The Press And Slavery In America 1791 1859

This scholarly study examines the shifting perceptions of slavery in the antebellum South through news accounts of major slave rebellions. Slavery remains one of the United States’ most troubling failings and its complexities have shaped American ideas about race, economics, politics, and the press since the first days of settlement. Brian Gabrial’s The Press and Slavery in America, 1791–1859 explores those intersections at moments when enslaved people revolted or conspired to revolt. Such events forced public discussions about slavery at times when supporters of the peculiar institution preferred them to be silent. This volume covers news accounts of five major slave rebellions or conspiracies: Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 Virginia slave conspiracy; the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt; Denmark Vesey’s 1822 slave conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina; Nat Turner’s 1831 Southampton County, Virginia, slave revolt; and John Brown’s 1859 Harper’s Ferry raid. Gabrial situates these stories within a historical framework that juxtaposes the transformation of the press into a powerful mass media with the growing political divide over slavery, illustrating how two American cultures, both asserting claims to founding America, devolved into enemies over slavery. What the nineteenth century press reveals in this book are discourses that have retained resonance in contemporary race relations and American politics. They connect to ideas about the press and technology, changing journalistic practice, and the destruction wrought by the dysfunction of the nation’s political parties.

This book introduces a more collaborative and reflexive way of producing news that incorporates concepts of cultural identity and cultural positioning of both journalists and sources using a feminist approach to inclusion of all voices and perspectives. This text proposes a feminist collaborative model of journalism that incorporates critical reflexivity, requiring journalists not only to be aware of their own cultural positionality but also that of their sources, as a means of producing more authentic and balanced news coverage. The model is intended for use by journalists as well as journalism education programs to educate future journalists on how to effectively serve audiences with scrupulously investigated, reported, and crafted stories. Chapters explore journalism during the Obama and Trump years, current journalistic trends, and alternative media, and feature topics such as fake news, racism, sexism in news production and content, and immigration and media. Thompson addresses issues of power and privilege amongst journalists and marginalized groups, and how these implicate power dynamics of journalism practice and reinforce social inequality, particularly relating to race and gender. This book is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of journalism and media studies, as well as scholars, journalists, and media practitioners.

This book examines slavery, an antiquated, ugly, inhumane practice, seemingly abolished in the nineteenth century, yet never eradicated. The legacies of historical slavery have become increasingly subject to public debate, manifested in calls for reparations, the UNESCO Slave Route Project, and in the dismantling of Confederate monuments in the United States. NGOs have researched and publicized the extent of contemporary slavery, which some of the essays in this collection discuss. This area of inquiry intersects with wider debates about the legacies of colonialism and structural racism—which could be seen in the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns in South Africa and Oxford. NGOs estimate that there are between 21 and 46 million slaves worldwide today. The essays gathered here critically examine the historical roots of slavery, the issue of reparations, and deconstruct contemporary human trafficking.

In the antebellum United States, formerly enslaved men and women who told their stories and advocated for abolition helped establish a new genre with widely recognized tropes: the slave narrative. This book investigates how enslaved black Africans conceived of themselves and their stories before the War of American Independence and the genre's development in the nineteenth century. Zachary McLeod Hutchins argues that colonial newspapers were pivotal in shaping popular understandings of both slavery and the black African experience well before the slave narrative's proliferation. Introducing the voices and art of black Africans long excluded from the annals of literary history, Hutchins shows how the earliest life writing by and about enslaved black Africans established them as political agents in an Atlantic world defined by diplomacy, war, and foreign relations. In recovering their stories, Hutchins sheds new light on how black Africans became Black Americans; how the earliest accounts of enslaved life were composed editorially from textual fragments rather than authored by a single hand; and how the public discourse of slavery shifted from the language of just wars and foreign policy to a heritable, race-based system of domestic oppression.

After slavery was abolished, how far would white America go toward including African Americans as full participants in the country's institutions? Conventional historical timelines mark the end of Reconstruction in the year 1877, but the Methodist Episcopal Church continued to wrestle with issues of racial inclusion for decades after political support for racial reform had receded. An 1844 schism over slavery split Methodism into northern and southern branches, but Union victory in the Civil War provided the northern Methodists with the opportunity to send missionaries and teachers into the territory that had been occupied by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. To a remarkable degree, the M.E. Church succeeded in appealing to freed slaves and white Unionists and thereby built up a biracial membership far surpassing that of any other Protestant denomination. A Long Reconstruction details the denomination's journey with unification and justice. African Americans who joined did so in a spirit of hope that through religious fellowship and cooperation they could gain respect and acceptance and ultimately assume a position of equality and brotherhood with whites. However, as segregation gradually took hold in the South, many northern Methodists evinced the same skepticism as white southerners about the fitness of African Americans for positions of authority and responsibility in an interracial setting. The African American membership was never without strong white allies who helped to sustain the Church's official stance against racial caste but, like the nation as a whole, the M.E. Church placed a growing priority on putting their broken union back together.

Donald Trump’s presidency was marked by angry attacks on journalists, an extraordinary ability to capture the media spotlight, a flood of disinformation from the White House, and bitter partisanship reflected in the media. Trump’s dysfunctional relationship with the press affected how the United States dealt with the crises of COVID-19, climate change, social unrest due to systemic racism, and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But Trump’s troubled relationship with the press didn’t happen by chance. Clash explores the political, economic, social, and technological forces that have shaped the relationship between U.S. presidents and the press during times of crisis. In addition to Trump’s presidency, Clash examines those of John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Some of these presidents faced military or international crises. Others were challenged by economic downturns or political scandals. And sometimes the survival of America’s system of government was at stake. By examining what happened between presidents and the press during these pivotal times, Clash helps us understand how we arrived at our current troubled state of affairs. It concludes with recommendations for strengthening the role the press plays in keeping presidents accountable.

Excavating Exodus analyzes adaptations of Exodus in novels, newspapers, and speeches from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights era. Although Exodus has perennially served to mobilize resistance to oppression, Black writers have radically reinterpreted its meaning over the past two centuries. Changing interpretations of Moses’ story reflect evolving conceptions of racial identity, religious authority, gender norms, political activism, and literary form. Black writers transformed Moses from a paragon of race loyalty into an avatar of authoritarianism. Excavating Exodus identifies a rhetorical tradition initiated by David Walker and carried on by Martin Delany and Frances Harper that treats Moses’ loyalty to his fellow Hebrews as his defining characteristic. By the twentieth century, however, a more skeptical group of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and William Melvin Kelley, associated Moses with overbearing charismatic authority. This book traces the transition from Walker, who treated Moses as the epitome of self-sacrifice, to Kelley, who considered Moses a flawed model of leadership and a threat to individual self-reliance. By asking how Moses became a touchstone for notions of racial belonging, Excavating Exodus illuminates how Black intellectuals reinvented the Mosaic model of charismatic male leadership.

An Inky Business is a book about the making and printing of news. It is a history of ink, paper, printing press, and type, and of those who made and read newspapers in Britain, continental Europe, and America from the British Civil Wars to the Battle of Gettysburg nearly two hundred years later. But it is also an account of what news was and how the idea of news became central to public life. Newspapers ranged from purveyors of high seriousness to carriers of scurrilous gossip. Indeed, our current obsession with “fake news” and the worrying revelations or hints about how money, power, and technology shapes and controls the press and the flows of what is believed to be genuine information have dark early-modern echoes.