Download or read book The Press and Slavery in America 1791 1859 written by Brian Gabrial and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This scholarly study examines the shifting perceptions of slavery in the antebellum South through news accounts of major slave rebellions. Slavery remains one of the United States’ most troubling failings and its complexities have shaped American ideas about race, economics, politics, and the press since the first days of settlement. Brian Gabrial’s The Press and Slavery in America, 1791–1859 explores those intersections at moments when enslaved people revolted or conspired to revolt. Such events forced public discussions about slavery at times when supporters of the peculiar institution preferred them to be silent. This volume covers news accounts of five major slave rebellions or conspiracies: Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 Virginia slave conspiracy; the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt; Denmark Vesey’s 1822 slave conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina; Nat Turner’s 1831 Southampton County, Virginia, slave revolt; and John Brown’s 1859 Harper’s Ferry raid. Gabrial situates these stories within a historical framework that juxtaposes the transformation of the press into a powerful mass media with the growing political divide over slavery, illustrating how two American cultures, both asserting claims to founding America, devolved into enemies over slavery. What the nineteenth century press reveals in this book are discourses that have retained resonance in contemporary race relations and American politics. They connect to ideas about the press and technology, changing journalistic practice, and the destruction wrought by the dysfunction of the nation’s political parties.

Download or read book The Denmark Vesey Affair written by Douglas R. Egerton and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-10-26 with total page 915 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vast collection of documents that illuminate one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the U.S. In 1822, thirty-four slaves and their leader, a free black man named Denmark Vesey, were tried and executed for "attempting to raise an insurrection" in Charleston, South Carolina. In The Denmark Vesey Affair, Douglas Egerton and Robert Paquette annotate and interpret a vast collection of contemporary documents that illuminate and contextualize this complicated saga, providing the definitive account of a landmark event that played a role in the nation’s path to Civil War. The editors ultimately argue that the Vesey plot was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Download or read book A Long Reconstruction written by Paul William Harris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After slavery was abolished, how far would white America go toward including African Americans as full participants in the country's institutions? Conventional historical timelines mark the end of Reconstruction in the year 1877, but the Methodist Episcopal Church continued to wrestle with issues of racial inclusion for decades after political support for racial reform had receded. An 1844 schism over slavery split Methodism into northern and southern branches, but Union victory in the Civil War provided the northern Methodists with the opportunity to send missionaries and teachers into the territory that had been occupied by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. To a remarkable degree, the M.E. Church succeeded in appealing to freed slaves and white Unionists and thereby built up a biracial membership far surpassing that of any other Protestant denomination. A Long Reconstruction details the denomination's journey with unification and justice. African Americans who joined did so in a spirit of hope that through religious fellowship and cooperation they could gain respect and acceptance and ultimately assume a position of equality and brotherhood with whites. However, as segregation gradually took hold in the South, many northern Methodists evinced the same skepticism as white southerners about the fitness of African Americans for positions of authority and responsibility in an interracial setting. The African American membership was never without strong white allies who helped to sustain the Church's official stance against racial caste but, like the nation as a whole, the M.E. Church placed a growing priority on putting their broken union back together.

Download or read book Storytelling History and the Postmodern South written by Jason Phillips and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-10 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On November 5, 1968, Ralph Ellison stood up at the Southern Historical Association meeting in New Orleans and called the members gathered there “respectable liars,” thus exposing the link between “official” history and the dominant consciousness of the time. Historian Jason Phillips refers to such scholarship as “master narratives”—stories masquerading as truth that promote the interests of white patriarchy past and present. In this innovative collection, Phillips and ten other historians and literary scholars explore an enduring dynamic between history, literature, and power in the American South. Blending analysis with storytelling, and professional insights with personal experiences, they “deconstruct Dixie,” insisting that writing the South’s history means harnessing, not criticizing, the inherent power of narrative. The contributors examine white southern narratives from multiple, fresh perspectives and consider ways in which storytelling helped shape identity and mold scholarship over time. Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that William Percy’s life and work blurred fact and fiction as he negotiated the anti-intellectual conventions of a rural, hierarchical South as a cosmopolitan and homosexual. Orville Vernon Burton and Ian Binnington investigate nationalism, local allegiances, and the imagined community of the Confederacy. Farrell O’Gorman, Jewel L. Spangler, David A. Davis, Robert Jackson, Anne Marshall, K. Stephen Prince, and Jim Downs explore diverse topics such as southern Gothic fiction and the centrality of religion, white trash autobiographies, the “professional southerner” in literature and criticism, and the “one-drop rule” of racial taxonomy in America. Like Ellison, these writers look beyond ideology and race, including how often-overlooked, basic elements of a work—such as its form, plot, aesthetics, or genre—can re- or deconstruct white southern power. Showcasing new ways of interpreting texts, they encourage historians and literary scholars to move beyond theory to engage the historical context of southern stories and storytelling while reading evidence more deeply and stories more broadly.

Download or read book Why Slavery Endures written by David W. Bulla and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines slavery, an antiquated, ugly, inhumane practice, seemingly abolished in the nineteenth century, yet never eradicated. The legacies of historical slavery have become increasingly subject to public debate, manifested in calls for reparations, the UNESCO Slave Route Project, and in the dismantling of Confederate monuments in the United States. NGOs have researched and publicized the extent of contemporary slavery, which some of the essays in this collection discuss. This area of inquiry intersects with wider debates about the legacies of colonialism and structural racism—which could be seen in the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns in South Africa and Oxford. NGOs estimate that there are between 21 and 46 million slaves worldwide today. The essays gathered here critically examine the historical roots of slavery, the issue of reparations, and deconstruct contemporary human trafficking.

Download or read book Handbook for the Christian Faith written by James M. Dawsey and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is religion disappearing from American life? Less than 50 percent of Americans now hold membership in any religious institution, and even fewer attend worship services. The decline in Christian churches is especially pronounced among the young and cuts across all denominations. But for Methodists and like-minded Protestants, concerns are deeper than shrinking denominational membership. Polls show disconcerting ignorance about religious and spiritual matters even among churchgoers. Our values as a society are in large measure molded by religion. What shape will Protestant Christianity take in the twenty-first century? And of Methodism? And beyond that, what kind of community will we be? Dawsey proposes returning to the roots of Christianity. And with anecdotes and stories and a sweeping grasp of church history, he examines those essential practices and beliefs necessary to revitalize American churches. Key, he argues, is rediscovering Christianity as a philosophy of living. John Wesley characterized the practice of religion as first, doing no harm; second, doing good; and third, keeping the ordinances of faith. Loving God and God’s creation—the doing of Christianity—marks the path for becoming the churches and individuals Christians were called to be.

Download or read book Clash written by Jon Marshall and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Trump’s presidency was marked by angry attacks on journalists, an extraordinary ability to capture the media spotlight, a flood of disinformation from the White House, and bitter partisanship reflected in the media. Trump’s dysfunctional relationship with the press affected how the United States dealt with the crises of COVID-19, climate change, social unrest due to systemic racism, and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But Trump’s troubled relationship with the press didn’t happen by chance. Clash explores the political, economic, social, and technological forces that have shaped the relationship between U.S. presidents and the press during times of crisis. In addition to Trump’s presidency, Clash examines those of John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Some of these presidents faced military or international crises. Others were challenged by economic downturns or political scandals. And sometimes the survival of America’s system of government was at stake. By examining what happened between presidents and the press during these pivotal times, Clash helps us understand how we arrived at our current troubled state of affairs. It concludes with recommendations for strengthening the role the press plays in keeping presidents accountable.

Download or read book An Inky Business written by Matthew J. Shaw and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Inky Business is a book about the making and printing of news. It is a history of ink, paper, printing press, and type, and of those who made and read newspapers in Britain, continental Europe, and America from the British Civil Wars to the Battle of Gettysburg nearly two hundred years later. But it is also an account of what news was and how the idea of news became central to public life. Newspapers ranged from purveyors of high seriousness to carriers of scurrilous gossip. Indeed, our current obsession with “fake news” and the worrying revelations or hints about how money, power, and technology shapes and controls the press and the flows of what is believed to be genuine information have dark early-modern echoes.

Download or read book Before Equiano written by Zachary McLeod Hutchins and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the antebellum United States, formerly enslaved men and women who told their stories and advocated for abolition helped establish a new genre with widely recognized tropes: the slave narrative. This book investigates how enslaved black Africans conceived of themselves and their stories before the War of American Independence and the genre's development in the nineteenth century. Zachary McLeod Hutchins argues that colonial newspapers were pivotal in shaping popular understandings of both slavery and the black African experience well before the slave narrative's proliferation. Introducing the voices and art of black Africans long excluded from the annals of literary history, Hutchins shows how the earliest life writing by and about enslaved black Africans established them as political agents in an Atlantic world defined by diplomacy, war, and foreign relations. In recovering their stories, Hutchins sheds new light on how black Africans became Black Americans; how the earliest accounts of enslaved life were composed editorially from textual fragments rather than authored by a single hand; and how the public discourse of slavery shifted from the language of just wars and foreign policy to a heritable, race-based system of domestic oppression.

Download or read book Excavating Exodus written by Joshua Laurence Cohen and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excavating Exodus analyzes adaptations of Exodus in novels, newspapers, and speeches from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights era. Although Exodus has perennially served to mobilize resistance to oppression, Black writers have radically reinterpreted its meaning over the past two centuries. Changing interpretations of Moses’ story reflect evolving conceptions of racial identity, religious authority, gender norms, political activism, and literary form. Black writers transformed Moses from a paragon of race loyalty into an avatar of authoritarianism. Excavating Exodus identifies a rhetorical tradition initiated by David Walker and carried on by Martin Delany and Frances Harper that treats Moses’ loyalty to his fellow Hebrews as his defining characteristic. By the twentieth century, however, a more skeptical group of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and William Melvin Kelley, associated Moses with overbearing charismatic authority. This book traces the transition from Walker, who treated Moses as the epitome of self-sacrifice, to Kelley, who considered Moses a flawed model of leadership and a threat to individual self-reliance. By asking how Moses became a touchstone for notions of racial belonging, Excavating Exodus illuminates how Black intellectuals reinvented the Mosaic model of charismatic male leadership.

Download or read book The Great Stain written by Noel Rae and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Eyewitness testimonies to the culture and commerce of slavery . . . coupled with smart commentary” from an acclaimed historian. “Essential.”(Kirkus Reviews) In this important book, Noel Rae integrates firsthand accounts into a narrative history that brings the reader face to face with slavery’s everyday reality. From the travel journals of sixteenth-century Spanish settlers who offered religious instruction and “protection” in exchange for farm labor, to the diaries of Reverend Cotton Mather, to Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted’s travelogue about the “cotton states,” to an 1880 speech given by Frederick Douglass, Rae provides a comprehensive portrait of the antebellum history of the nation. Most significant are the testimonies from former slaves themselves, ranging from the famous Solomon Northup to the virtually unknown Mary Reynolds, who was sold away from her mother as child. Drawing on thousands of original sources, The Great Stain tells of a society based on the exploitation of labor and fallacies of racial superiority. Meticulously researched, this is a work of history that is profoundly relevant to our world today. “Noel Rae expertly assembles the most consequential accounts from the era of the American slave trade. . . . A vivid and comprehensive picture.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America “Uniquely immediate, multivoiced, specific, arresting, and illuminating.” —Booklist “Many histories have been written of slavery in America, but far too few have let the participants, and particularly the victims, speak so directly for themselves. Rae has helped to fill that historical vacuum in this important work, and the voices are intense, eloquent, and haunting.” —National Book Review

Download or read book James Hamilton of South Carolina written by Robert Tinkler and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An esteemed planter, politician, and military leader influential in the affairs of both South Carolina and Texas, James Hamilton (1786--1857) so declined in reputation during the last twenty years of his life that his home state refused to acknowledge him when he died. Robert Tinkler's superb, first-published biography of Hamilton conveys the enormous drama, dignity, and pathos that marked Hamilton's pursuit of the greatness achieved by his prominent Revolutionary-era forebears and his subsequent profound reversal brought on by debt. While a member of Congress during the 1820s, Hamilton came to champion states' interests over a strong central national government. As governor of South Carolina, 1830--1832, he reached the pinnacle of his political and social glory when he presided over the Nullification Crisis of 1832. Hamilton's undoing began with a series of ill-advised cotton speculations that left him deeply and very publicly in arrears by 1839. He desperately sought relief -- even supporting the Compromise of 1850 in hopes of monetary benefit, while alienating his old allies in the process. To his fellow southerners, Hamilton became a scourge and embarrassment as one who compromised his political beliefs because of fiscal distress. Perhaps even more than his political apostasy, Hamilton's unforgivable offense may have been to remind planters of their own struggles with chronic debt. Tinkler's extraordinary research into both Hamilton's life and the dynamics of reputation and debt in the antebellum South suggests that many contemporaries simply wished to forget Hamilton's plight so as to avoid facing their own financial reality. Possessing the weight of tragedy, James Hamilton of South Carolina documents a powerful man's achievements and the events and personal flaws that led to his fall.

Download or read book The Enslaved and Their Enslavers written by Edward Pearson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution's development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them. Throughout South Carolina's long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.

Download or read book Hemispheric Regionalism written by Gretchen J. Woertendyke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this broad ranging study, Gretchen Woertendyke reconfigures US literary history as a product of hemispheric relations. Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre, brings together a rich archive of popular culture, fugitive slave narratives, advertisements, political treatises, and literature to construct a new literary history from a hemispheric and regional perspective. At the center of this history is romance, a popular and versatile literary genre uniquely capable of translating the threat posed by the Haitian Revolution--or the expansionist possibilities of Cuban annexation--for a rapidly increasing readership. Through romance, she traces imaginary and real circuits of exchange and remaps romance's position in nineteenth century life and letters as irreducible to, nor fully mediated by, a concept of nation. The energies associated with Cuba and Haiti, manifest destiny and apocalypse, bring historical depth to an otherwise short national history. As a result, romance becomes remarkably influential in inculcating a sense of new world citizenry. The study shifts our critical focus from novel and nation, to romance and region, inevitable, she argues, when we attend to the tangled, messy relations across geographic and historical boundaries. Woertendyke reads the archives of Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Denmark Vesey along with less frequently treated writers such as John Howison, William Gilmore Simms, and J.H. Ingraham. The study provides a new context for understanding works by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and James Fenimore Cooper and brings together the theories of Charles Brockden Brown, the editorial work of Maturin M. Ballou, and the historical romances of Walter Scott. In Hemispheric Regionalism, Woertendyke demonstrates that US literature has always been the product of hemispheric and regional relations and that all forms of romance are central to this history.

Download or read book Travel and the Pan African Imagination written by Tracy Keith Flemming and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-02 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travel and the Pan African Imagination explores the African Atlantic world as a productive theater or space where modernity, racialized dominance, and racialized resistance took form. The book stresses the importance of placing three Atlantic figures—the Charleston, South Carolina-based armed resistance leader Denmark Vesey; the West African emigration advocate Edward Wilmot Blyden; and the Christian missionary and teacher in Liberia as well as the United States, Alexander Crummell—within an Atlantic context and as African world community figures between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The book also examines the religious origins of Black Power ideology and modern Pan Africanism as products of the intense dialogue within the African world community about concepts of modernity, progress, and civilization. Tracy Keith Flemming identifies how travel and social mobility led to the generation of an ever more complex and dynamic Atlantic world and of a fluid and adaptive African world community imagination for those figures who were forced to operate within and against a racially framed universe. The vexing social position and symbolic figure of “the African” was central to the dilemmas facing the racialized imagination of African world community figures and the discipline of Africology.

Download or read book Denmark Vesey s Bible written by Jeremy Schipper and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides a historical reconstruction of a famous trial in the antebellum American South in which the Bible was invoked alternatively by the prosecution and the defense as both a pro- and antislavery text"--

Download or read book Race and American Political Development written by Joseph E. Lowndes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race has been present at every critical moment in American political development, shaping political institutions, political discourse, public policy, and its denizens’ political identities. But because of the nature of race—its evolving and dynamic status as a structure of inequality, a political organizing principle, an ideology, and a system of power—we must study the politics of race historically, institutionally, and discursively. Covering more than three hundred years of American political history from the founding to the contemporary moment, the contributors in this volume make this extended argument. Together, they provide an understanding of American politics that challenges our conventional disciplinary tools of studying politics and our conservative political moment’s dominant narrative of racial progress. This volume, the first to collect essays on the role of race in American political history and development, resituates race in American politics as an issue for sustained and broadened critical attention.