Knowing what is missing is an important first step.

For Jones and Allen, the problem was not a lack of information, but stubbornly partial accounts of that information.

Who was that traveler? And what did she signify to the poet?

As a teacher, the Black convention movement in the 1850s has helped me to broaden my story of the origins of the Civil War, especially the pitfalls to avoid when it comes to focusing too heavily on the controversy over slavery in the territories.

Understanding puzzles as agents of disorder runs counter to a common interpretation that associates puzzles with the quest for and ultimate affirmation of order.

Not only was women’s and African Americans’ public leadership new and controversial, but also, well into the 1800s, Black and white women didn’t typically cooperate in charitable activity or reform efforts.

Rather than seeking to extinguish the humanity of its victims, slavery rather invests in, and relies upon, their human capacity for suffering.

William Cronon presents in Nature’s Metropolis an assertion of the fundamental interconnectedness of the city and the countryside. This is figured in the history of Chicago, primarily in the nineteenth century, as the city grew from the commodification of the produce of its rural environs.

In “Learning to Read,” Harper prompts critical attention to textual materiality by depicting enslaved characters who advance their own literacy by exploiting white cultural expectations about the proper look of reading material.

Within the narrow rhetoric of antislavery politics that shape Prince’s narrative, however, steady articulation of money markets, repeated reference to financial transactions, and descriptions of resource accrual stand out in a declared autobiography, a distinctly literary production.

Ultimately, my students and I had to consider how to make sense of the Douglass of the 1840s, who viewed the Constitution as a “covenant with death,” and the Douglass of the 1850s, who adhered to an antislavery reading of the Constitution.

Jones focuses on how a proslavery “common sense” was the dominant ideological platform against which black people sought to exercise self-determination.

In this 1861 story, white society treats a teenaged African American postal rider with dignity and respect.

From Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.
Winner of the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award

In 1849, Benjamin F. Roberts, an African American shoemaker, filed suit against the Boston School Committee after they refused to […]

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue
Whether in fact Douglas was a scoundrel
had become the key issue in American politics
in 1858…

In this era of click-bait headlines and little time to settle in with a complicated and nuanced book (not to mention pressures to publish), categories offer a quick way to make sense of complex phenomena. 

The power base for revolution was with the great mass of slaves who became the nouveau libres. Toussaint in all his rhetoric identified himself with that group, to which he did not in fact belong.

Mather, like most other Christians of the time, also believed that racial equality before God did not demand equality on Earth–and, in particular, that it was wholly compatible with the institution of slavery.

New information on Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man who would turn escape into an art form.

When they arrived in Virginia, Africans joined a society that was divided between master and white servant, a society with such contempt for white servants that masters were not punished for beating them to death.

And then, I got hooked on Phillis Wheatley—even though I still wasn’t sure whether I liked her poetry or not.

The problem is an overdetermined interpretive frame that presumes that Hammon’s poems matter most only when they say something about slavery.

Sentimental reformist oration, fugitive confession, and the personal epistle are all represented in this text.

These versions of the Panic are capsules that carry other versions of the history of American capitalism into the bloodstream of historical consciousness.

Attacks on Black Charleston worshipers started well before 1822.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.

Once again abandoned by her husband and afflicted with uncertainty and poverty, Eunice began to direct her own life…

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Early northern black church voting may be the missing link in our understanding of black political consciousness and civic mindedness.

Some new evidence on an old controversy

Penned in 1897 by Julia C. Ferris, a white teacher and local educational leader, the manuscript narrates portions of the life of Jane Clark, an enslaved woman who escaped to Auburn in 1859. This narrative, rich with information about the Underground Railroad, has never been available to scholars, teachers, and lay readers—until now.

Little is known? One might well say that far too much is known to hold black lives within the comforting confines of a narrative biography.

Rusert intervenes in narratives of racist pseudo-science, establishing not only a more inclusive history of early American science, but in doing so, arguing for a revision of the concept of the human.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: “Revolution in Print: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

What would it be like to start off in life as a severely handicapped slave?

Newspapers have included a letter to the editor section as a public forum for debate for as long as they have circulated, yet we remain divided on how to read them.

Is slave food soul food?

Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the […]

Jasmine Nichole Cobb views early photography as an especially potent visual technology for the expression of black agency.

How, and why, did the language of love and romance become the language of war?

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

[The County Election] also parodies the men in the crowd, who are divided…by the moral valence of their characters…

Dred Scott did not intend to become famous.

As a result of her exemplary efforts, McCaskill has given us not only our richest account of the Crafts’ remarkable lives but also made a significant contribution to African American print culture broadly construed.

Forest Leaves helps us locate the young poet in time and space, but the retrospective addition of these poems to Harper’s corpus unsettles the literary order in interesting and jarring ways.

Forest Leaves is a transitional volume: a collection that reflects Harper’s youth and schooling, but that is also already attuned to the fleeting nature of life, to the moral stain of slavery on the nation, and to many other “grown-up” topics.

Nazera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an exemplar of well-researched and innovative scholarship, an exciting book for scholars of early African American literature and beyond.

Few of us who teach early American history can be unfamiliar with the monumental transatlantic slave trade database. Research on […]

By using legal knowledge as the central theme of the book, the author not only gives the reader guideposts that are easy to follow and remember, but also provides a blueprint for how some African Americans resisted racial degradation.

The newly recovered fifth chapter is critical to the development of both the novel’s plot and its themes.

Gunning Birds         She kept the Yankees from burning her homeby refusing to leave the bed, and when a few […]

But when it came to poetry, like many young poets, my first poems focused on myself. It was this exploration of my personal identity that ultimately led me to an exploration of the past. I’d brought several poems about my relationship with my father to a creative writing workshop, and a female classmate challenged me to write about the women in my family.

Caroline Remembers Her First Mistress, Darla Ford When I think on it, it is of joy I recall. And knowing […]

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Americans expressed remorse for their lost place in the British empire and their dissatisfaction with the new political order of an independent democracy wrought by economic and moral conflict.

At first glance, both books seem to share an interest in philology.

How could I tell that story for people who lived and died more than a century ago?

The heart of Fagan’s argument concerns how black newspapers transmitted, shaped, and fostered the myriad “practices of a dynamic black chosenness,” a powerful ideological tradition linking the experiences of black Americans with God’s chosen nation.

(October 1830)

We talk with Benjamin Fagan about the first black newspapers in the United States, biblical inspiration for freedom, and the place African Americans sought in society.

The next morning I was discussing My Bondage

What makes Harper’s January 31 [1867] lecture rare is that we have its full text. The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph printed a transcription of “National Salvation” the day after Harper spoke.

Attending to “the forms and institutional contexts” that characterized antebellum African American men’s writing, Pratt identifies a political-aesthetic project that he terms “stranger humanism.”

Rented slaves built federal forts, roads, and the United States Capitol. Sometimes they served as soldiers and sailors.

Common-place talks with Christopher Cameron, author of To Plead Their Own Cause, about the chronology of abolition, the role of religion in the movement, and the importance of African-American voices in intellectual history.

What matters most in Django, then, is not the accuracy of the film’s historical claims but how Tarantino’s awareness of his contemporary audience mediates his symbolic enterprise.

Despite the limited extant documents penned in Wheatley’s hand or published in her name, Carretta finds her almost everywhere, in church records, letters, newspaper articles, subscription lists, and elsewhere.

The problem with the book is the exact opposite of a dubious or controversial thesis.

To understand African American experience under slavery, it is imperative to consider region, and not just in northern versus southern terms.

By dispensing with the notion that there is a master text or a master figure capable of standing for fugitive or free African America, Chaney’s analytic strategy parallels the experiences and perspectives of his subjects.

For whites, death was perpetually connected to property and commercial exchange—yet another feature of a worldview centered upon economic transactions. For blacks, death became a way to create a culture that actually celebrated life by recognizing the interrelationship between the living and the dead.

The American Mediterranean had aspects that white Southerners regarded as foreboding.

A class’s engagement with the account book of a nineteenth-century plantation teaches painful lessons about the erasures embedded in historical records.

Discovery is one thing, interpretation another.

Harper’s early work adds a new genre–unabashedly romantic poetry– to her oeuvre.

As an abolitionist lecturer, Harper honed to perfection a polemical political style that appears to differ with the seemingly sentimental and religious form of Forest Leaves.

This project narrates the Colored Conventions Project’s work to transcribe, catalogue, and visualize the minutes of the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions.

Working with publishers, libraries, and archives, digital humanities projects can work to liberate African American history.

The minutes of Colored Conventions constitute one of the most important bodies of primary sources in African American history. The […]

Simpson weaves together a scrupulously researched and only lightly imagined twin narrative for his dual protagonists—one black and one white—as they lead lives that touch in profoundly different ways on the great issues of the United States’ first century

“Man,” wrote John Webb, a Boston-based minister, in a 1726 sermon, “conforms to the Tempers and Manners of the Company […]

Enacting Nat Fuller’s Feast at the University of South Carolina

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s first book of poems had been considered lost to history for well over one hundred years. Johanna Ortner shares the tale of recovering this incredibly valuable text–and shares the text itself–with the readers of Common-place.

“This study presents the kind of creative synthesis and thoughtful working-out of big ideas that will make it required reading. . . “

Wheatley’s saying that her soul touched by Virtue can “guide [her] steps” is thus more than just a metaphor for God’s ability to change a converted person’s life: it is an acknowledgment of the immense power that God’s virtuous character can have over a person’s body and soul.

Was age in early America an objective measure of years, an individual’s self-understanding, or a status imposed by a public official?

Where and how to find the narrator, who was not only an escaped slave but an author with no name?

The descendant of Nat Fuller’s mentor reflects on the 2015 Feast.

As one of my Clemente students once said in class: “Slavery was America’s original sin, but we’re all still paying for it.”

Stowe took a fugitive black man into her home and, under the threat of very real danger, waited upon him, hid him, and allowed her children to help care for him.

While many aspects of early American life were bound by geography, many others transcended it.

The Literary Paradises of Hurston and Bartram in a High School Curriculum Early American literature is not commonly taught at […]

American literature, culture, and ideals stand wounded because America has regularly asserted that some lives and literatures—especially Black lives and literatures—matter less than others.

Recasting autobiographical revisions through aging studies enables us to see ambivalences that the dominant aging plot of decline has foreclosed.

Given the facts, fiction and truths, what kind of autobiographical voice could I craft for the larger text that would establish the narrative provenance of a surviving pre-Civil War log cabin?

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The fascination of American men of letters with Henry Moss, the African American seeming to turn white, however, mirrored their denial of the possibility that whites might turn black.”

An open letter from Chef Kevin Mitchell to Chef Nat Fuller.

You don’t show up in a predominantly Muslim country during Ramadan and just start asking questions.

This coin box was created by the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) in late 1839 to […]

Seeing Lewis’s image I was immediately reminded of the importance of the visual—both for present-day scholars of African American life and culture and for those nineteenth-century freedom fighters who knew the visual field was a key site of struggle for representing the race.

How does one create memory around an event that has long been lost to history?

An interesting close-reading of an illustration from Moses Roper’s slave narrative.

The Civil War was one great eruption of something immanent in human civilization: an ineradicable cycle of violence, a timeless struggle for democracy and freedom.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

The prehistory of American bestsellers takes us beyond questions about the content and literary value of bestselling texts and invites us instead to explore just what makes such a phenomenon possible.

By the time the Union army reached Bayou Boeuf—the neighborhood where Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped from upstate […]

A twenty-first century chef invites guests to enter the spirit of Nat Fuller’s 1865 Reconciliation Banquet.

Initially, the students tend to dwell on the explicit message of the spirituals. They assert that the spirituals focus on another world and encourage slaves to passively accept their fate . . . Gradually, the classroom dialogue shifts to the implicit messages.

What happens if we pair “post” and “transbellum”?

Wheatley does not write about race as a collective and embodied experience.

The American Revolution helped to form the idea of conscious, willed, systemic, historic change—and thereby the very notion of agency itself.

David Shields reflects on the legacy of Nat Fuller in the wake of the attack on the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.

With Mightier Than the Sword, Reynolds has written the biography of a book, and 2012 might be the perfect time to […]

Digital History and Civil War Commemoration I saw Emilie Davis’s diaries years ago—three leather-bound volumes, small enough to fit comfortably […]

In virtually every story, loyal slaves reminisce about the era of slavery, and bring harmony to postwar plantations by ushering Southern belles and good Yankee soldiers to reconciliation and matrimony.

Whether or not the two men actually had conversational exchanges, there is no disputing the commonality of their experience.

What was the meaning of the Revolution for African Americans and whites in Rhode Island in terms of their understanding of race and citizenship?

Enslaved Virginians’ persistent attempts to acquire their personal liberty shaped nearly every discussion of taxes and military service.

By the time of John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry, both Northerners and Southerners seemed ready to go beyond the world of a make-believe courtroom.

Davis traces the roots of racism in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions that used the biblical “Curse on Ham” story to justify the enslavement of Africans and equated blackness with sin, slavery, and pollution.

Why do people perpetuate, by continuing to live within, societies in which violence, both threatened and actual, is a constant of life?

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Authenticity was always an important part of the freak show’s promotional rhetoric, which advertised exhibits as LIVE! TRUE! REAL! GENUINE! Despite such hyperbolic claims of veracity, the exotic act was the most easily and regularly fabricated of all attractions.”

African American worshippers were carefully responding and interacting with each other exactly because each individual was free to shape the collective sound.

What Hochschild does is not so much revise our understanding of the British abolition movement as humanize it.

Caron’s speculation and his reliance on outdated literature lead him to significant interpretive errors.

“As white fascination with black actors imitating white theatrical performances began to give way to the more racy thrills of minstrelsy, Hewlett found diminishing interest in his act as ‘Shakespeare’s proud representative.'”

An invitation to Common-place readers to create their own events dedicated to reconciliation.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“How did this ultimate Tomistic curiosity evolve, and what does it mean?”

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Clinton, South Carolina, seems at first blush an unlikely host location for the Nat Fuller Feast.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

This roundtable is part of an ongoing series devoted to “First Person” experiences with early American culture.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Why would clergymen of the Reformed Church use their office to baptize the offspring of men and women claimed as property by the Dutch West India Company, the premier slave-trading company of the seventeenth century?”

With history like this, I thought, who needs fiction?

What better way to explore the bare essentials of the master-slave relationship than with the figure of the black slaveholder, who comes to slavery without the delusion of racial difference that divided white owners from their slaves?

Even into the twentieth century, I learned, Bethel’s Independence struck a nerve for some in the white community, while in the black community it remained a fiercely prideful monument of black uplift.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“For Baltimore’s elected officials, prominent merchants, and moral reformers (who were often in fact the same people), the bad behavior of their working-class neighbors required much attention. Petitions to the city council complained of black women washing clothes too boisterously in a stream, Irish laborers singing too late into the evening, and unsupervised apprentices, servants, and slaves cursing and gambling in the marketplace.”

Parent turns to Marxist theory to structure his answer to the question of the origins of the slave system with markedly mixed results.

In these two almost random cases, the sounds created by African Americans induced in white observers a sense of cultural dissonance, prompting feelings of confusion, disgust, and even horror.

“‘And in what walk of life, or dance of life does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!'”

Part of the reason why courses about slavery and African American culture are so popular in institutions outside the United States, and why so many non-American scholars specialize in black history, is that “race” provides a quick way into America’s soft moral underbelly, laying bare in the starkest of fashions American sanctimony.

Like Wright’s, my trip to Ghana marked my first time in Africa and combined research with a spiritual homecoming.

Slavery and its aftermath are human drama still unsettled. Administrators, timekeepers, civil servants, guardians of the state try to revise our understanding of the period and its outcomes. An effort to convince us that the drama is over rages. Some of us insist, and rightly so, that we are now in this drama’s second act, we have not moved beyond the raised curtain, we are still in shock at what we have finally seen.

A generation away from the Sans Souci, we try to talk about what we see at museums, historic sites, and monuments.

Perhaps the bottle traveled to the swamp full, part of a social gathering of African people, rather than empty, as part of a haul of refuse. The bottle could have been a pilfered item, or one reused after Brewton discarded it.

The evocative writing style pulls the reader into the book, creating word-pictures about the wharves of New Orleans, the slave pens where deals were struck, or the desperation of slave families confronted with the loss of loved ones, often forever.

While Davis’s erstwhile contention about the potential symbiosis between history and film is one that most of us can share conceptually, the history of the documentation of slavery as a subject for film is a sad and sorry one . . .

Roll, Jordan, Roll is the locus classicus for some of the most powerful and important ideas that have shaped the discussion of slavery for the last quarter century.

As rendered by Morgan, English-style freedom was naive, arrogant, and ethnocentric, qualities that readers in the post-Vietnam United States might have recognized with shame.

And yet, for all that, I am still troubled by the issue: why was a white person teaching about black history?

Why is there not a more detailed visual record of slavery and even slave life in early America?

The cry for ‘apology,’ no matter how heartfelt, sounds positively quaint against the hotter rhetoric today’s activists embrace: Restitution. Redress. And, especially, reparation.

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