Prophets of Protest:
Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (2006)
(purchase)
The campaign to abolish slavery in the United States was the most powerful and effective social movement of the nineteenth century and has served as a recurring source of inspiration for every subsequent struggle against injustice. But the abolitionist story has traditionally focused on the evangelical impulses of white, male, middle-class reformers, obscuring the contributions of many African Americans, women, and others.
Prophets of Protest, the first collection of writings on abolitionism in more than a generation, draws on an immense new body of research in African American studies, literature, art history, film, law, women's studies, and other disciplines. The book incorporates new thinking on such topics as the role of early black newspapers, anti-slavery poetry, and abolitionists in film and provides new perspectives on familiar figures such as Sojourner Truth, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown. With contributions from the leading scholars in the field, Prophets of Protest is a long overdue update of one of the central reform movements in America's history.
Click here for a full summary of contents
Prophets of Protest, the first collection of writings on abolitionism in more than a generation, draws on an immense new body of research in African American studies, literature, art history, film, law, women's studies, and other disciplines. The book incorporates new thinking on such topics as the role of early black newspapers, anti-slavery poetry, and abolitionists in film and provides new perspectives on familiar figures such as Sojourner Truth, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown. With contributions from the leading scholars in the field, Prophets of Protest is a long overdue update of one of the central reform movements in America's history.
Click here for a full summary of contents
REVIEWS:
Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone
An original and thoughtful work on a subject of signal importance.
The American Historical Review
Over the past generation, historians of women and African Americans have shown that women and nonwhites fundamentally contributed to American antislavery agitation.... Nevertheless, there has not yet been a new synthetic treatment of abolitionism that absorbed this new work. The field has not yet been reconceived in terms of the social history of what we now realize to have been a multiracial and broad grass-roots movement with a long chronology. This important collection of essays admirably fills the gap.
