This bibliography of more than three thousand entries, often extensively annotated, lists books and pamphlets that illuminate evolving British views on the United States during a period of great change on both sides of the Atlantic. Subjects addressed in various decades include slavery and abolitionism, women's rights, the Civil War, organized labor, economic, cultural, and social behavior, political and religious movements, and the "American" character in general.

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist 'Biography' A groundbreaking biography of the most pioneering and accomplished African-American writer of the nineteenth century. Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres: travelogue, novel (the now canonized Clotel), printed play, and history. He also practiced medicine, ran for office, and campaigned for black uplift, temperance, and civil rights. Ezra Greenspan’s masterful work, elegantly written and rigorously researched, sets Brown’s life in the richly rendered context of his times, creating a fascinating portrait of an inventive writer who dared to challenge the racial orthodoxies and explore the racial complexities of nineteenth-century America.

In Performing Anti-Slavery, Gay Gibson Cima reimagines the connection between the self and the other within activist performance, providing fascinating new insights into women's nineteenth-century reform efforts, revising the history of abolition, and illuminating an affective repertoire that haunts both present-day theatrical stages and anti-trafficking organizations. Cima argues that black and white American women in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement transformed mainstream performance practices into successful activism. In family circles, literary associations, religious gatherings, and transatlantic anti-slavery societies, women debated activist performance strategies across racial and religious differences: they staged abolitionist dialogues, recited anti-slavery poems, gave speeches, shared narratives, and published essays. Drawing on liberal religious traditions as well as the Eastern notion of transmigration, Elizabeth Chandler, Sarah Forten, Maria W. Stewart, Sarah Douglass, Lucretia Mott, Ellen Craft and others forged activist pathways that reverberate to this day.

The period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly 'free' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.

In Building an Antislavery Wall, R. J. M. Blackett examines the efforts of black Americans in England to advance the cause of their own freedom. Speaking to enthusiastic working-class crowds in the cities and lobbying in the salons of the wealthy and aristocratic, black Americans used England as a forum to tell the world of their cruel plight in the United States, to expose what they saw as an oppressive slave society masquerading as the seat of democracy and freedom. It was their goal to create a moral cordon around the United States so that, in the words of Frederick Douglass, “wherever a slaveholder went, he might hear nothing but denunciation of slavery, that he might be looked upon as a man-stealing, cradle-robbing, woman-stripping monster, and that he might see reproof and detestation on every hand.” The American blacks who visited England between 1830 and 1860 came there for various specific reasons—some to raise funds for projects at home, some to receive the education that they had been denied by American colleges, many for refuge from slave-catchers. But every black saw himself, at least to some extent, as an emissary from his enslaved brethren in America, and he was treated as such by British society. Some—Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany, for example—were already famous; others, like Henry “Box” Brown and James Watkins, would gain fame through their lecturing while in England. Some of the blacks who came to England were ministers; others were doctors, journalists, and authors of slave narratives. Clearly gifted and articulate individuals, these black Americans stood as living proof of slavery’s unfairness, flesh-and-blood refutations of America’s boasted freedom. Tracing the impact of the black Americans, Blackett concludes that they were very effective spokesmen who significantly advanced the cause of the Atlantic abolitionist movement. British support had monetary as well as symbolic value, and the popularity of the blacks as lecturers gave them a special edge in both fund-raising and proselytizing. At the same time, while organized white abolitionist societies expended much of their energy on sectarian disputes, the blacks sought to bridge these differences in the hope of marshaling the full weight of British opinion in their favor. The blacks played an especially important role, Blackett finds, in discrediting the American Colonization Society—their adamant opposition made it difficult for colonizationists to convince the British that their plan was in the blacks’ best interest. Chronicling the efforts of black Americans to win international support for their struggles at home, Building an Antislavery Wall illuminates an important chapter in the history of American reform and in the emergence of an articulate black leadership in the United States.

A second volume of the collected correspondence of the great African-American reformer and abolitionist features correspondence written during the Civil War years The second collection of meticulously edited correspondence with abolitionist, author, statesman, and former slave Frederick Douglass covers the years leading up to the Civil War through the close of the conflict, offering readers an illuminating portrait of an extraordinary American and the turbulent times in which he lived. An important contribution to historical scholarship, the documents offer fascinating insights into the abolitionist movement during wartime and the author's relationship to Abraham Lincoln and other prominent figures of the era.