The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library W028650 The "late publications" referred to are those of Mathew Carey, particularly his "Short account of the malignant fever, lately prevalent in Philadelphia .." - District of Pennsylvania copyright notice (p. [2]) names Jones and Richard Allen as authors. "To Philadelphia: Printed for the authors, by William W. Woodward, at Franklin's Head, no. 41, Chesnut-Street, 1794. 28 p.; 12°

"Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were two formerly enslaved Africans who became community leaders and founders of Philadelphia's Free African Society. They wrote this gripping account refuting the misrepresentations of the role of blacks during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. One of the first pamphlets published in America by African Americans, their narrative sets the record straight about the many black citizens who heroically risked their lives during the epidemic that ravaged Philadelphia. Yellow fever was first diagnosed near Philadelphia's waterfront lte in the summer of 1793 and, in less than 100 days, some 10 percent of the city population lay dead. Under the leadership of Jones and Allen, Philadelphia's blacks courageously entered the homes of, and nursed, the hundreds of sick and dying when many of their neighbors were immobilized by fear"--Page 4 of cover

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass. Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.