Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Rochester (N.Y.)
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
Daily American Directory of the City of Rochester
Author: The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers
Author: Jean Fagan YellinPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469625792
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1052
Book Description
Although millions of African American women were held in bondage over the 250 years that slavery was legal in the United States, Harriet Jacobs (1813-97) is the only one known to have left papers testifying to her life. Her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, holds a central place in the canon of American literature as the most important slave narrative by an African American woman. Born in Edenton, North Carolina, Jacobs escaped from her owner in her mid-twenties and hid in the cramped attic crawlspace of her grandmother's house for seven years before making her way north as a fugitive slave. In Rochester, New York, she became an active abolitionist, working with all of the major abolitionists, feminists, and literary figures of her day, including Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Amy Post, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, William C. Nell, Charlotte Forten Grimke, and Nathan Parker Willis. Jean Fagan Yellin has devoted much of her professional life to illuminating the remarkable life of Harriet Jacobs. Over three decades of painstaking research, Yellin has discovered more than 900 primary source documents, approximately 300 of which are now collected in two volumes. These letters and papers written by, for, and about Jacobs and her activist brother and daughter provide for the thousands of readers of Incidents--from scholars to schoolchildren--access to the rich historical context of Jacobs's struggles against slavery, racism, and sexism beyond what she reveals in her pseudonymous narrative. Accompanied by a CD containing a searchable PDF file of the entire contents, this collection is a crucial launching point for future scholarship on Jacobs's life and times.
Revolutions and Reconstructions
Author: Van GossePublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether black people participated in the politics of the nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects. Collectively, its authors insist that historians go beyond questioning how revolutionary the American Revolution was, or whether Reconstruction failed, and focus, instead, on how political change initiated by African Americans and their allies constituted the rule in nineteenth-century American politics, not occasional and cataclysmic exceptions. The essays in this groundbreaking collection cover the full range of political activity by black northerners after the Revolution, from cultural politics to widespread voting, within a political system shaped by the rising power of slaveholders. Conceptualizing a new black politics, contributors observe, requires reorienting American politics away from black/white and North/South polarities and toward a new focus on migration and local or state structures. Other essays focus on the middle decades of the nineteenth century and demonstrate that free black politics, not merely the politics of slavery, was a disruptive and consequential force in American political development. From the perspective of the contributors to this volume, formal black politics did not begin in 1865, or with agitation by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass in the 1840s, but rather in the Revolutionary era's antislavery and citizenship activism. As these essays show, revolution, emancipation, and Reconstruction are not separate eras in U.S. history, but rather linked and ongoing processes that began in the 1770s and continued through the nineteenth century. Contributors: Christopher James Bonner, Kellie Carter Jackson, Andrew Diemer, Laura F. Edwards, Van Gosse, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, M. Scott Heerman, Dale Kretz, Padraig Riley, Samantha Seeley, James M. Shinn Jr., David Waldstreicher.
Secret Lives of the Underground Railroad in New York City
Author: Don PapsonPublisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476618712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
During the fourteen years Sydney Howard Gay edited the American Anti-Slavery Society's National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City, he worked with some of the most important Underground agents in the eastern United States, including Thomas Garrett, William Still and James Miller McKim. Gay's closest associate was Louis Napoleon, a free black man who played a major role in the James Kirk and Lemmon cases. For more than two years, Gay kept a record of the fugitives he and Napoleon aided. These never before published records are annotated in this book. Revealing how Gay was drawn into the bitter division between Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, the work exposes the private opinions that divided abolitionists. It describes the network of black and white men and women who were vital links in the extensive Underground Railroad, conclusively confirming a daily reality.
The Roots of Flower City
Author: Camden BurdPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501777939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
In The Roots of Flower City, Camden Burd explores the economic and ecological significance of Rochester plant nurserymen over the course of the nineteenth century. As the first boomtown in the United States, Rochester was an embodiment of nineteenth-century market economies and social reform movements. Connected to the eastern seaboard by the Erie Canal, the city's unique economic, cultural, and environmental conditions fostered and sustained a vast and influential commercial plant nursery industry that attracted the nation's most prominent horticulturists and nurserymen. Rochester-area nurserymen built parks and rural cemeteries, landscaped homes and schools, and promoted horticultural pursuits regionally and nationally. As their influence grew, many of these horticultural entrepreneurs developed into the city's elite and played a leading role in shaping Rochester's economic, social, and physical landscape. Most significantly, nurserymen enthusiastically participated in the American imperial project, selling and distributing fruit, shade, and ornamental trees, shrubs, and flowers across the continent, transforming landscapes and ecologies far beyond New York. The Roots of Flower City tells the remarkable history of Rochester's outsized influence on the homes, estates, towns, and cities of nineteenth-century America as it weathered economic downturns and competition from other regions. One threat, however, proved to be too much to overcome. As Burd details, the spread of the destructive San Jose scale through the transcontinental plant trade prompted federal legislation that would lead to the decline of the Rochester plant nursery industry in the last decade of the nineteenth century, ending a sustained era of success and ecological impact.
Bibliotheca Americana
Author: Joseph SabinPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 594
Book Description
Faith in Markets
Author: Joseph P. SlaughterPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549253
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States saw both a series of Protestant religious revivals and the dramatic expansion of the marketplace. Although today conservative Protestantism is associated with laissez-faire capitalism, many of the nineteenth-century believers who experienced these transformations offered different, competing visions of the link between commerce and Christianity. Joseph P. Slaughter offers a new account of the interplay between religion and capitalism in American history by telling the stories of the Protestant entrepreneurs who established businesses to serve as agents of cultural and economic reform. Faith in Markets examines three Christian business enterprises and the visions of a Christian marketplace they represented. Shaped by Pietist, Calvinist, and Arminian theologies, each offered different answers to the question of what a moral, Christian market should look like. George Rapp & Associates operated sophisticated textile factories as the business side of the model community the Harmony Society, which practiced communal living in pursuit of a harmonious workforce. The Pioneer Stage Coach Line provided transportation services only six days a week to keep Sunday sacred, attempting to reform society by outcompeting less pious businesses. The publisher Harper & Brothers sought to elevate American culture through commerce by producing virtuous products like lavishly illustrated Bibles. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Faith in Markets explores how the founders and owners of these enterprises infused their faith into their businesses and, in turn, how distinctly religious businesses shaped American capitalism and society.
Publications of the Rochester Historical Society
Author: Rochester Historical Society (Rochester, N.Y.)Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Rochester (N.Y.)
Languages : en
Pages : 414
Book Description
Out of the Shadows
Author: Emily MidorikawaPublisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640092315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Queen Victoria's reign was an era of breathtaking social change, but it did little to create a platform for women to express themselves. But not so within the social sphere of the séance--a mysterious, lamp-lit world on both sides of the Atlantic, in which women who craved a public voice could hold their own. Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and most important, influence as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead. The Fox sisters inspired some of the era’s best-known political activists and set off a transatlantic séance craze. While in the throes of a trance, Emma Hardinge Britten delivered powerful speeches to crowds of thousands. Victoria Woodhull claimed guidance from the spirit world as she took on the millionaires of Wall Street before becoming America’s first female presidential candidate. And Georgina Weldon narrowly escaped the asylum before becoming a celebrity campaigner against archaic lunacy laws. Drawing on diaries, letters, and rarely seen memoirs and texts, Emily Midorikawa illuminates a radical history of female influence that has been confined to the dark until now.
City Building on the Eastern Frontier
Author: Diane ShawPublisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421429314
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
America's westward expansion involved more than pushing the frontier across the Mississippi toward the Pacific; it also consisted of urbanizing undeveloped regions of the colonial states. In 1810, New York's future governor DeWitt Clinton marveled that the "rage for erecting villages is a perfect mania." The development of Rochester and Syracuse illuminates the national experience of internal economic and cultural colonization during the first half of the nineteenth century. Architectural historian Diane Shaw examines the ways in which these new cities were shaped by a variety of constituents—founders, merchants, politicians, and settlers—as opportunities to extend the commercial and social benefits of the market economy and a merchant culture to America's interior. At the same time, she analyzes how these priorities resulted in a new approach to urban planning. According to Shaw, city founders and residents deliberately arranged urban space into three segmented districts—commercial, industrial, and civic—to promote a self-fulfilling vision of a profitable and urbane city. Shaw uncovers a distinctly new model of urbanization that challenges previous paradigms of the physical and social construction of nineteenth-century cities. Within two generations, the new cities of Rochester and Syracuse were sorted at multiple scales, including not only the functional definition of districts, but also the refinement of building types and styles, the stratification of building interiors by floor, and even the coding of public space by class, gender, and race. Shaw's groundbreaking model of early nineteenth-century urban design and spatial culture is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary study of the American city.