"THE UNBOXING OF HENRY BROWN documents the amazing life of Henry Box Brown, whose daring escape from slavery sealed in a box has become a celebrated saga of the Underground Railroad. Based on more than a decade of research in the United States and England, Jeffrey Ruggles tells the dramatic but true story of Brown, an industrial slave in Virginia, an abolitionist activist in New England, and a performer for a quarter-century on the English stage." -- page 4 of cover.

On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown climbed into a large wooden postal crate and was mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Box Brown,” as he came to be known after this astounding feat, went on to carve out a career as an abolitionist speaker, actor, magician, hypnotist, and even faith healer, traveling the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada until his death in 1897. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown is the first book to show how subversive performances were woven into Brown’s entire life, from his early days practicing magic in Virginia while enslaved, to his last shows in Canada and England in the 1890s. It recovers forgotten elements of Brown’s history to illustrate the ways he made himself a spectacle on abolitionist lecture circuits via outlandish performances, and then fell off these circuits and went on to reinvent himself again and again. Brown’s stunts included creating a moving panoramic picture show about his escape; parading through the streets dressed as a “Savage Indian” or “African Prince”; convincing hypnotized individuals that they were sheep who would gobble down raw cabbage; performing magic, dark séances, and ventriloquism; and even climbing back into his “original” box to jump out of it on stage. In this study, Martha J. Cutter analyzes contemporary resurrections of Brown’s persona by leading poets, writers, and visual artists. Both in Brown’s time and in ours, stories were created, invented, and embellished about Brown, continuing to recreate his intriguing, albeit fragmentary and elusive, story. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown fosters a new understanding not only of Brown’s life but of modern Black performance art that provocatively dramatizes the unfinished work of African American freedom.

It is the most celebrated escape in the history of American slavery. Henry Brown had himself sealed in a three-foot-by-two-foot box and shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, a twenty-seven-hour journey to freedom. In Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, Brown not only tells the story of his famed escape, but also recounts his later life as a black man making his way through white American and British culture. Most important, he paints a revealing portrait of the reality of slavery, of the wife and children sold away from him, the home to which he could not return, and his rejection of the slaveholders' religion--painful episodes that fueled his desire for freedom. This edition comprises the most complete and faithful representation of Brown's life, fully annotated for the first time. John Ernest also provides an insightful introduction that places Brown's life in its historical setting and illuminates the challenges Brown faced in an often threatening world, both before and after his legendary escape.

Henry Box Brown is well known in America for escaping slavery by being packed in a box and mailed from Virginia to Philadelphia. The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 made it unsafe for Brown to remain in America. He relocated to England where he had a very successful career, initially as a speaker on abolitionism before he began speaking on other subjects and then branched out into other forms of entertainment, including magic. He married Jane Floyd, who, with their children, appeared in his acts. This book concentrates on the relatively unknown period of his life in Britain, detailing both how he was received and how he developed as a performer. It is the biography of a brave, intelligent individualist who was always willing to learn and to take chances, becoming the first black man to achieve landmarks in British law and entertainment.

During the nineteenth century and especially after the Civil War, scores of black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Moses Roper and Ellen Craft travelled to England, Ireland, Scotland, and parts of rural Wales to educate the public on slavery. By sharing their oratorical, visual, and literary testimony to transatlantic audiences, African American activists galvanised the antislavery movement, which had severe consequences for former slaveholders, pro-slavery defenders, white racists, and ignorant publics. Their journeys highlighted not only their death-defying escapes from bondage but also their desire to speak out against slavery and white supremacy on foreign soil. Hannah-Rose Murray explores the radical transatlantic journeys formerly enslaved individuals made to the British Isles, and what light they shed on our understanding of the abolitionist movement. She uncovers the reasons why activists visited certain locations, how they adapted to the local political and social climate, and what impact their activism had on British society.

Fugitive Testimony traces the long arc of the African American slave narrative from the eighteenth century to the present in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and postbellum literary slave narratives as well as contemporary visual art, Janet Neary brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre’s central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of his or her own testimony. Taking works by current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, Neary employs their representational strategies to decode the visual work performed in nineteenth-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, Henry Box Brown, and others. She focuses on the textual visuality of these narratives to illustrate how their authors use the logic of the slave narrative against itself as a way to undermine the epistemology of the genre and to offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.

The civil rights and black power movements expanded popular awareness of the history and culture of African Americans. But, as Stephen Hall observes, African American authors, intellectuals, ministers, and abolitionists had been writing the history of the black experience since the 1800s. With this book, Hall recaptures and reconstructs a rich but largely overlooked tradition of historical writing by African Americans. Hall charts the origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and maturation of African American historical writing from the period of the Early Republic to the twentieth-century professionalization of the larger field of historical study. He demonstrates how these works borrowed from and engaged with ideological and intellectual constructs from mainstream intellectual movements including the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. Hall also explores the creation of discursive spaces that simultaneously reinforced and offered counter narratives to more mainstream historical discourse. He sheds fresh light on the influence of the African diaspora on the development of historical study. In so doing, he provides a holistic portrait of African American history informed by developments within and outside the African American community.