Moving boldly between literary analysis and political theory, contemporary and antebellum US culture, Arthur Riss invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, liberalism, and literary representation. Situating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass at the center of antebellum debates over the person-hood of the slave, this 2006 book examines how a nation dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal' formulates arguments both for and against race-based slavery. This revisionary argument promises to be unsettling for literary critics, political philosophers, historians of US slavery, as well as those interested in the link between literature and human rights.

Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of "free labor" in mid-nineteenth-century America. Husband shows how the images of families split apart by slavery, circulated primarily by women leaders, proved to be the most powerful weapon in the antislavery cultural campaign and ultimately turned the nation against slavery. She also reveals the ways in which the sentimental narratives and icons that constituted the "family protection campaign" powerfully influenced Americans sense of the role of government, gender, and race in industrializing America. Chapters examine the writings of ardent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, non-activist sympathizers, and those actively hostile to but deeply immersed in antislavery activism including Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This book examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of 'free labour' in mid-nineteenth-century America.

This title looks at Frederick Douglass, from his early life, through the work that made him famous.

"American Dark Age contends that life in early and antebellum America for Black people resembles what Keidrick Roy calls "racial feudalism," a race-based system of social stratification in the U.S. that operates as an extension of medieval ideas and customs. Accordingly, this project does not read Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence against the backdrop of the European and American Enlightenment traditions, as virtually all modern scholars have done. Instead, it seeks to understand Jefferson as a product of the same feudal frameworks he claimed to supersede. Jefferson's attachment to feudalism is most evident in his approbation of two new aristocracies during the Age of Enlightenment: (1) the aristocracy of the mind, which he calls a "natural aristocracy," and (2) the aristocracy of the skin, what abolitionist Frederick Douglass later dubs, with emphasis, "skin-aristocracy." After tracing the lineaments of racial feudalism, Roy shows how four African Americans-James McCune Smith, William Wells Brown, Francis Harper, and Harriet Jacobs-present distinctive but interconnected visions for overcoming its effects in the mid-nineteenth century by upending the antecedent feudal architecture of American liberalism, a broad tradition whose unifying strands otherwise emphasize individual liberties, egalitarianism, moral universalism, and meliorism (the belief in the possibility for social and political progress). Ultimately, Roy argues, McCune Smith, Wells Brown, Harper, and Jacobs maintained a spirit of cautious optimism against the retrogressive forces of plantation slavery in the South and what McCune Smith calls "caste-slavery in the North." Their quest to destroy racial feudalism and reformulate American liberalism established the conditions for initiating new ways of being "American.""--

An intellectual portrait of the iconic 19th-century slave and abolitionist who took the lead in applying the Founders' doctrine of natural rights to the plight of African Americans. Reveals how Douglass's vision still guides contemporary liberalism.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication in 1935, Black Reconstruction has only grown in historical and literary importance. In the 1960s it joined the canon of the most influential revisionist historical works. Its greatest achievement is weaving a credible, lyrical historical narrative of the hostile and politically fraught years of 1860-1880 with a powerful critical analysis of the harmful effects of democracy, including Jim Crow laws and other injustices. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by David Levering Lewis, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.