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A study of contemporary slave narratives that reveals the conditions and consequences of slavery and the importance of survivors' stories.
One of the cruelest abuses of slavery in America was that slaves were forbidden to read and write. Consigned to illiteracy, they left no records of their thoughts and feelings apart from the few exceptional narratives of Frederick Douglass and others who escaped to the North—or so we have long believed. But as Christopher Hager reveals, a few enslaved African Americans managed to become literate in spite of all prohibitions, and during the halting years of emancipation thousands more seized the chance to learn. The letters and diaries of these novice writers, unpolished and hesitant yet rich with voice, show ordinary black men and women across the South using pen and paper to make sense of...
The essays in Web Writing respond to contemporary debates over the proper role of the Internet in higher education, steering a middle course between polarized attitudes that often dominate the conversation. The authors argue for the wise integration of web tools into what the liberal arts does best: writing across the curriculum. All academic disciplines value clear and compelling prose, whether that prose comes in the shape of a persuasive essay, scientific report, or creative expression. The act of writing visually demonstrates how we think in original and critical ways and in ways that are deeper than those that can be taught or assessed by a computer. Furthermore, learning to write well requires engaged readers who encourage and challenge us to revise our muddled first drafts and craft more distinctive and informed points of view. Indeed, a new generation of web-based tools for authoring, annotating, editing, and publishing can dramatically enrich the writing process, but doing so requires liberal arts educators to rethink why and how we teach this skill, and to question those who blindly call for embracing or rejecting technology.
The legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction remain a central part of American life a century and a half later. Drawing together leading scholars in literary studies and history, this volume offers accessible treatments of major authors and genres of this period, including Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as fiction, poetry, drama, and life-writing. Although focused on literature, this Companion also canvases battlefields, homefronts, and hospitals, and discusses a range of topics, including constitutional reform and presidential impeachment; emancipation and Africa; material culture and monuments; education, civil rights, and reenactment. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction speaks powerfully to literature's ability to help readers come to terms with a violent, oppressive history while also imagining a different future.
Toward a More Perfect Union is an extraordinary book of husband-and-wife letters written during the Civil War, selected from the Frederic E. Lockley Collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Appearing here are 162 letters exchanged between Frederic Lockley and his wife Elizabeth, chosen from 405 letters preserved in the collection. The survival of such two-way exchanges is rare. Few soldiers in the field had the opportunity to save letters from home. The Lockleys' selected letters narrate a chronological three-year story, from 1862 to 1865. When Frederic enlisted at thirty-seven, he and Elizabeth promised each other they would write twice a week and, for the most part, ...
A collection of newspaper articles, historic information, and photos of Holland, N.J. and the surrounding areas.
A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of Democracy Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality? Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has n...
Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child's hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front. The essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of this pivotal period. The collection proceeds chronologically, providing a nuanced hist...