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The first African American to publish a book on any subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) has long been denigrated by literary critics who refused to believe that a black woman could produce such dense, intellectual work. In recent decades, however, Wheatley's work has come under new scrutiny as the literature of the eighteenth century and the impact of African American literature have been reconceived. Fourteen prominent Wheatley scholars consider her work from a variety of angles, affirming her rise into the first rank of American writers. --from publisher description.
In The Ebony Column, Eric Ashley Hairston begins a new thread in the ongoing conversation about the influence of Greek and Roman antiquity on U.S. civilization and education. While that discussion has yielded many exceptional insights into antiquity and the American experience, it has so regularly elided the African American component that all classical influence on black writing and thought seems to vanish. That omission, Hairston contends, is disturbing not least because of its longevity— from an early period of overt stereotyping and institutionalized racism right up to the contemporary and, one would hope, more cosmopolitan and enlightened era. Challenging and correcting that persisten...
Classical influences and allusions are found throughout the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, the prominent African American intellectual and pioneering sociologist, historian, and educator. This is the first book-length discussion of the influence of classical authors such as Plato and Cicero on this important twentieth-century thinker.
This groundbreaking new volume unites eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, showcasing how these fields can vibrantly benefit one another. In eleven chapters that engage a variety of eighteenth-century texts, contributors explore timely themes and topics such as climate change, new materialisms, the blue humanities, indigeneity and decoloniality, and green utopianism. Additionally, each chapter reflects on pedagogical concerns, asking: How do we teach eighteenth-century environmental humanities? With particular attention to the voices of early-career scholars who bring cutting-edge perspectives, these essays highlight vital and innovative trends that can enrich both disciplines, making them essential for classroom use.
Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, our Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction that undoes the injustices of the past. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove traces his journey from the religion of the slaveholder to the Christianity of Christ, showing that when the gospel is reconstructed, freedom rings both for individuals and for society as a whole.
From Bruce Lee to Samurai Champloo, how Asian fictions fuse with African American creative sensibilities
This comprehensive and authoratative four-volume work surveys the history and philosophy of crime, punishment, and criminal justice institutions in America from colonial times to the present.
From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Re...
Canadian Association for American Studies Robert K. Martin Book Prize Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability. Such portrayals of the healthy black self in early black print culture created a nineteenth-century politics of well-being that spanned continents. Even in conditions of painful labor, severely limited resources, and physical and mental brutality, these writers counter stereotypes and circumstances by representing and claiming the totality of bodily existence. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether black people participated in the politics of the nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects. Collectively, its authors insist that historians go beyond questioning how revolutionary the American Revolution was, or whether Reconstruction failed, and focus, instead, on how political change initiated by African Americans and their allies constituted the rule in nineteenth-century American politics, not occasional and cataclysmic exceptions. The essays in this groundbreaking collection cover the full range of politica...