One of the nation's foremost Lincoln scholars offers an authoritative consideration of the document that represents the most far-reaching accomplishment of our greatest president. No single official paper in American history changed the lives of as many Americans as Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. But no American document has been held up to greater suspicion. Its bland and lawyerlike language is unfavorably compared to the soaring eloquence of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural; its effectiveness in freeing the slaves has been dismissed as a legal illusion. And for some African-Americans the Proclamation raises doubts about Lincoln himself. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation dispels the myths and mistakes surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation and skillfully reconstructs how America's greatest president wrote the greatest American proclamation of freedom.

In Emancipation's Daughters, Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States. Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson shows how five emblematic black women—Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé—have challenged white-centered definitions of American identity. By using the rhetoric of motherhood and focusing on families and children, these leaders have defied racist images of black women, such as the mammy or the welfare queen, and rewritten scripts of femininity designed to exclude black women from civic participation. Richardson shows that these women's status as national icons was central to reconstructing black womanhood in ways that moved beyond dominant stereotypes. However, these formulations are often premised on heteronormativity and exclude black queer and trans women. Throughout Emancipation's Daughters, Richardson reveals new possibilities for inclusive models of blackness, national femininity, and democracy.

Excerpt from Slavery and the War The reconstruction Of the Union on the basis of slavery is the real aim of the chiefs of the Southern Rebellion, which reconstruction would give them a government similar in its essential features to that of an cient pagan Rome, and a government, if the States held. Together, prepared for future conquest. Ethe Union reconstructed, it could pro ceed to the conquest of Mexico and Central America, and reduce their negro and colored populations to slavery, which would be counted their Americanization. This done, it could proceed, beginning with Cuba, to the annexation, one after another, of the West India Islands. It then could extend its power Over the whole continent of South America, and threaten an advance upon Eastern Asia, and the annexation of all the cotton-producing countries and tropical regions Of the globe, and through the monopoly of cotton, rice, and tropical productions in general, to Obtain the control of the commerce and credit of all nations. Such, to a greater or less extent, is the dream which Southern statesmen have indulged, and which they have taken the first step toward realizing. In its full extent no sane man supposes the dream practicable; but its practicability, up to a certain point, has been demonstrated by the suc cess which has hitherto attended the Rebellion, for, up to the present, successful it undeniably has been. The Confederates have brought into the field a more effective, if not a larger force, than the Federal govern ment has thus far brought against them and, from the Potomac to the Mississippi, they hold the strategic lines, and can be met by the Federal forces only at great disadvantage. As yet not one of those lines has been wrested from them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.