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"An outspoken abolitionist, Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818, and after his escape in 1838, he repeatedly risked his own freedom as an antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. My Bondage and My Freedom represents ten years of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846 and his break with his mentor, William Lloyd Garrison. Upon its initial publication in 1855, this book catapulted Douglass into the international spotlight...
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"The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the memoir of an African-American woman who struggled against the bondages of slavery in the early 1800s. It is one of the most famous slave narratives of all time and is one of the most important documents of slavery ever written. This is her story. This is her voice. Dictated to her friend Olive Gilbert and first published privately in 1850, this partial autobiography of the woman who became a pioneer in the...
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While working for the Underground Railroad and helped escaped slaves to safety, William Still kept meticulous records. These notes originally were used to help reconnect families and document history, but Still later used these records to create The Underground Railroad, telling the stories of the disenfranchised. Said to have helped nearly eight-hundred slaves, Still depicts their stories of heartbreak, narrow escapes, and oppression.
Not only was...
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"The Living Is Easy, Dorothy West's first novel and one of only a handful of novels published by women during the Harlem Renaissance, tells the story of Cleo Judson, daughter of Southern sharecroppers, who is determined to integrate into Boston's black elite. Married to the "Black Banana King" Bart Judson, Cleo maneuvers her three sisters and their children-but not their husbands-into living with her, attempting to recreate her original family in...
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The Garies and Their Friends (1857) is a novel by Frank J. Webb. Published at the height of the abolitionist movement, Webb's novel was only the second in history by an African American writer. Although it is his only novel, The Garies and Their Friends is a testament to Webb's skills as a writer and political thinker, a man who explored themes of racial passing and Northern racism decades before such topics were common in African American literature....
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Compiled by a prominent abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is combines information taken from witnesses, and from active and former slave owners, to generate a condemnation of slavery from both those who observed it and those who perpetuated it. The narrative describes the appalling day-to-day conditions of the over 2,700,000 men, women and children in slavery in the United States. Weld demonstrates how even prisoners--in the...
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"Originally published in 1884, T. Thomas Fortune's Black and White is an insightful and clear-eyed exploration of a post-Reconstruction America--one with issues that are still plaguing the United States to this day. As "the preeminent Black journalist of his age" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Church), and an early agitator for Civil Rights, Fortune astutely and compellingly analyses the relationship between capitalism and racism in...
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Martin Robison Delany's “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People” offers a comprehensive examination of the social and political circumstances that confronted African Americans during the mid-19th century. Delany's work is an essential contribution to the disciplines of historiography and anthropology in that it provides insight into how African Americans negotiated a range of pressing issues including slavery,...
10) Black Manhattan
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Originally published in 1930 and now back in print with an introduction by Zadie Smith, Black Manhattan traces the Black experience in New York City from its origins in the seventeenth century, through the Revolutionary and Civil War periods, to the triumphant achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. Written by one of the leading Black scholars and activists of the first half of the twentieth century, this timeless book also illuminates Black literature,...
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In 1887, Wilson offered this first history of the role of the African American soldier in the the War of Independence, the War of 1812, and the Civil War in which he himself served. African American Soldiers in the War of Independence, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.
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Nat Love, the son of enslaved parents, was born in 1854 on a plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee. In February 1869, Love left Tennessee and found work as a cowboy, first in the Texas panhandle, then in Arizona. Love's story, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, was published in 1907, and it is considered the only full-length autobiography by an African-American cowhand.
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Imperium in Imperio (1899) is a novel by Sutton E. Griggs. Written while Sutton was at the beginning of his career as a Baptist minister, Imperium in Imperio was sold door to door and earned modest praise upon publication. Although Griggs' novels were largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, scholars have recently sought to emphasize his role as an activist and author involved with the movement for Black nationalism in the United States. Critics...
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The title story of this 1899 collection by the well-known poet follows a slave woman name Cassie and her baby boy Gideon, named after the Biblical warrior that his mother heard about in church. Other stories include "Mammy Peggy's Pride," "Viney's Free Papers," "An Old-Time Christmas," and "The Faith Cure Man."
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This 1898 collection of the militant abolitionist's essays and sketches includes "A Cambridge Boyhood," "A Child of the College," "The Rearing of a Reformer," "The Fugitive Slave Epoch," "Kansas and John Brown," "Civil War," "Literary London Twenty Years Ago," and "On the Outskirts of Public Life," among others.
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Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was an American novelist, women's rights activist, abolitionist, journalist, and activist for Native American rights. Child is famous for her fiction and domestic manuals, which enjoyed international popularity during the mid 19th century. However, her work also drew controversy due to her tackling such issues as male dominance and white supremacy. First published in 1865, "The Freedmen's Book" contains a collection of...
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