Nick Bromell (born 1950) is an American author and educator in the field of intellectual history. [1] He is the professor of American studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. In his writing and research, he specializes in media and public opinion, race and ethnicity, and democracy and governance. [2] He was the founding editor of the political and literary magazine Boston Review .
Bromell's work has been published in numerous academic and literary journals, and he has also written articles for mainstream publications such as The Boston Globe , Harper's , and Salon . He is the author of the books By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum American Culture (1992), Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (2000), and The Time is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (2013). His book The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass is due for publication in 2021.
Bromell was born in rural Virginia. [3] He graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts with a B.A. in classics and philosophy. He received a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Stanford University in California, [4] where he specialized in American antebellum literature and culture and American intellectual history and popular culture. [3]
He went on to teach at Harvard and Princeton universities. [3] In 1980, he became the founding editor of the relaunched Boston Review . [5]
In 1987, Bromell joined the English faculty at University of Massachusetts Amherst. [4] He is a former president of the New England chapter of the American Studies Association. [1]
Bromell's research work has been published in many academic journals, including American Quarterly , American Literary History , American Literature , Journal of the Society for American Music , and Political Theory . [1] He is the author of three books: By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1992); [6] Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2000); and The Time is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2013). [2] He also edited the book of essays A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (University Press of Kentucky, 2018). [7]
He has written for Salon [8] and contributed articles on abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Scooter Libby to The American Scholar . [9] His articles and essays have also appeared in The Boston Globe , Harper's , Raritan , The Sewanee Review , and The Georgia Review , and online at AlterNet. [1] In February 2003, Bromell was among the guests discussing psychedelic drugs on the Infinite Mind radio show, presented by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. [10] In 2008, he was one of the three panelists at a public forum held at Stanford's Kresge Auditorium to discuss the influence of the Beatles and their self-titled double album (also known as the "White Album"), 40 years after its release. [11]
Bromell has been an affiliate scholar of the Center for American Progress. [9] In 2016, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of American literature. [1] [4] At that time, he was also named a 2016–17 fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard. [4] As of 2016, he was writing a book about Douglass's political philosophy. [1] Titled The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass, the book is due to be published by Duke University Press in February 2021. [12]
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.
Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. She was also the second black woman to attend law school in the United States. Mary Shadd established the newspaper Provincial Freeman in 1853, which was published weekly in southern Ontario. it advocated equality, integration, and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.
David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well. In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge, he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Frederick Douglass Patterson was an American academic administrator, the president of what is now Tuskegee University (1935–1953), and founder of the United Negro College Fund. He was a 1987 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, and 1988 recipient of the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.
Eaglebrook School is an independent junior boarding and day school for boys in grades six through nine. It is located in Deerfield, Massachusetts, on the Pocumtuck Range near Deerfield Academy and sited on an 724-acre (2.93 km2) campus which is also preserved by the Deerfield Wildlife Trust. Eaglebrook School is accredited by the Association of Independent Schools in New England (AISNE).
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
David Ruggles was an African-American abolitionist in New York who resisted slavery by his participation in a Committee of Vigilance and the Underground Railroad to help fugitive slaves reach free states. He was a printer in New York City during the 1830s, who also wrote numerous articles, and "was the prototype for black activist journalists of his time." He claimed to have led more than 600 fugitive slaves to freedom in the North, including Frederick Douglass, who became a friend and fellow activist. Ruggles opened the first African-American bookstore in 1834.
{{Infobox academic | name = John W. Blassingame | image = Blassingame.gif | alt = | caption = | birth_name = John Wesley Blassingame | birth_date = March 23, 1940 | birth_place = Covington, Georgia, US | death_date = February 13, 2000 (aged 59) | death_place = New Haven, Connecticut, US | home_town = | spouse = Teasie Jackson Blassingame | awards =
William L. Van Deburg was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written on antebellum slavery, on the history of black nationalism, and on contemporary African-American popular culture. Van Deburg retired from teaching in 2008 and is currently Professor Emeritus.
The Heroic Slave, a Heartwarming Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty is a short piece of fiction, or novella, written by abolitionist Frederick Douglass, at the time a fugitive slave based in Boston. When the Rochester Ladies' Anti Slavery Society asked Douglass for a short story to go in their collection, Autographs for Freedom, Douglass responded with The Heroic Slave. The novella, published in 1852 by John P. Jewett and Company, was Douglass's first and only published work of fiction.
Richard A. Yarborough is Professor of English and African-American literature and a Faculty Research Associate with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also an editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature.
Mark Hertsgaard is an American journalist and the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now. He is the environment correspondent for The Nation, and the author of seven non-fiction books, including Earth Odyssey (1998) and Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (2011).
Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
Robert Gooding-Williams is M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is the founding director of Columbia's Center for Race, Philosophy, and Social Justice. He specializes in philosophy of race and Continental philosophy, especially Nietzsche.
Ariela Julie Gross is an American historian. Previously the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (USC), she is now a Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law.
Jeff Forret is an American historian and professor at Lamar University.
The Provincial Freeman was a Canadian weekly newspaper founded by Mary Ann Shadd that published from 1853 through 1857. She was married to Thomas F. Cary in 1856, becoming Mary Ann Shadd Cary. It was the first newspaper published by an African-American female and Canada's first by a woman of any ethnicity. The paper's motto was "Devoted to anti-slavery, temperance, and general literature."
Robert S. Levine is a scholar of American and African American literature. He is currently Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Joshua Bennett is an American author, professor and artist. He is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.