New York's Grand Emancipation Jubilee: Essays on Slavery, Resistance, Abolition, Teaching, and Historical Memory by Alan J. Singer (review)

Alan Singer's new book, NewYork's Grand Emancipation Jubilee, aims to cover a lot of ground. Singer uses the Empire State both to understand and improve how public historians teach and commemorate the history of slavery, resistance, and abolition. To make this broad topic manageable, the book is structured as a series of loosely connected essays. Most chapters discuss a particular group, person, or theme in the history of slavery and antislavery in New York State—founding-era abolitionists, Harriet Tubman, antislavery politics, for example. Singer includes "teaching notes" throughout in which he excerpts primary sources or offers framing ideas and questions for teaching concepts. The result is a book that is uneven and at times dizzying.

At his best, Singer calls out some of the compromised ways that institutions have presented the history of slavery and resistance. The Gilder Lehrman Institute (GLI), which wields tremendous influence over the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS), draws his particular ire. (Full disclosure, I received a GLI fellowship as an undergraduate). Singer commends N-YHS for putting on a number of exhibitions on the history of slavery and freedom in recent years. But GLI founders Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman are noted Republican donors, and Singer senses their political influence creeping in to exhibitions. This has led, he thinks, to "sensationalism" (163) and rhetorical overreaches that put overly sanguine glosses on American history. He is hardly alone in his thinking. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of New York City, Mike Wallace, began drawing attention to the GLI's influence on the historical society with its 2004 exhibit on Alexander Hamilton.¹

Singer believes he brings a unique perspective to these issues. As a teacher, he does "not operate under the same political constraints" as other historians and can be more critical (8). More importantly, to my mind, as a professor of social studies education at Hofstra, Singer is a teacher of teachers. He can reach this important group, many of whom probably use Gilder Lehrman and other organizations' materials or attend their workshops without thinking about the potential problems in the resources they receive. Singer knows this. He describes his audience as "general readers, teachers," and, ideally, students (xi). This book might have been a corrective, offering new resources and more nuanced ways to think through this material.

The book, however, is written in a way that demands a startling degree of prior knowledge. Take the introduction, which lays out the stakes of the book: to foreground the "History of Slavery, Racism, and Resistance," and explain "Why Race Still Matters." In the first eight pages, Singer discusses thinkers ranging from W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West, to William Julius Wilson, James Madison, and Alexis de Tocqueville; politicians from Lyndon B. Johnson, Michael Dukakis, and Barack Obama, to Lee Atwater and John Roberts; historians, including Carl Degler, Eric Foner, Lonnie Bunch, and Manisha Sinha; and events ranging from the writing of the Federalist Papers, to the Dred Scott decision, and through the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin. This scattershot introduction does not help orient Singer's desired audience.

The larger organization of the book compounds these issues. Singer does not take a strictly chronological approach, which only works if his readers already know the chronology. For example, chapter 3 focuses on the 1830s and 1840s, when abolitionism remained "on the margins." Singer ends with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which he treats as a clear defeat for antislavery forces and as a catalyst that "gave direction to the abolitionist struggle" (59). Fair enough, but Singer does not explain that direction. In fact, he does not explicitly cover abolitionism between the Fugitive Slave Act and the raid on Harper's Ferry or the election of 1860 until chapter 9. Six chapters come in between. Two make some sense in the...