1st Edition
African-American Activism before the Civil War The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North
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.
Table of Contents
Preface by Mia Bay
Introduction, by Patrick Rael
Chapter 1: "Emancipation of the Negro Abolitionist", Leon Litwack
Chapter 2: "Black Power—The Debate in 1840", Jane H. Pease, William H. Pease
Chapter 3: "Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827-1850", Frederick Cooper
Chapter 4: "Black History’s Antebellum Origins", Benjamin Quarles
Chapter 5: "Since They Got Those Separate Churches: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia", Emma Jones Lapsansky
Chapter 6: "Interpreting Early Black Ideology: A Reappraisal of Historical Consensus", George A. Levesque
Chapter 7: "Afro-American Identity: Reflections on the Pre-Civil War Era", Ernest Allen, Jr.
Chapter 8: "Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks," James Oliver Horton
Chapter 9: "The Political Significance of Slave Resistance", James Oakes
Chapter 10: "It was a Proud Day: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741-1834", Shane White
Chapter 11: "Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands: Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America", Albert Raboteau
Chapter 12: "The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790-1840", James Brewer Stewart
Chapter 13: "From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of the Five Points’: The Discourse of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City," Leslie M. Harris
Chapter 14: "The Redeemer Race and the Angry Saxon: Race, Gender, and White People in Antebellum Black Ethnology," Mia Bay
Chapter 15: "The Market Revolution and Market Values in Antebellum Black Protest Thought", Patrick Rael
For Further Reading
Biography
Patrick Rael is Associate Professor of History at Bowdoin College, Maine. He is the author of Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North and Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860 (Routledge).
