Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution

Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution PDF Author: Patricia Bradley
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496800672
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book

Book Description
Under the leadership of Samuel Adams, patriot propagandists deliberately and conscientiously kept the issue of slavery off the agenda as goals for freedom were set for the American Revolution. By comparing coverage in the publications of the patriot press with those of the moderate colonial press, this book finds that the patriots avoided, misinterpreted, or distorted news reports on blacks and slaves, even in the face of a vigorous antislavery movement. The Boston Gazette, the most important newspaper of the Revolution, was chief among the periodicals that dodged or excluded abolition. The author of this study shows that The Gazette misled its readers about the notable Somerset decision that led to abolition in Great Britain. She notes also that The Gazette excluded anti-slavery essays, even from patriots who supported abolition. No petitions written by Boston slaves were published, nor were any writings by the black poet Phillis Wheatley. The Gazette also manipulated the racial identity of Crispus Attucks, the first casualty in the Revolution. When using the word slavery, The Gazette took care to focus it not upon abolition but upon Great Britain's enslavement of its American colonies. Since propaganda on behalf of the Revolution reached a high level of sophistication, and since Boston can be considered the foundry of Revolutionary propaganda, the author writes that the omission of abolition from its agenda cannot be considered as accidental but as intentional. By the time the Revolution began, white attitudes toward blacks were firmly fixed, and these persisted long after American independence had been achieved. In Boston, notions of virtue and vigilance were shown to be negatively embodied in black colonists. These devil's imps were long represented in blackface in Boston's annual Pope Day parade. Although the leaders of the Revolution did not articulate a national vision on abolition, the colonial anti-slavery movement was able to achieve a degree of success, but only in drives through the individual colonies.

Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution

Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution PDF Author: Patricia Bradley
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496800672
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book

Book Description
Under the leadership of Samuel Adams, patriot propagandists deliberately and conscientiously kept the issue of slavery off the agenda as goals for freedom were set for the American Revolution. By comparing coverage in the publications of the patriot press with those of the moderate colonial press, this book finds that the patriots avoided, misinterpreted, or distorted news reports on blacks and slaves, even in the face of a vigorous antislavery movement. The Boston Gazette, the most important newspaper of the Revolution, was chief among the periodicals that dodged or excluded abolition. The author of this study shows that The Gazette misled its readers about the notable Somerset decision that led to abolition in Great Britain. She notes also that The Gazette excluded anti-slavery essays, even from patriots who supported abolition. No petitions written by Boston slaves were published, nor were any writings by the black poet Phillis Wheatley. The Gazette also manipulated the racial identity of Crispus Attucks, the first casualty in the Revolution. When using the word slavery, The Gazette took care to focus it not upon abolition but upon Great Britain's enslavement of its American colonies. Since propaganda on behalf of the Revolution reached a high level of sophistication, and since Boston can be considered the foundry of Revolutionary propaganda, the author writes that the omission of abolition from its agenda cannot be considered as accidental but as intentional. By the time the Revolution began, white attitudes toward blacks were firmly fixed, and these persisted long after American independence had been achieved. In Boston, notions of virtue and vigilance were shown to be negatively embodied in black colonists. These devil's imps were long represented in blackface in Boston's annual Pope Day parade. Although the leaders of the Revolution did not articulate a national vision on abolition, the colonial anti-slavery movement was able to achieve a degree of success, but only in drives through the individual colonies.

Common Bondage

Common Bondage PDF Author: Peter A. Dorsey
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572336714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book

Book Description
“This is a brilliant book that I believe will make a very valuable and original contribution to the way scholars understand the use of language in the era of the American Revolution and the origin and limited nature of Revolutionary era anti-slavery sentiment.” —Robert Olwell, author of Master, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 In the American revolutionary era, the antislavery rhetoric of certain founding fathers often took on a life of its own. The distinctions they drew between the British imperial order and the bright dawn of liberty in a new American republic seemed, at times, to compel the freedom of the slaves as well as the freedom of white colonists. But Peter A. Dorsey shows that this rhetoric was often more strategic than principled, and he argues that understanding this ploy helps to explain why an early antislavery movement failed to achieve its goals once the American Revolution was over. In Common Bondage, Dorsey examines how patriots and those who opposed them understood slavery within a broader tradition of revolutionary thought. Especially prominent in the rhetoric and reality of the eighteenth century, this fluid concept was applied to a wide variety of events and values and was constantly being redefined. Dorsey explains the classical meaning of rhetoric as “to persuade” but notes that it can also mean “to mask” or “to mislead.” He shows how these different senses of the word merged, as revolutionary rhetoric was used to achieve limited ends. By examining the figurative extension of slavery in revolutionary rhetoric, Dorsey recaptures the transforming energy of the ideas it promoted and points toward a better understanding of the regressive aftermath. The resulting composite psychology of the slave-holding culture that existed during the country's formative years allows us to better trace the development of American racism. Peter A. Dorsey is the chair of the English Department at Mt. Saint Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He is the author of Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography.

Slave Nation

Slave Nation PDF Author: Alfred W Blumrosen
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 140222611X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

Book Description
A book all Americans should read, Slave Nation reveals the key role racism played in the American Revolutionary War, so we can see our past more clearly and build a better future. In 1772, the High Court in London freed a slave from Virginia named Somerset, setting a precedent that would end slavery in England. In America, racist fury over this momentous decision united the Northern and Southern colonies and convinced them to fight for independence. Meticulously researched and accessible, Slave Nation provides a little-known view of the birth of our nation and its earliest steps toward self-governance. Slave Nation is a fascinating account of the role slavery played in the American Revolution and in the framing of the Constitution, offering a fresh examination of the "fight for freedom" that embedded racism into our national identity, led to the Civil War, and reverberates through Black Lives Matter protests today. "A radical, well-informed, and highly original reinterpretation of the place of slavery in the American War of Independence."—David Brion Davis, Yale University

Propaganda as a Source of American History

Propaganda as a Source of American History PDF Author: Frank Heywood Hodder
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Propaganda, American
Languages : en
Pages : 28

Get Book

Book Description


Propaganda 1776

Propaganda 1776 PDF Author: Russ Castronovo
Publisher: Oxford Studies in American Lit
ISBN: 0199354901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Propaganda 1776 reframes the culture of the U.S. Revolution and early Republic, revealing it to be rooted in a vast network of propaganda. Truth, clarity, and honesty were declared virtues of the period-but rumors, falsehoods, forgeries, and unauthorized publication were no less the life's blood of liberty. Looking at famous patriots like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine; the playwright Mary Otis Warren; and the poet Philip Freneau, Castronovo provides various anecdotes that demonstrate the ways propaganda was - contrary to our instinctual understanding - fundamental to democracy rather than antithetical to it. By focusing on the persons and methods involved in Revolutionary communications, Propaganda 1776 both reconsiders the role that print culture plays in historical transformation and reexamines the widely relevant issue of how information circulates in a democracy.

Rough Crossings

Rough Crossings PDF Author: Simon Schama
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061914606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 750

Get Book

Book Description
“The most dramatic account so far of the extraordinary expeience of slaves in and after the American Revolution. . . . Schama’s gift for plunging us into the very center of the action makes reading an exhilarating and often moving experience.”—Daily Telegraph If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history. Told in the voices of the slaves and the white abolitionists who aided them, Simon Schama vividly details the odyssey of these escaped blacks, shedding light on an extraordinary chapter in America’s birth.

The Common Cause

The Common Cause PDF Author: Robert G. Parkinson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 769

Get Book

Book Description
When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like "domestic insurrectionists" and "merciless savages," the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic. In a fresh reading of the founding moment, Parkinson demonstrates the dual projection of the "common cause." Patriots through both an ideological appeal to popular rights and a wartime movement against a host of British-recruited slaves and Indians forged a racialized, exclusionary model of American citizenship.

The War Before the War

The War Before the War PDF Author: Andrew Delbanco
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Get Book

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book Selection Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the Lionel Trilling Book Award A New York Times Critics' Best Book "Excellent... stunning."—Ta-Nehisi Coates This book tells the story of America’s original sin—slavery—through politics, law, literature, and above all, through the eyes of enslavedblack people who risked their lives to flee from bondage, thereby forcing the nation to confront the truth about itself. The struggle over slavery divided not only the American nation but also the hearts and minds of individual citizens faced with the timeless problem of when to submit to unjust laws and when to resist. The War Before the War illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.

Slavery, Race and the American Revolution

Slavery, Race and the American Revolution PDF Author: Duncan J. MacLeod
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521205023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
This book analyses the impact of American Revolutionary ideology upon conceptions of the place of slavery in American society. The ambivalence involved in a libertarian revolution occurring in a slave society was as obvious to eighteenth-century Americans as it is to twentieth-century historians yet the obvious sincerity of Southern Republicanism and the persistence of slavery have presented a paradox with which historians have hardly come to terms.

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 PDF Author: David Brion Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195126718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Get Book

Book Description
Davis concentrates his attention on slavery in America.