Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865

Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865 PDF Author: Deborah C. De Rosa
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791458266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Explores why women abolitionists turned to children's literature to make their case against slavery. Deborah C. De Rosa examines the multifaceted nature of domestic abolitionism, a discourse that nineteenth-century women created to voice their political sentiments when cultural imperatives demanded their silence. For nineteenth-century women struggling to find an abolitionist voice while maintaining the codes of gender and respectability, writing children's literature was an acceptable strategy to counteract the opposition. By seizing the opportunity to write abolitionist juvenile literature, De Rosa argues, domestic abolitionists were able to enter the public arena while simultaneously maintaining their identities as exemplary mother-educators and preserving their claims to "femininity." Using close textual analyses of archival materials, De Rosa examines the convergence of discourses about slavery, gender, and children in juvenile literature from 1830 to 1865, filling an important gap in our understanding of women's literary productions about race and gender, as well as our understanding of nineteenth-century American literature more generally. “ the writings that De Rosa recovers must be considered in future scholarship. De Rosa’s careful archival work is a valuable contribution to the study of antebellum women writers and an important addition to our understanding of nineteenth-century American literatures of the child.” — Legacy “ [De Rosa] deserves tremendous credit for resurrecting voices that have long been mute and for opening a new discussion on the relationship between femininity, motherhood, and political activism in nineteenth-century America.” — Mississippi Quarterly “Deborah C. De Rosa’s excellent book offers the first extended look at the historical context, print culture, and rhetoric of American abolitionist literature written for children by women authors in the mid-nineteenth century.” — Rhetoric and Public Affairs "De Rosa offers a detailed analysis of various works of abolitionist children's literature to make a compelling case that this primary source can be valuable in explaining an overlooked dimension of antislavery activism before the Civil War. This study provides a new avenue for understanding female abolitionism and children's literature." — Nancy Isenberg, author of Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America "De Rosa should be commended for recognizing the gap in scholarship of the period and for finding value in a group of writers who took seriously the intersection of abolitionist and domestic concerns." — Bruce Mills, Kalamazoo College

Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865

Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865 PDF Author: Deborah C. De Rosa
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791458266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores why women abolitionists turned to children's literature to make their case against slavery. Deborah C. De Rosa examines the multifaceted nature of domestic abolitionism, a discourse that nineteenth-century women created to voice their political sentiments when cultural imperatives demanded their silence. For nineteenth-century women struggling to find an abolitionist voice while maintaining the codes of gender and respectability, writing children's literature was an acceptable strategy to counteract the opposition. By seizing the opportunity to write abolitionist juvenile literature, De Rosa argues, domestic abolitionists were able to enter the public arena while simultaneously maintaining their identities as exemplary mother-educators and preserving their claims to "femininity." Using close textual analyses of archival materials, De Rosa examines the convergence of discourses about slavery, gender, and children in juvenile literature from 1830 to 1865, filling an important gap in our understanding of women's literary productions about race and gender, as well as our understanding of nineteenth-century American literature more generally. “ the writings that De Rosa recovers must be considered in future scholarship. De Rosa’s careful archival work is a valuable contribution to the study of antebellum women writers and an important addition to our understanding of nineteenth-century American literatures of the child.” — Legacy “ [De Rosa] deserves tremendous credit for resurrecting voices that have long been mute and for opening a new discussion on the relationship between femininity, motherhood, and political activism in nineteenth-century America.” — Mississippi Quarterly “Deborah C. De Rosa’s excellent book offers the first extended look at the historical context, print culture, and rhetoric of American abolitionist literature written for children by women authors in the mid-nineteenth century.” — Rhetoric and Public Affairs "De Rosa offers a detailed analysis of various works of abolitionist children's literature to make a compelling case that this primary source can be valuable in explaining an overlooked dimension of antislavery activism before the Civil War. This study provides a new avenue for understanding female abolitionism and children's literature." — Nancy Isenberg, author of Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America "De Rosa should be commended for recognizing the gap in scholarship of the period and for finding value in a group of writers who took seriously the intersection of abolitionist and domestic concerns." — Bruce Mills, Kalamazoo College

Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865

Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865 PDF Author: Deborah C. De Rosa
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791486303
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Deborah C. De Rosa examines the multifaceted nature of domestic abolitionism, a discourse that nineteenth-century women created to voice their political sentiments when cultural imperatives demanded their silence. For nineteenth-century women struggling to find an abolitionist voice while maintaining the codes of gender and respectability, writing children's literature was an acceptable strategy to counteract the opposition. By seizing the opportunity to write abolitionist juvenile literature, De Rosa argues, domestic abolitionists were able to enter the public arena while simultaneously maintaining their identities as exemplary mother-educators and preserving their claims to "femininity." Using close textual analyses of archival materials, De Rosa examines the convergence of discourses about slavery, gender, and children in juvenile literature from 1830 to 1865, filling an important gap in our understanding of women's literary productions about race and gender, as well as our understanding of nineteenth-century American literature more generally.

Moral Commerce

Moral Commerce PDF Author: Julie L. Holcomb
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501706071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "Moral Commerce".

Young Abolitionists

Young Abolitionists PDF Author: Michaël Roy
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479830100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
How children helped abolish slavery During the antebellum period, several abolitionist figures, including William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator; Susan Paul, an African American primary school teacher; Henry Clarke Wright, a white reformer; and Frederick Douglass, the internationally renowned activist, consistently appealed to the sympathies of children against slavery. In 1835, Garrison proclaimed, “If . . . we desire to see our land delivered from the curse of PREJUDICE and SLAVERY, we must direct our efforts chiefly to the rising generation.” This rallying cry found a receptive audience and ignited action. Despite their limited scholarly exploration, children occupied a crucial position within the US abolition movement. Through a reexamination of archival materials including antislavery newspapers, correspondence, and autobiographies, Young Abolitionists is the first book to center children’s participation in the campaign to eradicate slavery in the United States. Michaël Roy uncovers how young advocates—Black and white alike—confidently delivered antislavery speeches within their schools, enrolled in juvenile antislavery societies, and contributed to the editorial process of antislavery newspapers. They aided fugitive slaves, attended antislavery fairs, and engaged in activities commemorating John Brown’s legacy. They even affixed their signatures to antislavery petitions, thus challenging the boundaries of their own citizenship. Abolitionists saw childhood as a force for social change. With the help of parents and teachers, children acted in concrete ways against slavery and made a meaningful contribution toward its demise. Young Abolitionists honors their contributions and reminds us that children can—and must—be included in the fight for a better world.

Enterprising Youth

Enterprising Youth PDF Author: Monika Elbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135898537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
"Recommended" by Choice Enterprising Youth examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children’s perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. The essays in this book reveal the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order, or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. The question, then, is whether the business of telling children's stories becomes an adult enterprise of conservative indoctrination, or whether children are enterprising enough to read what many of the contributors to this volume see as the subversive potential of these texts. This collection of literary and historical criticism of nineteenth-century American children’s literature draws upon recent assessments of canon formations, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and domestic/foreign are collapsed to reveal a picture of American childhood and life that is expansive and constrictive at the same time.

The Illustrated Slave

The Illustrated Slave PDF Author: Martha J. Cutter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
From the 1787 Wedgwood antislavery medallion featuring the image of an enchained and pleading black body to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) and Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave (2013), slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was slavery, including its painting, sculpture, pamphlet campaigns, and artwork. Yet an important piece of this visual culture has gone unexamined: the popular and frequently reprinted antislavery illustrated books published prior to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) that were utilized extensively by the antislavery movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Illustrated Slave analyzes some of the more innovative works in the archive of antislavery illustrated books published from 1800 to 1852 alongside other visual materials that depict enslavement. Martha J. Cutter argues that some illustrated narratives attempt to shift a viewing reader away from pity and spectatorship into a mode of empathy and interrelationship with the enslaved. She also contends that some illustrated books characterize the enslaved as obtaining a degree of control over narrative and lived experiences, even if these figurations entail a sense that the story of slavery is beyond representation itself. Through exploration of famous works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as well as unfamiliar ones by Amelia Opie, Henry Bibb, and Henry Box Brown, she delineates a mode of radical empathy that attempts to destroy divisions between the enslaved individual and the free white subject and between the viewer and the viewed.

Street Diplomacy

Street Diplomacy PDF Author: Elliott Drago
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421444542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
An illuminating look at how Philadelphia's antebellum free Black community defended themselves against kidnappings and how this "street diplomacy" forced Pennsylvanians to confront the politics of slavery. As the most southern of northern cities in a state that bordered three slave states, antebellum Philadelphia maintained a long tradition of both abolitionism and fugitive slave activity. Although Philadelphia's Black community lived in a free city in a free state, they faced constant threats to their personal safety and freedom. Enslavers, kidnappers, and slave catchers prowled the streets of Philadelphia in search of potential victims, violent anti-Black riots erupted in the city, and white politicians legislated to undermine Black freedom. In Street Diplomacy, Elliott Drago illustrates how the political and physical conflicts that arose over fugitive slave removals and the kidnappings of free Black people forced Philadelphians to confront the politics of slavery. Pennsylvania was legally a free state, at the street level and in the lived experience of its Black citizens, but Pennsylvania was closer to a slave state due to porous borders and the complicity of white officials. Legal contests between slavery and freedom at the local level triggered legislative processes at the state and national level, which underscored the inability of white politicians to resolve the paradoxes of what it meant for a Black American to inhabit a free state within a slave society. Piecing together fragmentary source material from archives, correspondence, genealogies, and newspapers, Drago examines these conflicts in Philadelphia from 1820 to 1850. Studying these timely struggles over race, politics, enslavement, and freedom in Philadelphia will encourage scholars to reexamine how Black freedom was not secure in Pennsylvania or in the wider United States.

Bonds of Union

Bonds of Union PDF Author: Bridget Ford
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
This vivid history of the Civil War era reveals how unexpected bonds of union forged among diverse peoples in the Ohio-Kentucky borderlands furthered emancipation through a period of spiraling chaos between 1830 and 1865. Moving beyond familiar arguments about Lincoln's deft politics or regional commercial ties, Bridget Ford recovers the potent religious, racial, and political attachments holding the country together at one of its most likely breaking points, the Ohio River. Living in a bitterly contested region, the Americans examined here--Protestant and Catholic, black and white, northerner and southerner--made zealous efforts to understand the daily lives and struggles of those on the opposite side of vexing human and ideological divides. In their common pursuits of religious devotionalism, universal public education regardless of race, and relief from suffering during wartime, Ford discovers a surprisingly capacious and inclusive sense of political union in the Civil War era. While accounting for the era's many disintegrative forces, Ford reveals the imaginative work that went into bridging stark differences in lived experience, and she posits that work as a precondition for slavery's end and the Union's persistence.

The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature

The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature PDF Author: Dale M. Bauer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316176002
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1161

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Book Description
The field of American women's writing is one characterized by innovation: scholars are discovering new authors and works, as well as new ways of historicizing this literature, rethinking contexts, categories and juxtapositions. Now, after three decades of scholarly investigation and innovation, the rich complexity and diversity of American literature written by women can be seen with a new coherence and subtlety. Dedicated to this expanding heterogeneity, The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature develops and challenges historical, cultural, theoretical, even polemical methods, all of which will advance the future study of American women writers – from Native Americans to postmodern communities, from individual careers to communities of writers and readers. This volume immerses readers in a new dialogue about the range and depth of women's literature in the United States and allows them to trace the ever-evolving shape of the field.

The Slave's Little Friends

The Slave's Little Friends PDF Author: Carme Manuel
Publisher: Universitat de València
ISBN: 8491349618
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
The texts included in this anthology illustrate the wide range of possibilities that abolitionist writings offered to American children during the first half of the nineteenth century. Composing their works under the wings of the antislavery movement, authors responded to the unequal and controversial development of abolitionist politics during the decades that led up to the outbreak of the Civil War. These writers struggled to teach children “to feel right,” and attempted to instruct them to actively respond to the injustice of the slavery system as rendered visible by a harrowing visual archive of suffering bodies compiled by both English and American antislavery promoters. Reading was equated with knowledge and knowledge was equated with moral responsibility, and therefore reading about “the abominations of slavery” became an act of emotional personal transformation. Children were thus turned into powerful agents of political change and potential activists to spread the abolitionist message. Invited to comply with a higher law that entailed the breaking of their nation’s edicts, they were morally rewarded by the Christian God and approvingly applauded by their elders for their violation of these same American regulations. These texts enclosed immeasurable value for young nineteenth-century Americans to fulfill a more democratic and egalitarian role in their future. Undoubtedly, abolitionist writings for children took away American children’s innocence and transformed them into juvenile abolitionists and empowered compassionate citizens.