The Works of James M. Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments We are pleased to acknowledge the generosity and support of a number of individuals and institutions. We did the bulk of our research and document collecting at the Library of Congress, and we are grateful for the assistance of its expert staff. Our thanks as well to librarians at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Shields Library at the University of California, Davis; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; and the interlibrary loan divisions of the University of Maryland, the University of Notre Dame, and Northwestern University. For travel and research support, we thank the University of Maryland, the University of Notre Dame, and Northwestern University. James Holstun provided us with his collection of Whitfieldiana (and his insights about the poetry); Edward Whitley kindly gave us an advance look at his chapter on Whitfield in his American Bards; Ezra Greenspan emailed timely information about America; and University of Maryland doctoral student Sarah Sillin skillfully assisted with the preparation of texts and annotations. We happily thank them all. A special thanks to Buffalo-based genealogist Ward Bray for providing us with invaluable new information on Whitfield based on his research in various public records, and to Robin Condon and James Hanna at the Frederick Douglass Papers at Indiana University for providing us with copies of two Whitfield poems (a section of “The Vision” and “Lines, Addressed to Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Holly”) currently unavailable in the standard microfilm of Frederick Douglass’ Paper. We are also de- x Acknowledgments lighted to thank Kenneth Price and Martha Nell Smith, who helped to give a start to this edition. At the University of North Carolina Press, we were fortunate to receive engaged responses from the Press’s anonymous outside readers . Our warm thanks to those two scholars for helping us to make this into a better edition. Our thanks as well to Beth Lassiter and Stephanie Wenzel for their editorial assistance. Finally, we are happy to thank our editor, Sian Hunter, who saw our edition of America grow and grow and never said no. We are grateful now, as we have been over the past several years, for her expert advice and enthusiastic support for our project. The Works of James M.Whitfield This page intentionally left blank ...