Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North

Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North PDF

Author: Patrick Rael

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-01-14

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0807875031

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Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany--these figures stand out in the annals of black protest for their vital antislavery efforts. But what of the rest of their generation, the thousands of other free blacks in the North? Patrick Rael explores the tradition of protest and sense of racial identity forged by both famous and lesser-known black leaders in antebellum America and illuminates the ideas that united these activists across a wide array of divisions. In so doing, he reveals the roots of the arguments that still resound in the struggle for justice today. Mining sources that include newspapers and pamphlets of the black national press, speeches and sermons, slave narratives and personal memoirs, Rael recovers the voices of an extraordinary range of black leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century. He traces how these activists constructed a black American identity through their participation in the discourse of the public sphere and how this identity in turn informed their critiques of a nation predicated on freedom but devoted to white supremacy. His analysis explains how their place in the industrializing, urbanizing antebellum North offered black leaders a unique opportunity to smooth over class and other tensions among themselves and successfully galvanize the race against slavery.

Jolly Fellows

Jolly Fellows PDF

Author: Richard Stott

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2009-09-21

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0801897955

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“Jolly fellows,” a term that gained currency in the nineteenth century, referred to those men whose more colorful antics included brawling, heavy drinking, gambling, and playing pranks. Reforms, especially the temperance movement, stigmatized such behavior, but pockets of jolly fellowship continued to flourish throughout the country. Richard Stott scrutinizes and analyzes this behavior to appreciate its origins and meaning. Stott finds that male behavior could be strikingly similar in diverse locales, from taverns and boardinghouses to college campuses and sporting events. He explores the permissive attitudes that thrived in such male domains as the streets of New York City, California during the gold rush, and the Pennsylvania oil fields, arguing that such places had an important influence on American society and culture. Stott recounts how the cattle and mining towns of the American West emerged as centers of resistance to Victorian propriety. It was here that unrestrained male behavior lasted the longest, before being replaced with a new convention that equated manliness with sobriety and self-control. Even as the number of jolly fellows dwindled, jolly themes flowed into American popular culture through minstrelsy, dime novels, and comic strips. Jolly Fellows proposes a new interpretation of nineteenth-century American culture and society and will inform future work on masculinity during this period.

City of Eros

City of Eros PDF

Author: Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 9780393311082

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Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians and the New York State Historical Association Manuscript Prize.

Champagne Charlie

Champagne Charlie PDF

Author: Don Kladstrup

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2021-11

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1640123946

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Machine generated contents note: List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- Chapter One: The First Sip -- Chapter Two: Young Charles -- Chapter Three: Discovery of the New World -- Chapter Four: Reading the Stars -- Chapter Five: The Panic -- Chapter Six: The Lion of New York -- Chapter Seven: Southern Comfort -- Chapter Eight: "It's War" -- Chapter Nine: The Beast -- Chapter Ten: Into the Jaws -- Chapter Eleven: "We Are Not in Venice" -- Chapter Twelve: The Homecoming -- Chapter Thirteen: The Man Who Never Forgot -- Chapter Fourteen: "War Seems to Follow Me" -- Chapter Fifteen: The Denver Miracle -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Notes -- Index.

Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima

Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima PDF

Author: Gillian M Rodger

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2010-06-17

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0252098056

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In this rich, imaginative survey of variety musical theater, Gillian M. Rodger masterfully chronicles the social history and class dynamics of the robust, nineteenth-century American theatrical phenomenon that gave way to twentieth-century entertainment forms such as vaudeville and comedy on radio and television. Fresh, bawdy, and unabashedly aimed at the working class, variety honed in on its audience's fascinations, emerging in the 1840s as a vehicle to accentuate class divisions and stoke curiosity about gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing acts were a regular feature of these entertainments, and Rodger profiles key male impersonators Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner while examining how both gender and sexuality gave shape to variety. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, variety theater developed into a platform for ideas about race and whiteness. As some in the working class moved up into the middling classes, they took their affinity for variety with them, transforming and broadening middle-class values. Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima places the saloon keepers, managers, male impersonators, minstrels, acrobats, singers, and dancers of the variety era within economic and social contexts by examining the business models of variety shows and their primarily white, working-class urban audiences. Rodger traces the transformation of variety from sexualized entertainment to more family-friendly fare, a domestication that mirrored efforts to regulate the industry, as well as the adoption of aspects of middle-class culture and values by the shows' performers, managers, and consumers.