“A New Vocation before Me”: Frederick Douglass's Post-Civil War Lyceum Career

This article examines the oratorical strategies adopted by Frederick Douglass in the late 1860s and early 1870s when he joined the ranks of professional lyceum speakers. Douglass's speaking shifted away from the long-established topics of slavery and civil rights to appeal to a broader audience. Douglass also shifted from a spontaneous speaking style, honed in years of abolitionist campaigning, to rely upon written texts prepared in advance and delivered repeatedly. A close analysis of those lyceum addresses, newspaper reports of their delivery, and Douglass's personal correspondence reveal that he retained many elements of his older performance style and facilely adapted his topic, sometimes in mid-lecture, to suit many audiences' demand to hear him address the “race question.

Long Road to Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left

Review of: Long Road to Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left, by Mark A. Lause

The Black Dream of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist

This article tells the story of Gerrit Smith, a New York abolitionist who had been loosely linked to the raid on Haper\u27s Ferry by John Brown. Shortly after the insurrection Smith was committed to an insane asylum by his family, and the scandal faded after John Brown\u27s execution. Through their research in the Syracuse University Special Collections, the authors have uncovered much evidence affirming the financial link between Smith and John Brown. The authors also determined that the mental state of Smith seemed rather genuine, and he might have suffered from bipolar disorder. The fallout of the Smith scandal received much attention in the partisan newspapers of the time

Autographs for Freedom and Reaching a New Abolitionist Audience

Scholars correctly appreciate Frederick Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave (1853) as an important early work of African American literature and as a significant indicator of its author’s endorsement of violent tactics to end slavery in the United States.1 This essay will literally step back farther from the text of Douglass’s only fictional work, and examine The Heroic Slave as a component of a larger project—the gift book Autographs for Freedom—edited by Douglass and his closest ally in the early 1850s, British abolitionist Julia Griffiths. The thirty-nine pieces of short fiction, poetry, essays, and correspondence in the 263-page anthology were envisioned as tools to construct a wider and politically more potent antislavery alliance than any in which the two abolitionists had previously participated. In the diverse composition of its collection of authors and antislavery themes, Autographs for Freedom was both a cultural and political tool designed by Douglass and Griffiths to help assemble a more powerful antislavery coalition from the volume’s reading audience

Frederick Douglass’s Foray into Fiction: Considering the Context of Recent Work on The Heroic Slave

In February 2015, the Frederick Douglass Papers, a documentary editing project at work since 1973 to collect, edit, and disseminate the various works of Frederick Douglass, the most influential African American of the 19th century, published the first-ever scholarly edition of Douglass’s sole work of fiction, his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave. Edited by Robert S. Levine of the University of Maryland, John Stauffer of Harvard University, and John McKivigan, the longtime editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers, based since 1998 at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), and published by the Yale University Press, The Critical and Cultural Edition of The Heroic Slave provides, for the first time, an authoritative text, along with assorted contemporary and scholarly documents to help readers engage the novella in its historical, biographical, and literary contexts. Those documents assist readers to better understand what Douglass chose to emphasize and leave out in his telling of the story of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole. The Heroic Slave has emerged as a major text in Douglass’s canon, a novella that continues to fascinate readers with its compelling vision of reform, black revolution, and the quest for human freedom

Assessing Frederick Douglass’s 1853 Novella The Heroic Slave

poster abstractIn summer 2014 the Frederick Douglass Papers, a unit of the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indianapolis’s Institute of American Thought published the first-ever scholarly edition of Douglass’s sole work of fiction, his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave. With the support of the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, the Indiana University New Currents Program, a number of campus units, and Indiana Humanities, a scholarly symposium, "Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave and the American Revolutionary Tradition," was held on the IUPUI campus on October 9 and 10, 2014 to observe this event and to reassess the historical and literary significance of The Heroic Slave. The two-day symposium was organized by John R. Kaufman-McKivigan, Editor of the Douglass Papers, and Bessie House-Soremekun, Chair of the IUPUI Africana Studies Program. Nine internationally recognized scholars in the disciplines of history, literature, and Africana Studies attended this two-day event and presented original research on Douglass, utilizing the new Yale University Press edition of The Heroic Slave. Kaufman- McKivigan of the Douglass Papers and symposium participant Professor Jane Schultz of the IUPUI English Department will edit these papers and provide appropriate accompanying apparatus for a special issue of the Journal of African American History to be published sometime in late 2016. The symposium and the journal issue will become a valuable new addition to the expanding scholarship on Frederick Douglass’s central role in the nineteenth-century African American experience