Egyptian Hagar

2019 ◽  
pp. 46-68
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Egyptian Woman ◽  
Biblical Texts

Chapter 2 explores the interpretation of Hagar in nineteenth-century pro- and anti-slavery literature in the United States. This chapter illustrates how nineteenth-century interpreters distance Hagar’s Egyptian ethnicity from any connection with African Americans. As well, it shows how they regard biblical enslavement as distinct from US chattel enslavement. While abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates argue using biblical texts, interpreters on both sides tend not to cite texts relating to the Hagar/Ishmael narrative. Although Hagar is an enslaved Egyptian woman, these interpreters tend not to regard her plight as analogous to that of enslaved African peoples in the United States.

The Atlantic Voyage and Black Radicalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Radicalism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Abolitionists ◽  
American Racism

Chapter 5 looks at the Atlantic crossing from the United States to Great Britain, where colored travelers shifted their protest strategies at sea. Black abolitionists made this journey between the 1830s and the 1860s, and they found that even British-owned steamship companies practiced segregation. Interestingly, however, black activists did not take on Atlantic captains and ship proprietors with the same ferocity that they had conductors back home. In part, this was because the ocean voyage, which lasted between nine and fourteen days, was too confining and dangerous to defy white vigilantes. Yet, more importantly, colored travelers also knew that desegregating Atlantic steamships was hardly the endgame. Rather, colored travelers relaxed their protest strategies while on board and remained focused on the significance of the trip itself. They wanted to reach foreign shores, connect with British abolitionists, and most of all see if the promises were true that abroad African Americans could experience true freedom of mobility, a right that eluded them at home. This is not to suggest that activists did not protest segregation on British steamships. They did, but without the physical assertiveness they adopted in the fight against the Jim Crow car. The story of Frederick Douglass’s harrowing transatlantic voyage in 1845 shows this. An analysis of early nineteenth- century shipboard culture and the British-owned Cunard steamship line illustrates how, for colored travelers, the transatlantic voyage emerged as a liminal phase between American racism and their perceptions of British and European egalitarianism.

Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arna Bontemps
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Literary Societies ◽  
Columbian Exposition

This chapter examines Negro literature in Illinois, beginning with the literary societies, orators, and slave narratives of the nineteenth century. The Illinois Negroes' interest in literature had been recorded almost a decade before the Civil War by the organization of the Chicago Literary Society. Prior to 1861, there had been thirty-five works of Afro-American authorship published and sold in the United States; at the time of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago more than 100 had been issued. This chapter considers the literary turn marked by the dialect poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Edwin Campbell, and James David Corrothers, along with the free verse of Fenton Johnson. It also discusses the works of other Negro writers such as Frank Marshall Davis, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemp, as well as those of a number of white scholars, poets, and novelists from Illinois who had written sympathetically about African Americans.

scholarly journals Freedom’s Journal

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Emma Stave
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Freedom's Journal ◽  
Journalistic Field

This article examines the first newspaper operated, published, and distributed by free blacks in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, Freedom’s Journal.  Despite being active for merely two years, the New York-based periodical managed to unite African Americans across different states by becoming their mouthpiece. The first part of the article examines well-established historical facts including information about the editors, the readership, and the methods of distribution. The second part examines changes brought to the journalistic field by African Americans, while part three analyzes excerpts from a debate between proponents of the colonization movement, and their African American opponents. The final part discusses why the periodical ceased publishing, the importance of the method of distribution, and how the paper may have impacted subsequent black rights movements. Finally, an assessment is given as to how periodicals like Freedom’s Journal may influence the present and the future.

Black Samson in the Temple of Liberty

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Black ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Temple

In the nineteenth century, prominent writers and politicians invoked the Temple of Liberty in debates over slavery. The Temple of Liberty was a symbolic term for the United States. Both pro- and anti-slavery advocates had concerns regarding the stability of the nation’s democracy due to the enslavement of African peoples. The idea of Black Samson in the Temple of Liberty became a powerful image within anti-slavery efforts. For example, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1842 poem “The Warning” popularized the image of a blinded Black Samson figure destroying the temple. In this chapter, we analyze how nineteenth-century American writers used Samson to address not only slavery but also other issues related to race. In doing so, these writers created a lasting link between the biblical Samson and African Americans that helped to generate a uniquely American Black Samson figure.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
The United States

This introduction explains the importance of visual culture to the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. People believed images to have persuasive powers and activists used them to convince viewers to join various social movements that included antislavery and black emigration. Black activists produced images before, during, and after the Civil War that included daguerreotypes, lithographs, moving panoramas, and cartes de visite. They quickly seized these technologies and mobilized the popularity, desirability, and unique capabilities of each. Studying the works of these black cultural producers expands our understanding of the arsenal of strategies African Americans drew upon in the service of increasing black rights.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

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