A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America

Notes

Notes Introduction 1 Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall. 2 W. W. Brown, Rising Son, v–ix. 3 Bethel, Roots of African American Identity; Fabre and O’Meally, History and Memory; Kachun, Festivals of Freedom; and K. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. 4 Literary scholars and historians active in the recovery of African American literary production have been especially adept in recognizing the importance and prevalence of textual production among early African American intellectuals. See Foster, Written by Herself, 1–2. 5 Ernest, Liberation Historiography. 6 Black engagement with texts is discussed in Porter, Early Negro Writing; Bruce, Origins of African American Literature; Peterson, Doers of the Word; and McHenry, Forgotten Readers. Issues regarding the importance of literacy are explored in Cornelius, “When I Can Read”; and H. A. Williams, Self-Taught. 7 Zafar, We Wear the Mask, 3. 8 McHenry, “‘Dreaded Eloquence,’” 32–56, and Forgotten Readers. 9 R. Brown, Knowledge Is Power; Davidson, Revolution and the Word. 10 See Ronnick, First Three, “Latin Quotations,” “Racial Ideology,” and “Twelve Black Classicists.” Also see Fikes, “It Was Never Greek,” and “African American Scholars.” 11 On the construction of history in the early republic and antebellum periods, see Gay, Loss of Mastery, 3–22; Calcott, History in the United States; Kraus and Joyce, Writing of American History. Interpretations of the jeremiad include Perry Miller, New England Mind; and Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, introduction. The jeremiad’s impact on black thought is discussed in Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms, 30–48; and Howard -Pitney, Afro-American Jeremiad. Classicism’s influence on nineteenth-century education is ably explored in Winterer, Culture of Classicism, 10–43. African American opposition to the Great Books, or “canon,” is featured in the following studies: Bloom, Closing of the American Mind; Casement, Great Canon Controversy, 40–83; and Denby, Great Books, 89–91. 12 Bender, Intellect and the Public Life. Information on the meanings of history among African Americans is explored in Moses, Afrotopia, 1–43; and McHenry, “‘Dreaded Eloquence.’” The building of an intellectual and institutional infrastructure in the African American community is discussed in H. Reed, Platform for Change. Discussion of various themes and issues in antebellum newspapers, especially Freedom’s Journal , is featured in Penn, Afro-American Press and Its Editors, 25–70; Dann, Black Press, 1827–1890; Bacon, Freedom’s Journal; and Hutton, Early Black Press in America, 3–6. {236} NOTES TO PAGES 7–8 13 For a good introduction to the development of intellectual life in the United States from 1760 to 1800, see Shalhope, Roots of Democracy. My definition of Romanticism is based on Susan Conrad’s work on the impact of Romanticism on female intellectuals . Conrad uses Morse Peckham’s classic work, Romanticism. Peckham dates Romanticism from the late eighteenth century and suggests it promoted a “new formula for the universe, an organic interpretation of nature, the cosmos and humanity .” Conrad, Perish the Thought, 9. It was a self-conscious worldview. However, I wish to distinguish between the rationalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment view of the world (older view) versus the romantic view, which was rooted more in the senses or an organic interpretation of reality. The relationship between history and Romanticism is explored in Levin, History as Romantic Art, 3–7. For information on the relationship between Romanticism and race, see Freimarck and Rosenthal, Race and the American Romantics. For another good discussion of Romanticism during the period, see Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America. 14 See Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 148–88. 15 The late-nineteenth-century shift to scientism is chronicled in a number of studies; see Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism, 51–73; and Ross, Origins of the Social Sciences, 53–76. Thomas Bender has done the most substantial work on the intellectual community in the antebellum period; see Intellect and Public Life. The development and transcendence of prehistoricist methodologies is discussed in Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason; Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America”; Iggers and Powell, Leopold von Ranke; and Novick, That Noble Dream, 21–31. Examinations of the development of historicism include Breisach, Historiography; and Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History, 52–90. For information on Northern intellectuals and the Civil War’s impact in converting a class-conscious Boston Brahmin elite into proponents of Gilded Age ideology, see Frederickson, Inner Civil War. 16 Historian William Banks views the Civil War and its aftermath as fostering the rise of a black intellectual infrastructure; see Black Intellectuals, 33–47. For other important treatments of...