Mitch Kachun's Books

Festivals of Freedom

Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915

By: Mitch Kachun,Mitchell Alan Kachun

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Festivals of Freedom

Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915

By: Mitch Kachun,Mitchell Alan Kachun

With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for "a day of publick thanksgiving" to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the ensuing century, black leaders built on this foundation and constructed a distinctive and vibrant tradition through their celebrations of the end of slavery in New York State, the British West Indies, and eventually the United States as a whole. In this revealing study, Mitch Kachun explores the multiple functions and contested meanings surrounding African American emancipation celebrations from the abolition of the slave trade to the fiftieth anniversary of U.S. emancipation. Excluded from July Fourth and other American nationalist rituals for most of this period, black activists used these festivals of freedom to encourage community building and race uplift. Kachun demonstrates that, even as these annual rituals helped define African Americans as a people by fostering a sense of shared history, heritage, and identity, they were also sites of ambiguity and conflict. Freedom celebrations served as occasions for debate over black representations in the public sphere, struggles for group leadership, and contests over collective memory and its meaning. Based on extensive research in African American newspapers and oration texts, this book retraces a vital if often overlooked tradition in African American political culture and addresses important issues about black participation in the public sphere. By illuminating the origins of black Americans' public commemorations, it also helps explain why there have been increasing calls in recent years to make the "Juneteenth" observance of emancipation an American -- not just an African American -- day of commemoration.

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Page Count

372

Publisher

Liverpool University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1558495282

ISBN 13

9781558495289

First Martyr of Liberty

Crispus Attucks in American Memory

By: Mitch Kachun

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First Martyr of Liberty

Crispus Attucks in American Memory

By: Mitch Kachun

First Martyr of Liberty explores how Crispus Attucks's death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in African Americans' struggle to incorporate their experiences and heroes into the mainstream of the American historical narrative. While the other victims of the Massacre have been largely ignored, Attucks is widely celebrated as the first to die in the cause of freedom during the era of the American Revolution. He became a symbolic embodiment of black patriotism and citizenship. This book traces Attucks's career through both history and myth to understand how his public memory has been constructed through commemorations and monuments; institutions and organizations bearing his name; juvenile biographies; works of poetry, drama, and visual arts; popular and academic histories; and school textbooks. There will likely never be a definitive biography of Crispus Attucks since so little evidence exists about the man's actual life. While what can and cannot be known about Attucks is addressed here, the focus is on how he has been remembered--variously as either a hero or a villain--and why at times he has been forgotten by different groups and individuals from the eighteenth century to the present day.

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Page Count

329

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199875723

ISBN 13

9780199875726

First Martyr of Liberty

Crispus Attucks in American Memory

By: Mitch Kachun

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First Martyr of Liberty

Crispus Attucks in American Memory

By: Mitch Kachun

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329

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Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199910863

ISBN 13

9780199910861

The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride

A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins

By: Julia C. Collins

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The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride

A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins

By: Julia C. Collins

In 1865, The Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serialized The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, a novel written by Mrs. Julia C. Collins, an African American woman living in the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The first novel ever published by a black American woman, it is set in antebellum Louisiana and Connecticut, and focuses on the lives of a beautiful mixed-race mother and daughter whose opportunities for fulfillment through love and marriage are threatened by slavery and caste prejudice. The text shares much with popular nineteenth-century women's fiction, while its dominant themes of interracial romance, hidden African ancestry, and ambiguous racial identity have parallels in the writings of both black and white authors from the period. Begun in the waning months of the Civil War, the novel was near its conclusion when Julia Collins died of tuberculosis in November of 1865. In this first-ever book publication of The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, the editors have composed a hopeful and a tragic ending, reflecting two alternatives Collins almost certainly would have considered for the closing of her unprecedented novel. In their introduction, the editors offer the most complete and current research on the life and community of an author who left few traces in the historical record, and provide extensive discussion of her novel's literary and historical significance. Collins's published essays, which provide intriguing glimpses into the mind of this gifted but overlooked writer, are included in what will prove to be the definitive edition of a major new discovery in African American literature. Its publication contributes immensely to our understanding of black American literature, religion, women's history, community life, and race relations during the era of United States emancipation.

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Age

Page Count

208

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190293861

ISBN 13

9780190293864

Book's by Mitch Kachun

Festivals of Freedom

Festivals of Freedom

First Martyr of Liberty

First Martyr of Liberty

First Martyr of Liberty

First Martyr of Liberty

The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride

The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride

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