Pamphlets Of Protest

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, African-American writing became a prominent feature of both black protest culture and American public life. Although denied a political voice in national affairs, black authors produced a wide range of literature to project their views into the public sphere. Autobiographies and personal narratives told of slavery's horrors, newspapers railed against racism in its various forms, and poetry, novellas, reprinted sermons and speeches told tales of racial uplift and redemption. The editors examine the important and previously overlooked pamphleteering tradition and offer new insights into how and why the printed word became so important to black activists during this critical period. An introduction by the editors situates the pamphlets in their various social, economic and political contexts. This is the first book to capture the depth of black print culture before the Civil War by examining perhaps its most important form, the pamphlet.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, African-American writing became a prominent feature of both black protest culture and American public life. Although denied a political voice in national affairs, black authors produced a wide range of literature to project their views into the public sphere. Autobiographies and personal narratives told of slavery's horrors, newspapers railed against racism in its various forms, and poetry, novellas, reprinted sermons and speeches told tales of racial uplift and redemption. The editors examine the important and previously overlooked pamphleteering tradition and offer new insights into how and why the printed word became so important to black activists during this critical period. An introduction by the editors situates the pamphlets in their various social, economic and political contexts. This is the first book to capture the depth of black print culture before the Civil War by examining perhaps its most important form, the pamphlet.

In pursuit of a more sophisticated and inclusive American history, the contributors to Beyond the Founders propose new directions for the study of the political history of the republic before 1830. In ways formal and informal, symbolic and tactile,

Explores the intertwined histories of print and protest in the United States from Reconstruction to the 2000s. Ten essays look at how protestors of all political and religious persuasions, as well as aesthetic and ethical temperaments, have used the printed page to wage battles over free speech; test racial, class, sexual, and even culinary boundaries; and to alter the moral landscape in American life.

David Ruggles (1810-1849) was one of the most heroic--and has been one of the most often overlooked--figures of the early abolitionist movement in America. Graham Russell Gao Hodges provides the first biography of this African American activist, writer, publisher, and hydrotherapist who secured liberty for more than six hundred former bond people, the most famous of whom was Frederick Douglass. A forceful, courageous voice for black freedom, Ruggles mentored Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and William Cooper Nell in the skills of antislavery activism. As a founder of the New York Committee of Vigilance, he advocated a "practical abolitionism" that included civil disobedience and self-defense in order to preserve the rights of self-emancipated enslaved people and to protect free blacks from kidnappers who would sell them into slavery in the South. Hodges's narrative places Ruggles in the fractious politics and society of New York, where he moved among the highest ranks of state leaders and spoke up for common black New Yorkers. His work on the Committee of Vigilance inspired many upstate New York and New England whites, who allied with him to form a network that became the Underground Railroad. Hodges's portrait of David Ruggles establishes the abolitionist as an essential link between disparate groups--male and female, black and white, clerical and secular, elite and rank-and-file--recasting the history of antebellum abolitionism as a more integrated and cohesive movement than is often portrayed.

Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany--these figures stand out in the annals of black protest for their vital antislavery efforts. But what of the rest of their generation, the thousands of other free blacks in the North? Patrick Rael explores the tradition of protest and sense of racial identity forged by both famous and lesser-known black leaders in antebellum America and illuminates the ideas that united these activists across a wide array of divisions. In so doing, he reveals the roots of the arguments that still resound in the struggle for justice today. Mining sources that include newspapers and pamphlets of the black national press, speeches and sermons, slave narratives and personal memoirs, Rael recovers the voices of an extraordinary range of black leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century. He traces how these activists constructed a black American identity through their participation in the discourse of the public sphere and how this identity in turn informed their critiques of a nation predicated on freedom but devoted to white supremacy. His analysis explains how their place in the industrializing, urbanizing antebellum North offered black leaders a unique opportunity to smooth over class and other tensions among themselves and successfully galvanize the race against slavery.

The explosion of print culture that occurred in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century activated the widespread use of print media to promote social and political activism. Exploring this phenomenon, the essays in Modern Print Activism in the United States focus on specific groups, individuals, and causes that relied on print as a vehicle for activism. They also take up the variety of print forms in which calls for activism have appeared, including fiction, editorials, letters to the editor, graphic satire, and non-periodical media such as pamphlets and calendars. As the contributors show, activists have used print media in a range of ways, not only in expected applications such as calls for boycotts and protests, but also for less expected aims such as the creation of networks among readers and to the legitimization of their causes. At a time when the golden age of print appears to be ending, Modern Print Activism in the United States argues that print activism should be studied as a specifically modernist phenomenon and poses questions related to the efficacy of print as a vehicle for social and political change.