Arrested for treason against the British Crown and deported to the penal colonies of Australia, the Irish revolutionary John Boyle O’Reilly managed to escape to the United States and within a few years became one of Boston’s most prominent political and literary figures, one of the best known Irish immigrants in the United States and one of the…[Read more]

In his eighteenth-century Memoirs, criminal Stephen Burroughs tells of his campaign to establish a library in Bridgehampton, New York. When the town elders discover the plan, they insist upon reviewing Burroughs’s choices. Undercurrents of other debates spill over into what would otherwise merely be some quibbling over book selections. In a series…[Read more]

Slaves were allowed three day’s holiday at Christmas time, and so it was over Christmas that John Andrew Jackson decided to escape.

The first day I devoted to bidding a sad, though silent farewell to my people; for I did not even dare to tell my father or mother that I was going, lest for joy they should tell some one else. Early next…[Read more]

The men and women massacred while studying the Bible the other night in the Emanuel A. M. E. Church were, in their own way, raising hell. That phrase might seem ill conceived or even disrespectful but it can be invoked here to honor their courage and the A. M. E Church’s long tradition of challenging white supremacy. Their private prayer this w…[Read more]

“Taking a liberal approach to the category “African American children’s literature,” I stipulate that the placement and framing of stories in an African American literary context such as the Christian Recorder suggest that they ought to be considered among “African American children’s literature” insomuch as they were read by or to African Ameri…[Read more]

“This essay will explore the different appearances of dogs in Stowe’s novel in order to suss out the contradictions inherent in the comparisons of enslaved African Americans to dogs and their various relationships to them. Reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for both its importance as an abolitionist literary phenomenon as well as…[Read more]

“I read black Atlantic circulations through the friendships between this mixed-race heroine and both her white governess and her black maid. Following Paul Gilroy’s construction of the black Atlantic as a space of movement, I consider Olivia’s movement within the frames of identification that position her relative racial privilege somewhere betwe…[Read more]

“In 1853, Mary King, the white daughter of abolitionists, was engaged to marry William G. Allen, the “Coloured Professor” of New York Central College at McGrawville.1 The engagement stirred their upstate New York community into a popular controversy, inciting letters of family disapproval, newspaper commentary, and mob violence leading to their…[Read more]

Analyzing abolitionist and neoabolitionist girlhood stories of racial pairing from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, this essay shows how children’s literature about interracial friendship represents differently racialized experiences of and responses to slavery. The article presents fiction by women writers such as Harriet Beecher S…[Read more]

This essay reads a little-studied, probably white-authored abolitionist children’s novel in which white parents adopt a black child and love her as much as they would a white child. Harriet and Ellen; or, The Orphan Girls by “Lois” (1856), depicts interracial kinship predicated on familial love and backed by radical abolitionist and antir…[Read more]

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20077873

In a follow-up installment in 1839 to the anonymously authored Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave, the narrator testifies that a Charleston slave speculator known as “Major Ross” had sold his brother. The narrator notes that Ross lives in “a nice little white house, on the right hand side of King street as you go in from the country…[Read more]

An 1856 essay by George Moses Horton. Survives in manuscript in his own hand. Held in the collections of the NYPL manuscripts and archives division within the papers of Henry Harrisse. Published in PMLA with an introduction by Jonathan Senchyne