As a key to understanding the meaning of slavery in America, the Missouri controversy of 181921 is probably our most valuable text. The heat of sectional rhetoric during the Missouri debates reached a level never exceeded, and rarely matched, until the secession crisis of 1860. Moreover, nearly all the arguments for and against slavery in Americ...
American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. Robert S. Levine challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, Levine argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period. Levine emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in his analysis of four illuminating "episodes" of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. He examines Charles Brockden Brown and the Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and the debates on the Missouri Compromise; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and Frederick Douglass and his approximately forty-year interest in Haiti. Levine offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.
Robert Goodloe Harper (1765-1825), a prominent attorney congressman from South Carolina & Maryland, was one of the most influential Federalists of the early national period. Harper is traditionally remembered as an extreme example of unthinking, reactionary conservatism in an era of intense partisanship & bitter sectional conflict. In this lively, revisionist account, Eric Robert Papenfuse reinterprets Harper's political philosophy in light of his personal struggle with the moral dilemma of slavery. Papenfuse uses newly discovered documents to show how Harper rose to power among back country South Carolinians as both an advocate of innate racial equality & a proponent of the gradual end to slavery's westward expansion. Though deeply troubled by slavery's irremediable moral & political evils, Harper accepted the system as a temporary necessity, & turned his efforts to achieving social progress through the education of lower-class white Americans & the "emancipation" of European peasants from Napoleonic tyranny. The establishment of the American Colonization Society in 1816 renewed Harper's commitment to resolving the problem of slavery by educating blacks & transporting them to an environment free from white racial prejudice, where they might one day become a "great nation." By conveniently reproducing & indexing four of Harper's most important speeches & letters, Papenfuse invites readers to examine for themselves a fundamental paradox of the age: how an abiding conviction that all races were inherently equal could allow for such forced rationalizations, painful self-deceptions, & maddening compromises.
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