Between the Revolution and the Civil War, non-slave black Americans existed in the no-man’s land between slavery and freedom. The two generations defined by these two titanic struggles for national survival saw black Bostonians struggle to make real the quintessential values of individual freedom and equality promised by the Revolution. Levesque’s richly detailed study fills a significant void in our understanding of the formative years of black life in urban America. Black culture Levesque argues was both more and less than separation and integration. Poised between an occasionally benevolent, sometimes hostile, frequently indifferent white world and their own community, black Americans were, in effect, suspended between two cultures.

Report for 1871/1873-1903/1905 contains a list of additions to the miscellaneous and law departments.

To the pioneer folk of Upper and Lower Canada—Loyalists, "late" Loyalists, and the hordes of land-seekers—living in what seemed like religious destitution, various American Baptist missionary associations in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York State sent missionary preachers in the decade after 1800. Numerous small churches were established, but the War of 1812 disturbed these efforts, and much of the missionary activity itself had to be abandoned for an interval. This may well have stimulated the co-operation which had already appeared before the war between Canadian Baptist communities. Out of this co-operation were to develop conferences and associations of Canadian Baptist churches, until by 1820 all were members of Canadian groups. By 1818 travelling missionaries from the United States had almost ceased to visit; the Canadian churches had begun to raise up ministers from among their own members. In this very complete investigation of early Baptist history in Canada, assembled from a wide variety of sources, every separate group has been recorded and its development traced, and all available information has been coordinated for the missionaries and ministers who served the groups. The book is a veritable encyclopaedia of early Baptist history and will be invaluable to future students of Baptist history in general. This study of a developing cultural tradition strikingly parallels the struggle to master the physical features of a new land.

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed freedom for Americans from the domination of Great Britain, yet for millions of African Americas caught up in a brutal system of racially based slavery, freedom would be denied for ninety additional years until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776–1865 probes the slow, painful, yet ultimately successful crusade to end slavery throughout the nation, North and South. This work fills an important gap in the literature of slavery’s demise. Unlike other authors who focus largely on specific time periods or regional areas, Allen Carden presents a thematically structured national synthesis of emancipation. Freedom’s Delay offers a comprehensive and unique overview of the process of manumission commencing in 1776 when slavery was a national institution, not just the southern experience known historically by most Americans. In this volume, the entire country is examined, and major emancipatory efforts—political, literary, legal, moral, and social—made by black and white, free and enslaved individuals are documented over the years from independence through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Freedom’s Delay dispels many of the myths about slavery and abolition, including that racial servitude was of little consequence in the North, and, where it did exist, it ended quickly and easily; that abolition was a white man’s cause and blacks were passive recipients of liberty; that the South seceded primarily to protect states’ rights, not slavery; and that the North fought the Civil War primarily to end the subjugation of African Americans. By putting these misunderstandings aside, this book reveals what actually transpired in the fight for human rights during this critical era. Carden’s inclusion of a cogent preface and epilogue assures that Freedom’s Delay will find a significant place in the literature of American slavery and freedom. With a compelling preface and epilogue, notes, illustrations and tables, and a detailed bibliography, this volume will be of great value not only in courses on American history and African American history but also to the general reading public. Allen Carden is professor of history at Fresno Pacific University in Fresno, California. He is the author of Puritan Christianity in America: Religion and Life in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts.