Abstract

Abstract:

This essay, originally presented as the Presidential Address at the July 2018 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, explores ways in which Lunsford Lane has been interpreted and employed as a biographical subject and within public narratives. Academic and public historians alike have not accepted Lane for who he was, forming him into a model of racialized virtue, industriousness, and entrepreneurialism that would satisfy white audiences while minimizing and masking his otherness defined by his enslavement and his blackness. The address asks scholars and public historians to be more reflexive and empathetic in their use of biography.

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