Pennsylvania contained the largest concentration of early AmericaOCOs abolitionist leaders and organizations, making it a necessary and illustrative stage from which to understand how national conversations about the place of free blacks in early America originated and evolved, and, importantly, the role that colonizationOCosupporting the emigration of free and emancipated blacks to AfricaOCoplayed in national and international antislavery movements. Beverly C. TomekOCOs meticulous exploration of the archives of the American Colonization Society, PennsylvaniaOCOs abolitionist societies, and colonizationist leaders (both black and white) enables her to boldly and innovatively demonstrate that, in Philadelphia at least, the American Colonization Society often worked closely with other antislavery groups to further the goals of the abolitionist movement. In Colonization and Its Discontents, Tomek brings a much-needed examination of the complexity of the colonization movement by describing in depth the difference between those who supported colonization for political and social reasons and those who supported it for religious and humanitarian reasons. Finally, she puts the black perspective on emigration into the broader picture instead of treating black nationalism as an isolated phenomenon and examines its role in influencing the black abolitionist agenda.

In a groundbreaking book, Kathryn Grover reconstructs from their own writings the lives of African Americans in Geneva, New York, virtually from its beginning in the 1790s, to the time of the community's first civil rights march in 1965. She weaves together demographic evidence and narratives by black Americans to recount their lives within a white-controlled society. Make a Way Somehow, which reflects the tenor of the gospel song whence it came, is a complete and meaningful history of black Genevans, with a moving focus on the individual experience. The author traces five principal migrations of African Americans to northern cities: the forced migration of slaves from the East and South before 1820; the antebellum fugitive slave farm-to-town movement; the postwar migration of emancipated people; the so-called Great Migration between the two World Wars; and the last movement that began around 1938 and ended in 1960, which was precipitated by the need for workers in large-scale commercial agriculture and the war-mobilization effort. Grover pieces together the lives of generations of African Americans in Geneva and delineates the local system of race relations from the city's social and economic standpoint. Black Genevans were kept at the fringes of society and worked in jobs that were temporary and scarce. While antislavery and suffrage work was common, it represented but a small portion of reform in towns whose broader sentiments opposed racial equality. In a work that spans more than a hundred years, the author establishes a context for understanding both the persistence of a small group of blacks and the transience of a great many others.

New light is shed on the largely misunderstood or ignored history of slavery in Canada through this portrait of slave Marie-Joseph Angelique, who in 1734 was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for starting a fire that destroyed more than forty Montreal buildings. Simultaneous.

African Americans encountered many challenges throughout history facing slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and other forms of racism. Many relied on religion as their source of strength and endurance. The African American religious experience is a story of survival that demonstrates how religion became the key ingredient that allowed a race to adapt and survive the harshest systems of injustice and prejudice in America. Religion became the greatest universal and dynamic tool of survival adopted by enslaved individuals and the utmost weapon known to the black race. African American religious practices, a blend of African and European traditions, are distinctively unique because of worship styles and contemplative practices; all reflective of the vital role religion played in the lives of blacks during slavery and beyond.

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book. Born in Gambia in 1753, she came to America aboard a slave ship, the Phillis. From an early age, Wheatley exhibited a profound gift for verse, publishing her first poem in 1767. Her tribute to a famed pastor, “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield,” followed in 1770, catapulting her into the international spotlight, and publication of her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral in London created her an international star. Despite the attention she received at the time, history has not been kind to Wheatley. Her work has long been neglected or denigrated by literary critics and historians. John C. Shields, a scholar of early American literature, has tried to help change this perception, and Wheatley has begun to take her place among the elite of American writers. In Phillis Wheatley and the Romantic Age, Shields contends that Wheatley was not only a brilliant writer but one whose work made a significant impression on renowned Europeans of the Romantic age, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who borrowed liberally from her works, particularly in his famous distinction between fancy and imagination. Shields shows how certain Wheatley texts, particularly her “Long Poem,” consisting of “On Recollection,” “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” and “On Imagination,” helped shape the face of Romanticism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Phillis Wheatley and the Romantic Age helps demolish the long-held notion that literary culture flowed in only one direction: from Europe to the Americas. Thanks to Wheatley’s influence, Shields argues, the New World was influencing European literary masters far sooner than has been generally understood.

In the wake of the Great Migration of thousands of African Americans from the scattered hamlets and farms of the rural South to the nation's burgeoning cities, a New Negro ethos of modernist cultural expression and potent self-determination arose to challenge white supremacy and create opportunities for racial advancement. In Prove It On Me, Erin D. Chapman explores the gender and sexual politics of this modern racial ethos and reveals the constraining and exploitative underside of the New Negro era's vaunted liberation and opportunities. Chapman's cultural history documents the effects on black women of the intersection of primitivism, New Negro patriarchal aspirations, and the early twentieth-century consumer culture. As U.S. society invested in the New Negroes, turning their expressions and race politics into entertaining commodities in a sexualized, primitivist popular culture, the New Negroes invested in the idea of black womanhood as a pillar of stability against the unsettling forces of myriad social and racial transformations. And both groups used black women's bodies and identities to "prove" their own modern notions and new identities. Chapman's analysis brings together advertisements selling the blueswoman to black and white consumers in a "sex-race marketplace," the didactic preachments of New Negro reformers advocating a conservative gender politics of "race motherhood," and the words of the New Negro women authors and migrants who boldly or implicitly challenged these dehumanizing discourses. Prove It On Me investigates the uses made of black women's bodies in 1920s popular culture and racial politics and black women's opportunities to assert their own modern, racial identities.