Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer,abolitionist,orator,writer,and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland,he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York,becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly,he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to enslavers' arguments that enslaved people lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been enslaved. It was in response to this disbelief that Douglass wrote his first autobiography.
Hoodoo is a set of spiritual practices,traditions,and beliefs that were created by enslaved Africans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities,Christianity and elements of indigenous botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers,conjure doctors,conjure man or conjure woman,root doctors,Hoodoo doctors,and swampers. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include conjure or rootwork. As a syncretic spiritual system,it also incorporates Islam brought over by enslaved West African Muslims and Spiritualism.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery,comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans,was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865,predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526,during early colonial days,it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies,including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law,an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought,sold,or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction,many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation,sharecropping,and convict leasing.
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.
The Three-fifths Compromise was an agreement reached during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention over the inclusion of slaves in a state's total population. This count would determine the number of seats in the House of Representatives;the number of electoral votes each state would be allocated;and how much money the states would pay in taxes. The compromise counted three-fifths of each state's slave population toward that state's total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives. Even though slaves were denied voting rights,this gave Southern states more representatives and more presidential electoral votes than if slaves had not been counted. It also gave slaveholders similarly enlarged powers in Southern legislatures;this was an issue in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia in 1863. Free blacks and indentured servants were not subject to the compromise,and each was counted as one full person for representation.
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,speaker,author,and advocate for women's rights.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865,free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free.
The American Renaissance period in American literature ran from about 1830 to around the Civil War. A central term in American studies,the American Renaissance was for a while considered synonymous with American Romanticism and was closely associated with Transcendentalism.
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.
Egyptomania refers to a period of renewed interest in the culture of ancient Egypt sparked by Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign in the 19th century. Napoleon was accompanied by many scientists and scholars during this campaign,which led to a large interest in the documentation of ancient monuments in Egypt. Thorough documentation of ancient ruins led to an increase in the interest about ancient Egypt. Jean-François Champollion deciphered the ancient hieroglyphs in 1822 by using the Rosetta Stone that was recovered by French troops in 1799 which began the study of scientific Egyptology.
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.
Ira Berlin was an American historian,professor of history at the University of Maryland,and former president of Organization of American Historians.
The Slave Community:Plantation Life in the Antebellum South is a book written by American historian John W. Blassingame. Published in 1972,it is one of the first historical studies of slavery in the United States to be presented from the perspective of the enslaved. The Slave Community contradicted those historians who had interpreted history to suggest that African-American slaves were docile and submissive "Sambos" who enjoyed the benefits of a paternalistic master–slave relationship on southern plantations. Using psychology,Blassingame analyzes fugitive slave narratives published in the 19th century to conclude that an independent culture developed among the enslaved and that there were a variety of personality types exhibited by slaves.
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.
The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) was founded in December 1833 and dissolved in March 1870 following the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was founded by eighteen women,including Mary Ann M'Clintock,Margaretta Forten,her mother Charlotte,and Forten's sisters Sarah and Harriet.
Slavery in what became the U.S. state of Illinois existed for more than a century. Illinois did not become a state until 1818,but earlier regional systems of government had already established slavery. France introduced African slavery to the Illinois Country in the early eighteenth century. French and other inhabitants of Illinois continued the practice of owning slaves throughout the Illinois Country's period of British rule (1763-1783),as well as after its transfer to the new United States in 1783 as Illinois County,Virginia. The Northwest Ordinance (1787) banned slavery in Illinois and the rest of the Northwest Territory. Nonetheless,slavery remained a contentious issue,through the period when Illinois was part of the Indiana Territory and the Illinois Territory and some slaves remained in bondage after statehood until their gradual emancipation by the Illinois Supreme Court. Thus the history of slavery in Illinois covers several sometimes overlapping periods:French;British;Virginia;United States Northwest Territory (1787-1800),Indiana Territory (1800-1809),Illinois Territory (1809-1818) and the State of Illinois.
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.
John Jones was an American abolitionist,businessman,civil rights leader,and philanthropist.
Jeff Forret is an American historian and professor at Lamar University.
Martin A. Klein is an Africanist and an emeritus professor in the History Department at the University of Toronto specialising in the Atlantic slave trade,and francophone West Africa:Senegal,Guinea,and Mali. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism at Northwestern University (1951-1955) and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in history at the University of Chicago (1957-1964). Klein worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley from 1965 till 1970,later teaching African history at the University of Toronto as an associate professor and later full professor from 1970 until his retirement in 1999. As a Fulbright Fellow,Klein taught for a year at Lovanium University in Kinshasa.
