INQ 271: Black Spaces in America: Primary Sources

The ten works collected in this volume demonstrate how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition by expressing their in anger, pain, sorrow, and courage. Included in the volume: Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw; Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; The Confessions of Nat Turner; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Narrative of William W. Brown; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb; Narrative of Sojouner Truth; Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of J. D.Green.

What shines through each of these stories is the black woman's ability to recover in past oppression the hope for a better day.

The most famous collection of Garvey's speeches and essays in a special centennial edition.

In this comprehensive volume of the collected writings of James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson restore this African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual to his rightful place in the arts and politics of the nineteenth-century United States. Whitfield's works, including poems from his celebrated America and Other Poems (1853), were printed in influential journals and newspapers, such as Frederick Douglass's The North Star. A champion of the black emigration movement during the 1850s, Whitfield was embraced by African Americans as a black nationalist bard when he moved from his longtime home in Buffalo, New York, to California in the early 1860s. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, his reputation had faded. For this volume, Levine and Wilson gathered and annotated all of Whitfield's extant writings, both poetry and prose, and many pieces are reprinted here for the first time since their original publication. In their thorough introduction, the editors situate Whitfield in relation to key debates on black nationalism in African American culture, underscoring the importance of poetry and periodical culture to black writing during the period.

Women have always been historians. Whether in schoolrooms or kitchens, state houses or church pulpits, women functioned as teachers of history and historical interpreters, offering narrations of the past to criticize existent narratives and inspire new ones. Within African-Americancommunities, women began to write histories in the years after the American Revolution. Distributed through churches, seminaries, public schools, and auxiliary societies, their stories of the past translated ancient Africa, slavery, and ongoing American social reform to populist audiences North andSouth. In the United States, black women have labored to sustain the cogency of their race and their families through the promotion of education, Christian and historical, for themselves and for their families. This book surveys the creative ways in which African American women harnessed the powerof print to share their historical revisions with a broader public. These speeches, textbooks, poems, and polemics did more than just recount the past. They also protested their present status in the United States, using history to write a new story for the future of African America.

A collection of twenty of Frederick Douglass's most important orations This volume brings together twenty of Frederick Douglass's most historically significant speeches on a range of issues, including slavery, abolitionism, civil rights, sectionalism, temperance, women's rights, economic development, and immigration. Douglass's oratory is accompanied by speeches that influenced him, his reflections on successful rhetorical strategies, contemporary commentary on his performances, and modern-day assessments of his rhetorical legacy.