilderness,"" ""Willie Wharton,"" and ""The Indians""--as well as explanatory notes and an updated bibliography.

A classic of American political fiction first published in 1880, a mere three years after Reconstruction officially ended, "Bricks Without Straw" offers an inside view of the struggle to create a just society in the post-slavery South. It is unique among the white-authored literary works of its time in presenting Reconstruction through the eyes of emancipated slaves. As a leading Radical Republican, the author, Albion W. Tourgee, played a key role in drafting a democratized Constitution for North Carolina after the Civil War, and he served as a state superior court judge during Reconstruction. Tourgee worked closely with African Americans and poor whites in the struggle to transform North Carolina's racial and class politics. He saw the ravages of the Ku Klux Klan firsthand, worked to bring the perpetrators of Klan atrocities to justice, and fought against what he called the "counter-revolution" that destroyed Reconstruction.

"Bricks Without Straw" is Tourgee's fictionalized account of how Reconstruction was sabotaged. It is a chilling picture of violence against African Americans condoned, civil rights abrogated, constitutional amendments subverted, and electoral fraud institutionalized. Its plot revolves around a group of North Carolina freedpeople who strive to build new lives for themselves by buying land, marketing their own crops, setting up a church and school, and voting for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Klan terrorism and the ascendancy of a white supremacist government reduce them to neo-slavery. This edition of "Bricks Without Straw" is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher's introduction, which sets the novel in historical context and provides an overview of Albion W. Tourgee's career, a chronology of the significant events of both the Reconstruction era and Tourgee's life, and explanatory notes identifying actual events fictionalized in the novel.

For half a century Lydia Maria Child was a household name in the United States. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters--the historical novel, the short story, children's literature, the domestic advice book, women's history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history.

Published in Boston in 1833, Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans provided the abolitionist movement with its first full-scale analysis of race and enslavement. Controversial in its own time, the Appeal surveyed the institution of slavery from historical, political, economic, legal, racial, and moral perspectives and advocated for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved without compensation to their enslavers. By placing American slavery in historical context and demonstrating how slavery impacted—and implicated—Americans of all regions and races, the Appeal became a central text for the abolitionist movement that continues to resonate in the present day. This revised and updated edition is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s illuminating introduction, a chronology of Child’s life, and a list of books for further reading.

For half a century Lydia Maria Child was a household name in the United States. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters-the historical novel, the short story, children's literature, the domestic advice book, women's history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history.