[Review of] Michael P. Johnson and James P. Roark, eds. No Chariot Let Down: Charleston\u27s Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War

In an overgrown cemetery in the old village of Stateburg, South Carolina, a hundred miles north of Charleston lies the body of William Ellison (1790-1860), patriarch of a remarkable clan of free blacks whose achievements belie the myth of the Old South as a society of wealthy white masters and poor black slaves. Born a slave and perhaps the son of his master, Ellison early learned to make cotton gins and at age twentysix purchased his freedom and went into business in Stateburg. Riding the crest of the cotton boom, in 1835 he bought the handsome home of former governor Stephen D. Miller and by 1851 had also become a large cotton planter owning 800 acres of land and sixty-three slaves, more than any other free black except in Louisiana. He moved on an equal footing with white planters, eventually coming down from the colored balcony of Holy Cross Episcopal Church to sit with them

Critique [of Between Shadow and Rock: The Woman in Armenian American Literature by Margaret Bedrosian]

This is a generally competent and perceptive analysis of the stated topic by a writer who is certainly a feminist and evidently an Armenian American woman herself. The basic theme of the paper, to quote the writer, is that nowhere in Armenian American writing do we find a detailed and sustained reflection of a three-dimensional Armenian woman, and that on the whole this is due to the unleavened state of [Armenian American] literature in general. She reaches these conclusions through examination of recent Armenian American writing, most of it by men -- to whom, not incidentally, she primarily attributes the unbalanced treatment of Armenian women. Certainly it is clear from her citations that Armenian American women have been assigned a traditional, subordinate, and compliant role

[Review of] C. Peter Ripley, ed. The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 1: The British Isles, 1830-1865

From 1830 until 1865, hundreds of American, Canadian, and West Indian blacks went to the British Isles and became active in the antislavery movement, which in 1833 reached a peak there with abolition of slavery in the Empire but was only beginning to gain momentum in the United States. They represented the full spectrum of free or fugitive Western Hemisphere blacks: some were well-known antislavery speakers and writers such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany; others were originally unknowns such as John Andrew Jackson, who spoke in the peculiar broken dialect of the negro, and John Brown, whose language was of the rudest but most impressive character. A few, as for example William Nixon, resorted to fraud and were imprisoned, or, like Alexander Duval, were reduced to begging in the streets of London. Several were women, most notably Ellen Craft and Sarah Remond

[Review of] Joel Williamson. The Crucible of Race

Almost twenty years ago Joel Williamson, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, began work on this book, envisioned as the definitive history and reinterpretation of black-white relationships in our time. Along the way he modified his conceptions many times and detoured in 1977-78 to write New People, a study of the physical and cultural mixing of blacks and whites

Orville W. Taylor papers

The collection contains the personal papers, writings and historical research materials of Orville W. Taylo