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"In 1856 Ottilie Assing, an intrepid journalist who had left Germany after the failed revolution of 1848, traveled to Rochester, New York, to interview Frederick Douglass for a German newspaper. This encounter transformed the lives of both: they became intimate friends, they stayed together for twenty-eight years, and she translated his autobiography into German. Diedrich reveals in fascinating detail their shared intellectual and cultural interests and how they worked together on his abolitionist writings." "As is clear from letters and diaries, Douglass was enchanted with his vivacious companion but believed that any liaison with a white woman would be fatal to his political mission. Assing was keenly aware of his dilemma but certain he would marry her once his mission was fulfilled. She was bitterly disappointed: after his wife's death, Douglass did remarry - but he married another woman. Assing committed suicide, leaving her estate to Douglass."--Jacket.
In the 1930s and 1940s American women, like women elsewhere in the Western world, experienced three very different and contradictory historical phases: women in the nation's workforce, denounced as parasites in the face of mass unemployment during the Depression, were courted to replace men in the US economy during the Second World War only to be dismissed to return to their natural realm, the home, as the GIs came back from the front.
This volume of essays examines the forced dispossession caused by the Middle Passage. The book analyzes the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance, and music it elicited, both on the transatlantic journey and on the American continent. The totality of this collection establishes a broad topographical and temporal context for the Passage that extends from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic and to the interior of the Americas, and from the beginning of the Passage to the present day.
After a long and painful transatlantic passage, African captives reached a continent they hadn't even known existed, where they were treated in ways that broke every law of civilization as they understood it. This was the discovery of America for a good number of our ancestors, one quite different from the "paradise" Columbus heralded but no less instrumental in shaping the country's history. What finding the New World meant to those who never sought it, and how they made the hostile, unfamiliar continent their own, is the subject of this volume, the first truly international collection of essays on African American literature and culture. Distinguished scholars, critics, and writers from ar...
The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.
From Black to Schwarz explores the long and varied history of the exchanges between African America and Germany, with a particular focus on cultural interplay. Covering a wide range of media of expression—music, performance, film, scholarship, literature, visual arts, reviews—these essays trace and analyze a cultural interaction, collaboration, and mutual transformation that began in the eighteenth century, boomed during the Harlem Renaissance/Weimar Republic, survived the Third Reich’s “Degenerate Art” campaigns, and (with new media available to further exchanges), is still increasingly empowering and inspiring participants on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the lives of ordinary people are the truths of history. Such truths abound in the diaries of Jacob Epp, a Russian Mennonite school-teacher, lay minister, farmer, and village secretary in southern Ukraine. This abridged translation of his diaries offers a remarkably vivid picture of Mennonite community life in Imperial Russia during a period of troubled change. Epp’s writings reveal a skilled and honest diarist of deep feelings, and tell a human story that no conventional historical account could hope to equal. The diaries overflow with the details of his workaday world. Family, village, church, and community routines are broken by trips to market, visits to other Mennonite settlements, ...
How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders’ oligarchy in the Civil War. This is a story about a dangerous idea—one which ignited revolutions in America, France, and Haiti; burst across Europe in the revolutions of 1848; and returned to inflame a new generation of intellectuals to lead the abolition movement—the idea that all men are created equal. In their struggle against the slaveholding oligarchy of their time, America’s antislavery leaders found their way back to the rationalist, secularist, and essentially atheist inspiration for the first American Revolution. Frederick Douglass...
A staggering love illuminating the dark corners of a Nazi prison Renowned German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is famous for his resistance to the Nazi regime and for his allegiance to God over government. But what few realize is that the last years of his life also held a love story that rivals any romance novel. Maria von Wedemeyer knows the realities of war. Her beloved father and brother have both been killed on the battlefield. The last thing this spirited young woman needs is to fall for a man under constant surveillance by the Gestapo. How can she give another piece of her heart to a man so likely to share the same final fate? Yet when Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an old family fr...
The first volume of a collection of short stories by Sean Dietrich, a writer, humorist, and novelist, known for his commentary on life in the American South. His humor and short fiction appear in various publications throughout the Southeast.