Abigail Field Mott’s The Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano: A Scholarly Edition
In 1829, Samuel Wood and Sons, a New York publisher of children’s literature, printed and sold the Quaker Abigail Field Mott’s Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano. Mott adapted Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, a bestselling autobiography first published in London in 1789, for Black children studying at New York African Free Schools, one of the first educational […]
The Ambassador and the Courtesan: The Body and the Body Politic in Renaissance Italy
The Ambassador and the Courtesan: The Body and the Body Politic in Renaissance Italy examines the formation of cultural subjects at the intersection of political and literary discourse. Drawing on literary and legal texts as well as archival materials, Paola De Santo offers a comparative analysis of two emerging roles in the early modern period […]
Appointed
Appointed is a recently recovered novel written by William Anderson and Walter Stowers, two of the editors of the Detroit Plaindealer, a long-running and well-regarded African American newspaper of the late nineteenth century. Drawing heavily on nineteenth-century print culture, the authors tell the story of John Saunders, a college-educated black man living and working in Detroit. Through […]
The Colonel’s Dream
Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) was an African American writer, essayist, Civil Rights activist, legal-stenography businessman, and lawyer whose novels and short stories explore race, racism, and the problematic contours of African Americans’ social and cultural identities in post–Civil War South. He was the first African American to be published by a major American publishing house […]
The Enduring Work of Biography: James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1791-2020
The Enduring Work of Biography seeks to revitalize appreciation of Boswell’s great biography for a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers. Engaging accessibly and informatively with biographical, historical, critical, and textual matters, and drawing on the Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell, Enduring Work discusses Boswell’s collaboration with others (both alive and dead) […]
The Fenwick Letters: Reconstructing a Transnational, Social, Cultural, and Political Life, Volume 1 (1797-1821)
The Fenwick Letters: Reconstructing a Transnational, Social, Cultural and Political Life serves as a companion volume to Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist (2019). The first of this two-volume edition covers the initial phase—1797-1821—of Eliza Fenwick’s transformative, transnational odyssey as she moved from promising radical author (supporting emerging democratic, liberatory philosophies) to conservative schoolmistress and businesswoman; from the urban […]
Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner
In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper the Christian Recorder, the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, DC, and later, as one of the Union army’s first black chaplains. In the halls of Congress, […]
Hearts of Gold
J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold is a gripping tale of post–Civil War battles against racism and systemic injustice. Originally published in 1896, this novel reveals an African American community of individuals dedicated to education, journalism, fraternal organizations, and tireless work serving the needs of those abandoned by the political process of the white world. Jones […]
The Hindered Hand
Between 1899 and 1908, five long works of fiction by the Nashville-based black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs appeared in print, making him the most prolific African American novelist at the turn of the twentieth century. Brought out by Griggs’s own Orion Publishing Company in three distinct printings in 1905 and 1906, The Hindered Hand; or, […]
Imperium in Imperio
Sutton E. Griggs’s first novel, originally published in 1899, paints a searing picture of the violent enforcement of disfranchisement and Jim Crow racial segregation. Based on events of the time, including US imperial policies, revolutionary movements, and racial protests, Imperium in Imperio introduces the fictional Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave as “future leaders of their race” and […]
Junk Drawer: What We Leave Behind
Junk Drawer: What We Leave Behind explores the personal objects that were once treasured by their owners yet were ultimately consigned to online “junk drawer” sales. Photographer and coeditor Barbara Von Eckardt acquired these random assortments from estate remnants on eBay and has documented their contents through evocative, sepia-toned images. In doing so, she has […]
Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge
Elleanor Eldridge, born of African and US indigenous descent in 1794, operated a lucrative domestic services business in nineteenth century Providence, Rhode Island. In defiance of her gender and racial background, she purchased land and built rental property from the wealth she gained as a business owner. In the 1830s, Eldridge was defrauded of her […]
Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels, and Labours of Mrs. Elaw
As a young Black orphan indentured to a Quaker family in Bristol, Pennsylvania, Zilpha Elaw (c. 1793–1873) decided to join the upstart Methodists in 1808. She preached her first sermon a decade later, ignoring her husband and the many church leaders, clergy, and laity who tried to silence her. Elaw’s memoir chronicles the first twenty […]
A Nickel and a Prayer
Virtually unknown outside of her adopted hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Jane Edna Hunter was one of the most influential African American social activists of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. In her autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer, Hunter presents an enlightening two-part narrative that recollects her formative years in the post–Civil War South and her activist years in […]
Quixotic Authority: The Female Quixote and the Woman Writer, Lennox to Austen
Quixotic Authority re-writes the story of what it has meant to be an impassioned womanreader by exploring the female quixote trope within novels and in the professional lives of mid-to late eighteenth-century British women novelists. The female quixote is often a self-centered, deluded, ill-educated homewrecker who must be reformed or punished; yet women writers such […]
Sketches of Slave Life and From Slave Cabin to Pulpit
This book is the first anthology of the autobiographical writings of Peter Randolph, a prominent nineteenth-century former slave who became a black abolitionist, pastor, and community leader. Randolph’s story is unique because he was freed and relocated from Virginia to Boston, along with his entire plantation cohort. A lawsuit launched by Randolph against his former […]
Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age
How did workers experience cut glass during its cultural heyday? Rather than privilege the stories of factory owners or wealthy consumers, Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age refracts the medium’s history through the labors required to make and maintain these dazzling artifacts as well as popular representations of this work, […]