Douglass: In His Own Time

Frederick Douglass through the Eyes of His Contemporaries With Douglass in His Own Time, editor and scholar of African American literature John Ernest intends to provide an “introduction to Douglass the man by those who knew him (p. ix). Attempting to avoid selections that reiter...

The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown\u27s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism

A New Way to Look at an Important Figure There might seem little new to say about John Brown, who fascinated even when he terrified both his contemporaries and historians. Yet, in The Tie that Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism, Bonnie...

A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution

Root . . . appears more interested in proving that the U.S. Constitution, if interpreted correctly, was not a document that would permit racism, especially once abolitionists had prevailed with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The narrative has very little to say about Frederick Douglass, following the highlights of pro- or anti-slavery moments in relation to the Constitution more than the ebb and flow of Douglass’s ideas. Douglass appears less as a man with complex thinking processes that developed over time and in response to multiple factors than as an icon supplying optimistic quotes about the Constitution as a document of freedom

Picturing Frederick Douglass:an Illustrated Biography Of The Nineteenth Century\\u27s Most Photographed American

A Life in Images: The Many Faces of Frederick Douglass Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass sat for a portrait nearly every year of his life from 1841 until his death in 1895. Although this frequency does not necessarily prove the headline-ready subtitle of Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illu...

Women in the World of Frederick Douglass

As part of the day-long event Why Douglass Matters: A Bicentennial Symposium, Dr. Leigh Fought (associate professor of history at LeMoyne College) discusses her book Women in the World of Frederick Douglass. Fought addresses two primary questions in her lecture: Who were some of the women in the world of Frederick Douglass, and how were they important to understanding both Douglass\u27s life and the world in which he lived

Douglass Liaisons: The Female Correspondents of Frederick Douglass, 1842-52

For the past twenty years, historians have recognized the role that \u271\u27 women played in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement. Works by Gerda Lerner, Nancy Hewitt,jean Fagan Yellin, Clare Taylor, and Maria Diedrich, among others, have demonstrated that women spoke, organized, promoted, and wrote on behalf of the movement to end slavery. Yet, the published volumes of the Frederick Douglass Papers have obscured that fact. Although women supported and often saved Douglass throughout his career, their voices have been conspicuously absent from the seven volumes of the Douglass Papers. With the impending publication of the first correspondence volume, which covers the years 1842-52, the project can correct this oversight by emphasizing the contributions of women to abolitionism and to Douglass\u27s life. Moreover, in these letters, Douglass\u27s complex relationships with women and among the women themselves become more apparent and intriguing

Review of \u3ci\u3eSelected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott\u3c/i\u3e. Edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer, et al.

Such a long and active life naturally produced a prodigious body of correspondence. Beverly Palmer, editor of Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, estimates that there are 950 letters by Mott alone, and these are the ones that have survived. References within those letters suggest that Mott wrote many more. Yet, the letters of Mott have appeared in a printed volume only once. That volume, Lucretia and James Molt: Their Life and Letters, published in 1884, was edited by Mott\u27s granddaughter Anna Davis Hallowell in a fashion that might be described today as something more akin to proofreading