3 research outputs found
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Combating Slavery and Colonization: Student Abolitionism and the Politics of Antislavery in Higher Education, 1833-1841
During the early 1830’s, the nascent American Antislavery Society needed support at the local level. This thesis argues that college and seminary students were a crucial demographic that helped garner support for, and spread, abolitionism. Examining the proliferation of radical abolitionism at three locations, Lane Seminary, Andover Theological Seminary, and Amherst College, reveals that students developed intellectual and moral arguments to justify their abolitionist sentiments. Typically, student abolitionists rhetorically battled with faculty, administration, and other students, who all supported colonization, over competing solutions to the problem of slavery. At all three locations, faculty and administration sought to suppress student abolitionism for a number of reasons, chief among them was the adherence to contemporary racial prejudices. Despite faculty restrictions, student abolitionists remained active in the movement in various capacities and were pivotal actors that helped spread abolitionism. Centering these locations in the historical narrative of the antebellum era illuminates the power dynamics at institutions of higher learning and how concepts of race, freedom, citizenship, and free speech were intellectually debated. In turn, students were resolved to engage with the foremost problem facing society, racial slavery, and believed immediate emancipation and racial equality were the solutions. This history complicates the current trend in the historiography that focuses on the complicity of America’s universities with the institution of racial slavery and reveals that the history of student activism in the United States can be traced back to antebellum era campuses
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ABOLITION AND ACADEME: STRUGGLES FOR FREEDOM AND EQUALITY AT BRITISH AND AMERICAN COLLEGES, 1742-1855
The radical nature of abolitionist activism and ideology at institutions of higher learning is the analytical focus of this study. A host of abolitionists from a variety of backgrounds made colleges sites of struggle for emancipation and racial equality. Central to these struggles was the role of students whose contributions to the abolition movement were crucial to its evolution. A focus on abolitionists from multiple institutions reveals a significant demographic of activists that has been largely overlooked and whose advocacy provides a new window into the movement’s history. Abolitionist dissent at colleges was a proximate refutation to the growth of academic thought that legitimized slaving and also promoted racist ideologies. Abolitionist thought and activism at colleges threw into question the very nature and utility of college learning in the British-American Atlantic World. Tracing a history of abolition at numerous colleges, theological seminaries, and universities across time and space, from the northern United States to Britain, this study re-evaluates the connections of the political economy of Atlantic slaving to institutions of higher learning. By studying the thought and actions of historical actors beyond trustees, faculty, and benefactors, this project offers a history of radical resistance to the politics of slavery and racism at colleges and the reverberations of that resistance beyond the campus