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The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism by Julie Roy Jeffrey
By focusing on male leaders of the abolitionist movement, historians have often overlooked the great grassroots army of women who also fought to eliminate slavery. Here, Julie Roy Jeffrey explores the involvement of ordinary women--black and white--in the most significant reform movement prior to the Civil War. She offers a complex and compelling portrait of antebellum women's activism, tracing its changing contours over time. For more than three decades, women raised money, carried petitions, created propaganda, sponsored lecture series, circulated newspapers, supported third-party movements, became public lecturers, and assisted fugitive slaves. Indeed, Jeffrey says, theirs was the day-to-day work that helped to keep abolitionism alive. Drawing from letters, diaries, and institutional records, she uses the words of ordinary women to illuminate the meaning of abolitionism in their lives, the rewards and challenges that their commitment provided, and the anguished personal and public steps that abolitionism sometimes demanded they take. Whatever their position on women's rights, argues Jeffrey, their abolitionist activism was a radical step--one that challenged the political and social status quo as well as conventional gender norms.
ISBN: 9780807866849
Publication Date: 2000-11-09
Harriet Beecher Stowe : a spiritual life by Nancy Koester
"So you're the little woman who started this big war," Abraham Lincoln is said to have quipped when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin converted readers by the thousands to the anti-slavery movement and served notice that the days of slavery were numbered. Overnight Stowe became a celebrity, but to defenders of slavery she was the devil in petticoats. Most writing about Stowe treats her as a literary figure and social reformer while downplaying her Christian faith. But Nancy Koester's biography highlights Stowe's faith as central to her life -- both her public fight against slavery and her own personal struggle through deep grief to find a gracious God. Having meticulously researched Stowe's own writings, both published and un-published, Koester traces Stowe's faith pilgrimage from evangelical Calvinism through spiritualism to Anglican spirituality in a flowing, compelling narrative.
Call Number: PS 2956 .K64 2014
ISBN: 9780802833044
Publication Date: 2014-01-13
On Slavery and Abolitionism by Sarah Grimke; Angelina Grimke; Mark Perry (Introduction by)
The daughters of a wealthy and respected Charlestown judge, Sarah and Angelina Grimké grew up with a life of ease, facilitated by the convenience of slavery. Yet their close proximity to inhumane cruelty bred their revulsion towards the practice of slavery, and both sisters rejected their upbringing, moved to Philadelphia and embraced Quakerism. Led by Angelina's gifted oration, they toured the country as the American Anti-Slavery Society's first female agents. They passionately demonstrated the ability of women to make valuable contributions to political and social change, setting a precedent that would reverberate through the 20th century.
Call Number: E 449 .G872 2014
ISBN: 9780143107514
Publication Date: 2015-05-05
Quakers and Abolition by Brycchan Carey (Editor); Geoffrey Plank (Editor)
Introduction / Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank -- Part I. Freedom within Quaker discipline: arguments among friends -- "Liberation is coming soon": the radical reformation of Joshua Evans (1731-1798) / Ellen M. Ross -- Why Quakers and slavery? Why not more Quakers? / J. William Frost -- George F. White and Hicksite opposition to the abolitionist movement / Thomas D. Hamm -- "Without the consumers of slave produce there would be no slaves": Quaker women, antislavery activism and free-labor cotton dress in the 1850s / Anna Vaughan Kett -- The spiritual journeys of an abolitionist: Amy Kirby Post, 1802-1889 / Nancy A. Hewitt -- Part II. The scarcity of African Americans in the meetinghouse: racial issues among the Quakers -- Quaker evangelization in early Barbados: forging a path toward the unknowable / Kristen Block -- Anthony Benezet: working the antislavery cause inside and outside of "the society" / Maurice Jackson -- Aim for a free state and settle among Quakers: African-American and Quaker parallel communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey / Christopher Densmore -- The Quaker and the colonist: Moses Sheppard, Samuel Ford McGill, and transatlantic antislavery across the color line / Andrew Diemer -- Friend on the American frontier: Charles Pancoast's A Quaker forty-niner and the problem of slavery / James Emmett Ryan -- Part III. Did the rest of the world notice? The Quakers' reputation -- The slave trade, Quakers, and the early days of British abolition / James Walvin -- The Quaker antislavery commitment and how it revolutionized French antislavery through the Crèvecoeur-Brissot friendship, 1782-1789 / Marie-Jeanne Rossignol -- Thomas Clarkson's Quaker trilogy: abolitionist narrative as transformative history / Dee E. Andrews and Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner -- The hidden story of Quakers and slavery / Gary B. Nash.
Call Number: E 441 .Q35 2014
ISBN: 9780252038266
Publication Date: 2014-04-07
The radical and the Republican : Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the triumph of antislavery politics by James Oakes
The frontier lawyer and the former slave, the cautious politician and the fiery reformer, the president and the most famous black man in America - their lives met in the bloody landscape of secession, civil war and emancipation. Opponents at first, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln gradually became allies, each influenced by and attracted to the other. James Oakes brings these two iconic figures to life and sheds new light on the central issues of slavery, race and equality in Civil War America.
Call Number: E 449 .D75 O15 2008
ISBN: 9780393061949
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism : Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement by Julie Roy Jeffrey
By focusing on male leaders of the abolitionist movement, historians have often overlooked the great grassroots army of women who also fought to eliminate slavery. Here, Julie Roy Jeffrey explores the involvement of ordinary women--black and white--in the most significant reform movement prior to the Civil War. She offers a complex and compelling portrait of antebellum women's activism, tracing its changing contours over time. For more than three decades, women raised money, carried petitions, created propaganda, sponsored lecture series, circulated newspapers, supported third-party movements, became public lecturers, and assisted fugitive slaves. Indeed, Jeffrey says, theirs was the day-to-day work that helped to keep abolitionism alive. Drawing from letters, diaries, and institutional records, she uses the words of ordinary women to illuminate the meaning of abolitionism in their lives, the rewards and challenges that their commitment provided, and the anguished personal and public steps that abolitionism sometimes demanded they take. Whatever their position on women's rights, argues Jeffrey, their abolitionist activism was a radical step--one that challenged the political and social status quo as well as conventional gender norms.
Call Number: 9780807866849
ISBN: 9780807866849
Publication Date: 2000-11-09
To Live an Antislavery Life : Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class by Erica L. Ball
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
ISBN: 9780820344676
Publication Date: 2012-11-01
The Antislavery Debate : Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation by Thomas Bender (Editor)
This volume brings together one of the most provocative debates among historians in recent years. The center of controversy is the emergence of the antislavery movement in the United States and Britain and the relation of capitalism to this development.The essays delve beyond these issues, however, to raise a deeper question of historical interpretation: What are the relations between consciousness, moral action, and social change? The debate illustrates that concepts common in historical practice are not so stable as we have thought them to be. It is about concepts as much as evidence, about the need for clarity in using the tools of contemporary historical practice.The participating historians are scholars of great distinction. Beginning with an essay published in the American Historical Review (AHR), Thomas L. Haskell challenged the interpretive framework of David Brion Davis's celebrated study, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. The AHR subsequently published responses by Davis and by John Ashworth, as well as a rejoinder by Haskell. The AHR essays and the relevant portions of Davis's book are reprinted here. In addition, there are two new essays by Davis and Ashworth and a general consideration of the subject by Thomas Bender.This is a highly disciplined, insightful presentation of a major controversy in historical interpretation that will expand the debate into new realms.
ISBN: 9780520912458
Publication Date: 1992-06-02
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