“Can You Be Surprised at My Discouragement?”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Mae Duane
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Black Children ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Free School ◽  
Early Republican

This chapter explores the warring—and yet mutually constitutive—discourses of education and colonization through a particular focus on the New York African Free School (1787-1834), an institution designed by the New York Manumission Society to prepare black children for freedom. The school produced a remarkable roster of alumni, including Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, Henry Highland Garnet, Ira Aldridge, Patrick Reason and others. The development and curriculum of this school, when placed in context with early republican conversations about education, race and citizenship, provides a means of understanding how in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Enlightenment notions of a child’s malleability had become a means of determining whether non-white occupants of United States soil could be educated into citizenship, or whether they would have to be excised from the nation’s borders. Ultimately, this chapter attends to the conversations about black education that unfolded in the interplay between parents and administrators, and between students and the schoolwork those students were assigned, to better understand how and why colonization would emerge as the reigning antislavery philosophy during these years, and how African Americans engaged and eventually dismantled the racial logic underlying the American Colonization Society.

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.

scholarly journals Collections, Compilations, and Convolutes of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Fragments in North America before ca. 1900

Fragmentology ◽  
10.24446/dlll ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-139
Author(s):  
Scott Gwara
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
The United States ◽  
New York University ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Private Collections ◽  
Public Exhibition

Using evidence drawn from S. de Ricci and W. J. Wilson’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, American auction records, private library catalogues, public exhibition catalogues, and manuscript fragments surviving in American institutional libraries, this article documents nineteenth-century collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscript fragments in North America before ca. 1900. Surprisingly few fragments can be identified, and most of the private collections have disappeared. The manuscript constituents are found in multiple private libraries, two universities (New York University and Cornell University), and one Learned Society (Massachusetts Historical Society). The fragment collections reflect the collecting genres documented in England in the same period, including albums of discrete fragments, grangerized books, and individual miniatures or “cuttings” (sometimes framed). A distinction is drawn between undecorated text fragments and illuminated ones, explained by aesthetic and scholarly collecting motivations. An interest in text fragments, often from binding waste, can be documented from the 1880s.

Africa in the Shuffle

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-23
Author(s):  
Immanuel Wallerstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
The U.S

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the study of Africa in the United States was a very rare and obscure practice, engaged in almost exclusively by African-American (then called Negro) intellectuals. They published scholarly articles primarily in quite specialized journals, notably Phylon, and their books were never reviewed in the New York Times. As a matter of fact, at this time (that is, before 1945) there weren't even very many books written about African-Americans in the U.S., although the library acquisitions were not quite as rare as those for books about Africa.

The Optics of Liberian Emigration

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Fugitive Slave

This chapter explores the life and work of Augustus Washington, the free African American photographer, who envisioned more rights and freedoms than those available in the United States. Anticipating a future in the United States bound by racial restraints, he packed up his successful photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, and emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia. Washington worked closely with the American Colonization Society to convince black Americans to leave their homeland for Liberia and attempted to provoke viewers of his images to envision the potential of black rights in the United States that he enjoyed in Liberia. Washington’s images promulgating black Liberian political leadership and economic promise abroad offered a vision of freedom that belied a hierarchical, and often oppressive, Liberian society. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, his images brought into focus the debates among African Americans about the uncertain, and perhaps imperiled, future of black people in the United States.

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.

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