Author: James WilliamsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Slavery
Languages : en
Pages : 126
Book Description
Narrative of James Williams
Author: James WilliamsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Slavery
Languages : en
Pages : 126
Book Description
Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, who was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama
Author: Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (Classic Reprint)
Author: Honorary Professor of Philosophy and Member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization James WilliamsPublisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9780259525363
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
Excerpt from Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama The cardinal principle of slavery, that a. Slave is not to be ranked among sentient beings, but among things, as afi' article of property, a chattel personal, obtains as undoubted law, in all the slave states. (judge Stroud's sketch of Slave Laws, p. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Narrative of James Williams
Author: James WilliamsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 109
Book Description
This book contains the memoir of James Williams, an American slave who was for several years a driver on a cotton plantation in Alabama.
Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave
Author: Hank TrentPublisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807151041
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
The American Anti-Slavery Society originally published Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave in 1838 to much fanfare, describing it as a rare slave autobiography. Soon thereafter, however, southerners challenged the authenticity of the work and the society retracted it. Abolitionists at the time were unable to defend the book; and, until now, historians could not verify Williams's identity or find the Alabama slave owners he named in the book. As a result, most scholars characterized the author as a fraud, perhaps never even a slave, or at least not under the circumstances described in the book. In this annotated edition of Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Hank Trent provides newly discovered biographical information about the true author of the book -- an African American man enslaved in Alabama and Virginia. Trent identifies Williams's owners in those states as well as in Maryland and Louisiana. He explains how Williams escaped from slavery and then altered his life story to throw investigators off his track. Through meticulous and extensive research, Trent also reveals unknown details of James Williams's real life, drawing upon runaway ads, court cases, census records, and estate inventories never before linked to him or to the narrative. In the end, Trent proves that the author of the book was truly an enslaved man, albeit one who wrote a romanticized, fictionalized story based on his real life, which proved even more complex and remarkable than the story he told.
The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel
Author: Julia Sun-Joo LeePublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199889260
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 729
Book Description
Conceived as a literary form to aggressively publicize the abolitionist cause in the United States, the African American slave narrative remains a powerful and illuminating demonstration of America's dark history. Yet the genre's impact extended far beyond the borders of the U.S. In a period when few books sold more than five hundred copies, slave narratives sold in the tens of thousands, providing British readers vivid accounts of the violence and privation experienced by American slaves. Eloquent, bracing narratives by Frederick Douglass, William Box Brown, Solomon Northrop, and others enjoyed unprecedented popularity, captivating audiences that included activists, journalists, and some of the era's greatest novelists. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel investigates the shaping influence of the American slave narrative on the Victorian novel in the years between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation. The book argues that Charlotte Brontë, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative-from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists used these tropes in an attempt to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. Through a deft use of disparate sources, Lee reveals how the slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to English culture. Lucidly written, richly researched, and cogently argued, Julia Sun-Joo Lee's insightful monograph makes an invaluable contribution to scholars of American literary history, African American literature, and the Victorian novel, in addition to highlighting the vibrant transatlantic exchange of ideas that illuminated literatures on both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century.
Rethinking the Slave Narrative
Author: Charles J. HeglarPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313000646
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
The African American slave narrative is popularly viewed as the story of a lone male's flight from slavery to freedom, best exemplified by the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845). On the other hand, critics have also given much attention to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), to indicate how the form could have been different if more women had written in it. But in stressing the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs as models for the genre, scholars have ignored the formal and thematic importance of marriage and family in the slave narrative, since neither author explores slave marriage in their works. This book examines the central role of marriage in The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849) and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860). Bibb's slave wife and child account for significant innovations in the form and content of his narrative, while the Crafts' mutual dependence as a married couple results in a sustained use of dramatic irony. The volume closes by offering a thoughtful consideration of the influence of Bibb and the Crafts on the later fiction of Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany. In doing so, it invites a critical reexamination of current assumptions about slave narratives.
Within the Plantation Household
Author: Elizabeth Fox-GenovesePublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807864226
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 565
Book Description
Documenting the difficult class relations between women slaveholders and slave women, this study shows how class and race as well as gender shaped women's experiences and determined their identities. Drawing upon massive research in diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories, the author argues that the lives of antebellum southern women, enslaved and free, differed fundamentally from those of northern women and that it is not possible to understand antebellum southern women by applying models derived from New England sources.
The Fabrication of American Literature
Author: Lara Langer CohenPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205197
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Literary histories typically celebrate the antebellum period as marking the triumphant emergence of American literature. But the period's readers and writers tell a different story: they derided literature as a fraud, an imposture, and a humbug, and they likened it to inflated currency, land bubbles, and quack medicine. Excavating a rich archive of magazine fiction, verse satires, comic almanacs, false slave narratives, minstrel song sheets, and early literary criticism, and revisiting such familiar figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Davy Crockett, Fanny Fern, and Herman Melville, Lara Langer Cohen uncovers the controversies over literary fraudulence that plagued these years and uses them to offer an ambitious rethinking of the antebellum print explosion. She traces the checkered fortunes of American literature from the rise of literary nationalism, which was beset by accusations of puffery, to the conversion of fraudulence from a national dilemma into a sorting mechanism that produced new racial, regional, and gender identities. Yet she also shows that even as fraudulence became a sign of marginality, some authors managed to turn their dubious reputations to account, making a virtue of their counterfeit status. This forgotten history, Cohen argues, presents a dramatically altered picture of American literature's role in antebellum culture, one in which its authority is far from assured, and its failures matter as much as its achievements.
Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South
Author: David Stefan DoddingtonPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108423981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
Highlights competing masculine values in slave communities and reveals how masculinity shaped resistance, accommodation, and survival.