Lenny Ray Johnson is a good man. He knows it. His wife Bertha Jean knows it. Everybody in Clarksdale, Mississippi knows it.Until they don't.All Lenny Ray wanted was a Friday night out with his best friend Beebo, a couple of drinks at the Hen & Rooster Lounge, and to make it home to his wife. What he got instead was one too many "Shotguns," a blackout he can't account for, and a visit four weeks later from Mabel Ann Williams — Beebo's girlfriend — parked sideways across his ...

In a trans-bellum public career of over fifty years, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper fought for abolition, women's suffrage, Black suffrage, civil rights, and temperance. She fashioned a sense of literature across genre that engaged deeply with both her activism and questions of aesthetics, craft, and art. Still, while Harper was well-known during her lifetime, many twentieth-century critics dismissed or ignored her. Even amid interest spurred by a new generation of scholars, Harper has often...

This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core ...

Black Print Unbound explores the development of the Christian Recorder during and just after the American Civil War. As a study of the African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper and so of a periodical with national reach among free African Americans, Black Print Unbound is at once a massive recovery effort of a publication by African Americans for African Americans, a consideration of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and print culture studies, and an in...

Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain present a long-overdue collection of theoretical perspectives and case studies aimed at teaching nineteenth-century American literature using digital humanities tools and methods. Scholars foundational to the development of digital humanities join educators who have made digital methods central to their practices. Together they discuss and illustrate how digital pedagogies deepen student learning. The collection's innovative approach allows the works to ...

Traditional histories of the American transcendentalist movement begin in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s terms: describing a rejection of college books and church pulpits in favor of the individual power of “Man Thinking.” This essay collection asks how women who lacked the privileges of both college and clergy rose to thought. For them, reading alone and conversing together were the primary means of growth, necessarily in private and informal spaces both overlapping with those of the men and apart...

Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child’s hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the f...

In June 1867, the San Francisco Elevator-one of the nation\'s premier black weekly newspapers during Reconstruction-began publishing articles by a Californian calling herself \"Ann J. Trask\" and later \"Semper Fidelis.\" Her name was Jennie Carter (1830-1881), and the Elevator would print her essays, columns, and poems for seven years.Carter probably spent her early life in New Orleans, New York, and Wisconsin, but by the time she wrote her \"Always Faithful\" co...

J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold is a gripping tale of post–Civil War battles against racism and systemic injustice. Originally published in 1896, this novel reveals an African American community of individuals dedicated to education, journalism, fraternal organizations, and tireless work serving the needs of those abandoned by the political process of the white world. Jones challenges conventional wisdom by addressing a range of subjects—from interracial relationships to forced ...

Appointed is a recently recovered novel written by William Anderson and Walter Stowers, two of the editors of the Detroit Plaindealer, a long-running and well-regarded African American newspaper of the late nineteenth century. Drawing heavily on nineteenth-century print culture, the authors tell the story of John Saunders, a college-educated black man living and working in Detroit. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, Saunders befriends his white employer’s son, Seth S...

Until recently, scholars believed that African American children’s literature did not exist before 1900. Now, Who Writes for Black Children? opens the door to a rich archive of largely overlooked literature read by black children. This volume’s combination of analytic essays, bibliographic materials, and primary texts offers alternative histories for early African American literary studies and children’s literature studies.From poetry written by a slave for a plantation sc...

Uncle Tom charts the dramatic cultural transformation of perhaps the most controversial literary character in American history. From his origins as the heroic, Christ-like protagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible, Uncle Tom has become a widely recognized epithet for a black person deemed so subservient to whites that he betrays his race. Readers have long noted that Stowe's character is not the trait...