Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He became the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.
The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved persons, particularly Africans enslaved in the Americas, though many other examples exist. Over six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist; about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets. In the United States during the Great Depression (1930s), more than 2,300 additional oral histories on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program. Most of the 26 audio-recorded interviews are held by the Library of Congress.
My Bondage and My Freedom is an autobiographical slave narrative written by Frederick Douglass and published in 1855. It is the second of three autobiographies written by Douglass and is mainly an expansion of his first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The book depicts in greater detail his transition from bondage to liberty. Following this liberation, Douglass went on to become a prominent abolitionist, orator, author, newspaper publisher, and advocate for women's rights.
Alan Shaw Taylor is an American historian and scholar who, most recently, was the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A specialist in the early history of the United States, Taylor has written extensively about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution, and the early American Republic. Taylor has received two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize, and was also a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History was founded in New York City by businessmen-philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman in 1994 to promote the study and interest in American history.
The Slave Power, or Slavocracy, referred to the perceived political power held by American slaveholders in the federal government of the United States during the Antebellum period. Antislavery campaigners charged that this small group of wealthy slaveholders had seized political control of their states and were trying to take over the federal government illegitimately to expand and protect slavery. The claim was later used by the Republican Party that formed in 1854–55 to oppose the expansion of slavery.
Lewis E. "Lew" Lehrman is an American investment banker, businessman, politician, economist, and historian who supports the ongoing study of American history based on original source documents. He was presented the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2005 for his contributions to American history, the study of President Abraham Lincoln, and monetary policy. In 1982, Lehrman ran for Governor of New York against Democratic candidate Mario Cuomo, losing the election by two percentage points.
The George Washington Book Prize was instituted in 2005 and is awarded annually to the best book on the founding era of the United States; especially ones that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history. It is administered by Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience; it is sponsored by Washington College in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington's Mount Vernon. At $50,000, the George Washington Book Prize is one of the largest book awards in the United States.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
James Oakes is an American historian, and is a Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he teaches courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Slavery, the Old South, Abolitionism, and U.S. and World History. He taught previously at Princeton University and Northwestern University.
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, commonly known as the MacMillan Center, is a research and educational center for international affairs and area studies at Yale University. It is named after Whitney MacMillan and his wife Betty.
Philip D. Morgan is a British historian. He has specialized in Early Modern colonial British America and slavery in the Americas. In 1999, he won both the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for his book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998).
The Frederick Douglass Book Prize is awarded annually by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
John Stauffer is Professor of English, American Studies, and African American Studies at Harvard University. He writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and photography.
Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing is a 2013 historical book and analysis of a collection of writings by American slaves and befreed slaves. It was written by Christopher Hager and published by Harvard University Press.
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory is a 2001 book by the American historian David W. Blight. The book was awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book on slavery of 2001.
Thavolia Glymph is an American historian and professor. She is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Duke University. She specializes in nineteenth-century US history, African-American history and women’s history, authoring Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020). Elected the 140th president of the American Historical Association, she is the first Black woman to serve in that office.
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom is a 2018 biography of African American abolitionist, writer, and orator Frederick Douglass, written by historian David W. Blight and published by Simon & Schuster. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Although the United States Constitution has never contained the words "slave" or "slavery" within its text, it dealt directly with American slavery in at least five of its provisions and indirectly protected the institution elsewhere in the document.
"The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?" is a speech that Frederick Douglass gave on March 26, 1860, in Glasgow, in which he rejected arguments made by slaveholders as well as by fellow abolitionists as to the nature and meaning of the United States Constitution. The popularity of the speech led to its being published as a pamphlet.
