The Elite Of Our People Joseph Willsons Sketches Of Black Upper Class Life In Antebellum Philadelphia

Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, first published in 1841, was written by Joseph Willson, a southern black man who had moved to Philadelphia. He wrote this book to convince whites that the African-American community in his adopted city did indeed have a class structure, and he offers advice to his black readers about how they should use their privileged status. The significance of Willson's account lies in its sophisticated analysis of the issues of class and race in Philadelphia. It is all the more important in that it predates W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro by more than half a century. Julie Winch has written a substantial introduction and prepared extensive annotation. She identifies the people Willson wrote about and gives readers a sense of Philadelphia's multifaceted and richly textured African American community. The Elite of Our People will interest urban, antebellum, and African-American historians, as well as individuals with a general interest in African-American history. This volume has withstood the test of time. It remains readable. Joseph Willson was well read, articulate, and had a keen eye for detail. His message is as timely today as it was in 1841. The people he wrote about were remarkable individuals whose lives were as complex as his own.

W.E.B Du Bois is widely considered one of the most accomplished and controversial African American intellectuals in U.S. history. A pioneering historian, sociologist, political economist, and civil rights activist, his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk remains one of the most widely read books in the history of American literature. In this new book, Reiland Rabaka critically explores Du Bois’s multidimensional legacy, lucidly introducing his main contributions in areas ranging from American sociology and critical race studies to black feminism and black Marxism. Rabaka argues that Du Bois’s corpus, particularly when attention is given to his contributions to the critique of racism, sexism, capitalism and colonialism, can be persuasively interpreted as both an undeniable and unprecedented contribution to the origins and evolution of one of our most important contemporary critical concepts: intersectionality. Du Bois: A Critical Introduction is an indispensable resource for scholars and students of history, sociology, politics, and economics. It will also be very valuable for those working in interdisciplinary fields, ranging from African American studies, critical race studies, and critical white studies to black feminism, black Marxism, and black internationalism.

This volume charts the ways in which African American literature fosters transitions between material cultures and contexts from 1830 to 1850, and showcases work that explores how African American literature and lived experiences shaped one another. Chapters focus on the interplay between pivotal political and social events, including emancipation in the West Indies, the Irish Famine, and the Fugitive Slave Act, and key African American cultural productions, such as the poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the writings of David Walker, and the genre of the Slave Narrative. Chapters also examine the relationship between African American literature and a variety of institutions including, the press, and the post office. The chapters are grouped together in three sections, each of which is focused on transitions within a particular geographic scale: the local, the national, and the transnational. Taken together, they offer a crucial account of how African Americans used the written word to respond to and drive the events and institutions of the 1830s, 1840s, and beyond.

What was it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children behind? To Free a Family tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her family. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price—remorse at parting without a word, fear for her family’s fate. This story is anchored in two extraordinary collections of letters and diaries, that of her former North Carolina slaveholders and that of the northern family—Susan and Peter Lesley—who protected and employed her. Sydney Nathans’s sensitive and penetrating narrative reveals Mary Walker’s remarkable persistence as well as the sustained collaboration of black and white abolitionists who assisted her. Mary Walker and the Lesleys ventured half a dozen attempts at liberation, from ransom to ruse to rescue, until the end of the Civil War reunited Mary Walker with her son and daughter. Unlike her more famous counterparts—Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth—who wrote their own narratives and whose public defiance made them heroines, Mary Walker’s efforts were protracted, wrenching, and private. Her odyssey was more representative of women refugees from bondage who labored secretly and behind the scenes to reclaim their families from the South. In recreating Mary Walker’s journey, To Free a Family gives voice to their hidden epic of emancipation and to an untold story of the Civil War era.

Winner, 2021 AERA Outstanding Book Award Winner, 2021 AERA Division F New Scholar's Book Award Winner, 2020 Mary Kelley Book Prize, given by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Winner, 2020 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society Uncovers the hidden role of girls and women in the desegregation of American education The story of school desegregation in the United States often begins in the mid-twentieth-century South. Drawing on archival sources and genealogical records, Kabria Baumgartner uncovers the story’s origins in the nineteenth-century Northeast and identifies a previously overlooked group of activists: African American girls and women. In their quest for education, African American girls and women faced numerous obstacles—from threats and harassment to violence. For them, education was a daring undertaking that put them in harm’s way. Yet bold and brave young women such as Sarah Harris, Sarah Parker Remond, Rosetta Morrison, Susan Paul, and Sarah Mapps Douglass persisted. In Pursuit of Knowledge argues that African American girls and women strategized, organized, wrote, and protested for equal school rights—not just for themselves, but for all. Their activism gave rise to a new vision of womanhood: the purposeful woman, who was learned, active, resilient, and forward-thinking. Moreover, these young women set in motion equal-school-rights victories at the local and state level, and laid the groundwork for further action to democratize schools in twentieth-century America. In this thought-provoking book, Baumgartner demonstrates that the confluence of race and gender has shaped the long history of school desegregation in the United States right up to the present.

Gossip is one of the most common, and most condemned, forms of discourse in which we engage - even as it is often absorbing and socially significant, it is also widely denigrated. This volume examines fascinating moments in the history of gossip in America, from witchcraft trials to People magazine, helping us to see the subject with new eyes.

Six years before the onset of the Civil War, two courageous figures - one a free white man and one an enslaved black woman - risked personal liberty to ensure each other's freedom in an explosive episode that captured the attention of a nation on the brink of cataclysmic change. In this deeply researched account of the rescue of the slave Jane Johnson by the Philadelphia Quaker and fervent abolitionist Passmore Williamson, of the federal court case that followed, and of Johnson's selfless efforts to free the jailed Williamson, veteran journalist Nat Brandt and Emmy-winning filmmaker Yanna Kroyt Brandt capture the heroism and humanity at the heart of this important moment in American history. written plea from Johnson and rushed to the Camden ferry dock to liberate her and her two children from their master in a daring confrontation. Unbeknownst to the abolitionists, Johnson's owner, Col. John Hill Wheeler, was connected to the highest levels of government and was a personal friend of President Franklin Pierce. As a result, Wheeler was able to have Williamson arrested and confined to Moyamensing Prison, an institution notorious for harboring Philadelphia's worst criminals. with famous leaders of the abolitionist movement, black and white, visiting the prisoner. In one of the episode's most dramatic moments, Johnson returned to Philadelphia, risking her own freedom, to testify on Williamson's behalf. There were petitions in many states to impeach Judge John Kintzing Kane, who stubbornly refused to release Williamson. The case became a battle of wills between a man who was unwavering in his defiance of slavery and another determined to defend the so-called rights of the slave owner. Williamson's martyrdom spotlighted Philadelphia as one northern city where the growing rifts between states' rights, federal mandates, and personal liberties had come to the fore. drama, and the rise of a cult of celebrity, the Brandts' brisk narrative takes readers into the lives of the central participants in this complex episode. Passmore Williamson, Jane Johnson, William Still, Colonel Wheeler, and Judge Kane are brought vibrantly to life as fully developed and flawed characters drawn unexpectedly into the annals of history. In the Shadow of the Civil War chronicles events that presage the divisive national conflict that followed and that underscore the passionate views on freedom and justice that continue to define the American experience.

How has the mass media changed our experience of Election Day? This chronological account of Election Day in Philadelphia begins in the colonial era and traces the evolution of the democratic process through to the present day. Using a variety of sources, the book documents how Philadelphians have dramatically changed the ways in which they perform and discuss Election Day, and examines the significance of these changes, using them as a lens through which to understand differing conceptions of democratic life. Particular attention is paid to the day's status as a mass-mediated ritual, and the various forms of media - among them broadsides, newspapers, television, and the Internet - that have dominated public portrayals of the occasion.Well-researched and written, Celebrating Democracy is as much about the history of Election Day as it is about the history of American journalism and mass media.

"Picture Freedom provides a unique and nuanced interpretation of nineteenth-century African American life and culture. Focusing on visuality, print culture, and an examination of the parlor, Cobb has fashioned a book like none other, convincingly demonstrating how whites and blacks reimagined racial identity and belonging in the early republic."--Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City

One of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andreá N. Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.