Library Guides: African American History Resources- HI 211: Freedom

Schewe Library Resources

Between Slavery and Freedom by Howard McGary; Bill E. Lawson; Howard McGary
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 0253012791
Publication Date: 1993-02-22
"Using the writings of slaves and former slaves, as well as commentaries on slavery, Between Slavery and Freedom explores the American slave experience to gain a better understanding of six moral and political concepts-oppression, paternalism, resistance, political obligation, citizenship, and forgiveness. The authors use analytical philosophy as well as other disciplines to gain insight into the thinking of a group of people prevented from participating in the social/political discourse of their times."
Freedom's promise: ex-slave families and citizenship in the age of Emancipation by Elizabeth Ann Regosin
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9786613585677
Publication Date: 2002
"Emancipation and the citizenship that followed conferred upon former slaves the right to create family relationships that were sanctioned, recognized, and regulated by the laws that governed the families of all American citizens. Elizabeth Regosin explores what the acquisition of this legal familial status meant to former slaves, personally, socially, and politically."

Primary Source or Newspaper Resource

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The failures of Reconstruction have never been more evident - or relevant - than today by Alexander Manevitz in The Washington Post (June 11, 2020)

Online Resources

National Museum of African American History and Culture
"The National Museum of African American History and Culture is a place where all Americans can learn about the richness and diversity of the African American experience, what it means to their lives, and how it helped us shape this nation."
Slavery & Freedom 1400–1877
A digital exhibition from the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Database Resources

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"To Raise Them to an Equal Participation": Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship (scholarly article) by Paul J. Polgar in Journal of the Early Republic (2011)
- "The article discusses the social reform efforts of abolitionists in the early 19th century to enact gradual emancipation in the Northern states. It considers views held by anti-slavery proponents regarding natural rights and property rights during the Republic period. Some of the subjects considered include efforts to educate slaves and free Blacks to promote citizenship, social philosophies of the Enlightenment, racial prejudice, and the American Colonization Society. A historiography of abolition and slave studies is presented."
Frederick Douglass and the African American Epistle (scholarly article) by Benjamin T. Lynerd in Journal of Church & State (2021)
- "This article examines Douglass's Letter to Thomas Auld as an epistle that can shed further light on the genre at large. The letter is already a well-known vindication of natural rights theory, delivered with a personal mandate that only an ex-slave can summon. The religious dimensions of this document are less well understood, but I would argue they are no less important. They arise not in the letter's many overt references to Christian ethics, but in its overall rhetorical structure. The letter specifically replicates Paul's epistle to the slaveowner Philemon, but with calculated departures from the Pauline dispensation on the ethics of slavery. Amid divisions among Christians in the 1840 s over the compatibility of their religion with slave-keeping, Douglass delivers in the Letter to Auld a kind of scriptural intervention—a condemnation of slavery and a defense of the natural rights tradition with an apostolic voice."