The Northern Abolitionist Movement
America had always been home to people who felt that slavery was wrong and should be eliminated. These people, called abolitionists because they wanted to abolish or...
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Abolition of Slavery
United States 1863-1865
Synopsis
By early 1861, just before the beginning of the American Civil War (sometimes also called the War Between the States and the War for Southern Inde...
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In the following essay, Dykes examines the poetry and prose of famous English authors writing on abolitionist themes, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Thomas DeQuincey, and Charles Di...
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In the following essay, Rice argues that English attitudes toward slavery can be understood by examining how the subject was treated in British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a...
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In the following essay, Richardson contends that William Blake's poem “The Little Black Boy” cannot simply be categorized as either a fine abolitionist poem or an example of laten...
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In the following essay, Macdonald compares the antislavery poetry of William Cowper and William Blake to highlight the differences in pre-Romantic and Romantic literary strategies.
Most historians ...
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In the following essay, Fisch discusses themes in the anonymous 1852 novel Uncle Tom in England, asserting the work was published to illustrate England's moral superiority to the United States ...
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In the following excerpt, Thomas analyzes two nineteenth-century abolitionist texts written by ex-slave Robert Wedderburn, focusing especially on the impact and influence of his mulatto identity on th...
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In the following essay, Paul-Emile discusses Samuel Taylor Coleridge's transformation from liberal abolitionist to a conservative wary of emancipation's effect on the British social hier...
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In the following excerpt, Oldfield examines antislavery literature aimed at British children, which its authors believed would ultimately be beneficial in spreading the abolitionist message to the pub...
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In the following excerpt, Richardson argues that even though poetry by abolitionists writers Robert Southey, Thomas Chatterton, Hannah More, and Anne Yearsley shows that British Romanticism contribute...
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In the following essay, Ferguson describes why Hannah More was chosen by London's Abolition Committee to compose a poem condemning British slavery, and how her “Slavery: A Poem” i...
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In the following excerpt, Ferguson examines the 1831 slave narrative The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave to show that Prince's language and agenda were often at odds with white fema...
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In the following essay, Coleman argues that even as white female abolitionists in the late eighteenth century tried to connect their own subjugation to the plight of slaves, their writings tacitly cre...
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In the following essay, Button discusses feminist and antislavery themes in Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, which she asserts was the first English nov...
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In the following essay, Schulman argues that Cuba's nineteenth-century abolitionist novels, though few in number, set the stage for emancipation in Cuba and were the earliest and most influenti...
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In the following essay, García-Barrio analyzes six nineteenth-century Cuban novels commonly described as abolitionist, arguing that as a result of strict censorship laws in Cuba prohibiting the...
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In the following essay, Decosta-Willis analyzes themes of desire for freedom and self-identity in two autobiographical narratives written by former Cuban slaves—Juan Francisco Manzano and Esteb...
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In the following essay, Fivel-Démoret questions whether four Cuban novels written in the late 1830s should be labeled abolitionist, concluding that while they all advocated some level of reform...
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In the following essay, Branche contests standard depictions of Avellaneda's Sab as a pioneering abolitionst/feminist novel, arguing that the novel's characters, plot, and themes betray ...
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In the following excerpt, Sayers discusses antislavery sentiment in Brazilian literature in the first half of the nineteenth century, finding that this theme was most commonly found in newspapers and ...
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In the following excerpt, Luis argues that Cuba's nineteenth-century abolitionist literature grew out of the evolution from Romanticism toward Realism and was also a response to the increasingl...
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In the following excerpt, Luis discusses the historical and social conditions in Cuba that made the condemnation of the slave trade and slavery itself a growing concern in nineteenth-century Cuban lit...
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In the following essay, Haberly argues that the majority of nineteenth-century Brazilian abolitionist literature depicted black slaves as sexually immoral and prone to violence, stereotypes that reinf...
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In the following essay, Luis describes how Cuban editors Domingo del Monte and José Antonio Saco encouraged the island's liberal writers to protest slavery.
I
The antislavery narrativ...
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In the following excerpt, Sayers examines the themes of torture, violence, and suffering in the antislavery poetry of late-nineteenth-century Brazil, paying special attention to the work of Antô...
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In the following excerpt, Sayers discusses Brazilian abolitionist novels written between 1850 and 1888, many of them thematically influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin....
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In the following essay, Coulthard discusses antislavery themes in several nineteenth-century Cuban novels and poems, arguing that abolitionism was in many respects a cause taken up by Cuban liberals t...
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As an American, one is entitled to all the rights and privileges of a citizen. One can vote, hold office, drive any vehicle or own land. However, at one point in time African Americans were not entitl...
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Given that an outside consultant failed to find evidence that the Underground Railroad stopped at seven imperiled rowhouses on Duffield and Gold streets (PDF), Mayor Bloomberg could have pressed on...
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