The Train Is Always Leaving

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-18
Author(s):  
Michael Boyce Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

Director Barry Jenkins’s body of work to date demonstrates an exquisite devotion to the art of blackness as an aesthetic and cultural practice. On the occasion of Jenkins’ latest work—the television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 book, The Underground Railroad—Film Quarterly contributor Michael Gillespie speaks with Jenkins about his craft, his process, and his acutely cinephilic attention to black visual and expressive culture. The series poses a stunningly exacting sense of the slave narrative coupled with an ambitious charting of antebellum nineteenth-century America, at once familiar and uncanny. As visual historiography, The Underground Railroad enacts an irreconcilable challenge to the writing of history and, furthermore, to the political and aesthetic capacities of televisual seriality. Jenkins’s conception of the series resonates as a fantastical and haunting restipulation of the idea of America—and a crucial reimagining of the rendering of blackness.

Radical Friend

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy A. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Local Leader ◽  
William Lloyd Garrison ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Woman's Rights ◽  
Radical Activism

A pillar of radical activism in nineteenth-century America, Amy Kirby Post (1802–89) participated in a wide range of movements and labored tirelessly to orchestrate ties between issues, causes, and activists. A conductor on the Underground Railroad, co-organizer of the 1848 Rochester Woman’s Rights Convention, and a key figure in progressive Quaker, antislavery, feminist, and spiritualist communities, Post sustained movements locally, regionally, and nationally over many decades. But more than simply telling the story of her role as a local leader or a bridge between local and national arenas of activism, Nancy A. Hewitt argues that Post’s radical vision offers a critical perspective on current conceptualizations of social activism in the nineteenth century. While some individual radicals in this period have received contemporary attention—most notably William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Lucretia Mott (all of whom were friends of Post)—the existence of an extensive network of radical activists bound together across eight decades by ties of family, friendship, and faith has been largely ignored. In this in-depth biography of Post, Hewitt demonstrates a vibrant radical tradition of social justice that sought to transform the nation.

Promotion, Competition, Captivity: The Political Economy of Coal

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Patrick Adams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Energy Source ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Mineral Fuel

“Coal is, perhaps, the most indispensable article used by man. Without it, in time, we should return to a state of barbarism.” So proclaimed the president of Pennsylvania's Pequa Railroad and Improvement Company in 1849. The importance of coal, the official explained, lay in its utility as an energy source, for which he hailed it as unsurpassed: coal was “‘hoarded labor’”—a “treasure reserved by nature to promote and perfect our civilization.” The railroad official's florid tribute to the mineral fuel was hardly disinterested: the Pequa Railroad had ambitious plans to ship a great deal of coal. Yet it effectively underscored the enormous role of coal in nineteenth-century America. It was an age in which, as countless industry boosters proclaimed, coal was king.

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