The Elite Of Our People Joseph Willsons Sketches Of Black Upper Class Life In Antebellum Philadelphia

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Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 9780271043029
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Elite of Our People: Joseph Willson's Sketches of Black Upper-Class Life in Antebellum Philadelphia written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, first published in 1841, was written by Joseph Willson, a southern black man who had moved to Philadelphia. He wrote this book to convince whites that the African-American community in his adopted city did indeed have a class structure, and he offers advice to his black readers about how they should use their privileged status. The significance of Willson's account lies in its sophisticated analysis of the issues of class and race in Philadelphia. It is all the more important in that it predates W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro by more than half a century. Julie Winch has written a substantial introduction and prepared extensive annotation. She identifies the people Willson wrote about and gives readers a sense of Philadelphia's multifaceted and richly textured African American community. The Elite of Our People will interest urban, antebellum, and African-American historians, as well as individuals with a general interest in African-American history. This volume has withstood the test of time. It remains readable. Joseph Willson was well read, articulate, and had a keen eye for detail. His message is as timely today as it was in 1841. The people he wrote about were remarkable individuals whose lives were as complex as his own.

Author : Gay Gibson Cima
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139917242
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing Anti-Slavery written by Gay Gibson Cima and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Erica Ball
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820343501
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book To Live an Antislavery Life written by Erica Ball and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of antebellum African American print culture in transnational perspective, Erica L. Ball explores the relationship between antislavery discourse and the emergence of the northern black middle class. Through innovative readings of slave narratives, sermons, fiction, convention proceedings, and the advice literature printed in forums like Freedom's Journal, the North Star, and the Anglo-African Magazine, Ball demonstrates that black figures such as Susan Paul, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany consistently urged readers to internalize their political principles and to interpret all their personal ambitions, private familial roles, and domestic responsibilities in light of the freedom struggle. Ultimately, they were admonished to embody the abolitionist agenda by living what the fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward called an “antislavery life.” Far more than calls for northern free blacks to engage in what scholars call “the politics of respectability,” African American writers characterized true antislavery living as an oppositional stance rife with radical possibilities, a deeply personal politics that required free blacks to transform themselves into model husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, self-made men, and transnational freedom fighters in the mold of revolutionary figures from Haiti to Hungary. In the process, Ball argues, antebellum black writers crafted a set of ideals—simultaneously respectable and subversive—for their elite and aspiring African American readers to embrace in the decades before the Civil War. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

Author : Eric Gardner
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190237090
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Print Unbound written by Eric Gardner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Print Unbound explores the development of the Christian Recorder during and just after the American Civil War. As a study of the African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper and so of a periodical with national reach among free African Americans, Black Print Unbound is at once a massive recovery effort of a publication by African Americans for African Americans, a consideration of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and print culture studies, and an intervention in the study of literatures of the Civil War, faith communities, and periodicals.

Author : Samuel Otter
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780199741939
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.3X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Philadelphia Stories written by Samuel Otter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Philadelphia Stories, Samuel Otter finds literary value, historical significance, and political urgency in a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War. Historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia. Yet while individual writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Lippard have been linked to Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand these figures, and many others, as writing in a tradition tied to the city's history. The site of William Penn's "Holy Experiment" in religious toleration and representative government and of national Declaration and Constitution, near the border between slavery and freedom, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential "free" African American communities in the United States. The city was seen by residents and observers as the laboratory for a social experiment with international consequences. Philadelphia would be the stage on which racial character would be tested and a possible future for the United States after slavery would be played out. It would be the arena in which various residents would or would not demonstrate their capacities to participate in the nation's civic and political life. Otter argues that the Philadelphia "experiment" (the term used in the nineteenth-century) produced a largely unacknowledged literary tradition of peculiar forms and intensities, in which verbal performance and social behavior assumed the weight of race and nation.

Author : Gregory Nobles
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022669772X
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Education of Betsey Stockton written by Gregory Nobles and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-06-13 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prologue -- Given, as a slave -- She calls herself Betsey Stockton -- A long adieu -- A missionary's life is very laborious -- Philadelphia's first "coloured infant school" -- From ashes to assertion -- Betsey Stockton's Princeton education -- A time of war, a final peace -- Epilogue.

Author : William L. Andrews
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190908394
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Slavery and Class in the American South written by William L. Andrews and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-02 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The distinction among slaves is as marked, as the classes of society are in any aristocratic community. Some refusing to associate with others whom they deem to be beneath them, in point of character, color, condition, or the superior importance of their respective masters." Henry Bibb, fugitive slave, editor, and antislavery activist, stated this in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1849). In William L. Andrews's magisterial study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than 60 mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slave narrators disclosed class-based reasons for violence that broke out between "impudent," "gentleman," and "lady" slaves and their resentful "mean masters." Andrews's far-reaching book shows that status and class played key roles in the self- and social awareness and in the processes of liberation portrayed in the narratives of the most celebrated fugitives from U.S. slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Noting that the majority of the slave narrators came from the higher echelons of the enslaved, Andrews also pays close attention to the narratives that have received the least notice from scholars, those from the most exploited class, the "field hands." By examining the lives of the most and least acclaimed heroes and heroines of the slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers' advantage, but at other times fueling pride, aspiration, and a sense of just deserts among some of the enslaved that could be satisfied by nothing less than complete freedom. The culmination of a career spent studying African American literature, this comprehensive study of the antebellum slave narrative offers a ground-breaking consideration of a unique genre of American literature.

Author : Andrew N. Wegmann
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820360775
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book An American Color written by Andrew N. Wegmann and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, scholars have conceived of the coastal city of New Orleans as a remarkable outlier, an exception to nearly every “rule” of accepted U.S. historiography. A frontier town of the circum-Caribbean, the popular image of New Orleans has remained a vestige of North America’s European colonial era rather than an Atlantic city on the southern coast of the United States. Beginning with the French founding of New Orleans in 1718 and concluding with the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, An American Color seeks to correct this vision. By tracing the impact of racial science, law, and personal reputation and identity through multiple colonial and territorial regimes, it shows how locally born mulâtres in French New Orleans became part of a self-conscious, identifiable community of Creoles of color in the United States. An American Color places this local history in the wider context of the North American continent and the Atlantic world. This book shows that New Orleans and its free population of color did not develop in a cultural, legal, or intellectual vacuum. More than just a study of race and law, this work tells a story of humanity in the Atlantic world, a story of how a people on the French colonial frontier in the mid-eighteenth century became unlikely, accepted parts of a vast political, social, and racial United States without ever leaving home.

Author : Laura Arnold Leibman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197530494
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Once We Were Slaves written by Laura Arnold Leibman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Author : Louis J. Parascandola
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271098252
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Black Philadelphia Reader written by Louis J. Parascandola and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024-05-20 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: