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In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.
In Unchained Voices, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa-between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors. Briton Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano told their stories as Afro-Britons who recognized the sovereignty of George III; Johnson Green, Belinda, Benjamin Banneker, and Venture Smith spoke and wrote as African Americans n the United States; Phillis Wheatley, initially an Afro-British poet, later chose an African American identity; Francis Williams and George Liele wrote in Jamaica; David George and Boston King, having served with the British forces in the American Revolution and later lived in Canada, composed their narratives as British subjects in the newly established settlement in Sierra Leone, Africa. In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of African literature written in English.
The Crisis, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP, is a journal of civil rights, history, politics, and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color. For nearly 100 years, The Crisis has been the magazine of opinion and thought leaders, decision makers, peacemakers and justice seekers. It has chronicled, informed, educated, entertained and, in many instances, set the economic, political and social agenda for our nation and its multi-ethnic citizens.
Anthony Benezet (1713-84), universally recognized by the leaders of the eighteenth-century antislavery movement as its founder, was born to a Huguenot family in Saint-Quentin, France. As a boy, Benezet moved to Holland, England, and, in 1731, Philadelphia, where he rose to prominence in the Quaker antislavery community. In transforming Quaker antislavery sentiment into a broad-based transatlantic movement, Benezet translated ideas from diverse sources—Enlightenment philosophy, African travel narratives, Quakerism, practical life, and the Bible—into concrete action. He founded the African Free School in Philadelphia, and such future abolitionist leaders as Absalom Jones and James Forten studied at Benezet's school and spread his ideas to broad social groups. At the same time, Benezet's correspondents, including Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, Abbé Raynal, Granville Sharp, and John Wesley, gave his ideas an audience in the highest intellectual and political circles. In this wide-ranging intellectual biography, Maurice Jackson demonstrates how Benezet mediated Enlightenment political and social thought, narratives of African life written by slave traders themselves, and the ideas and experiences of ordinary people to create a new antislavery critique. Benezet's use of travel narratives challenged proslavery arguments about an undifferentiated, "primitive" African society. Benezet's empirical evidence, laid on the intellectual scaffolding provided by the writings of Hutcheson, Wallace, and Montesquieu, had a profound influence, from the high-culture writings of the Marquis de Condorcet to the opinions of ordinary citizens. When the great antislavery spokesmen Jacques-Pierre Brissot in France and William Wilberforce in England rose to demand abolition of the slave trade, they read into the record of the French National Assembly and the British Parliament extensive unattributed quotations from Benezet's writings, a fitting tribute to the influence of his work.
The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution introduces scholars, students and generally interested readers to the formative event in American history. In thirty-three individual essays, the Handbook provides readers with in-depth analysis of the Revolution's many sides.
A look at America’s revolution in the context of the larger British empire: “Many interesting essays . . . a valuable scholarly contribution.” —Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History How did events and ideas from elsewhere in the British empire influence development in the thirteen American colonies? And what was the effect of the American Revolution on the wider Atlantic world? In Empire and Nation, leading historians reconsider the American Revolution as a transnational event, with many sources and momentous implications for Ireland, Africa, the West Indies, Canada, and Britain itself. The opening section of the book situates the origins of the American Revolution in the commercial, ethnic, and political ferment that characterized Britain’s Atlantic empire at the close of the Seven Years’ War. The empire experienced extraordinary changes, ranging from the first stirrings of nationalism in Ireland to the dramatic expansion of British rule in Canada, Africa, and India. The second part focuses on the rebellion of the thirteen colonies, touching on slavery and ethnicity, the changing nature of religious faith, and ideas about civil society and political organization. Finally, contributors examine the changes wrought by the American Revolution both within Britain’s remaining imperial possessions and among the other states in the emerging “concert of Europe.” These essays challenge assumptions about the “exceptional” character of the republic’s founding moment—even as they invite readers to think anew about the complex ways in which the Revolution reshaped both American society and the Atlantic world.
Between 1760 and 1902, more than 200 book-length autobiographies of ex-slaves were published; together they form the basis for all subsequent African American literature. I Was Born a Slave collects the 20 most significant &“slave narratives.&” They describe whippings, torture, starvation, resistance, and hairbreadth escapes; slave auctions, kidnappings, and murders; sexual abuse, religious confusion, the struggle of learning to read and write; and the triumphs and difficulties of life as free men and women. Many of the narratives—such as those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs—have achieved reputations as masterpieces; but some of the lesser-known narratives are equally brilliant. This unprecedented anthology presents them unabridged, providing each one with helpful introductions and annotations, to form the most comprehensive volume ever assembled on the lives and writings of the slaves. Volume One (1770-1849) includes the narratives of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa), William Grimes, Nat Turner, Charles Ball, Moses Roper, Frederick Douglass, Lewis & Milton Clarke, William Wells Brown, and Josiah Henson.
Although Africans and African Americans have been left out of most accounts of the Revolutionary years, this book pieces together their emerging path toward freedom. From Britain came the Great Awakening, the advent of evangelism in America, which would provide slaves with hope for future freedom. In 1775, black emancipation commenced in Chesapeake Bay with Lord Dunmore’s proclamation and the resulting fleet, which attracted blacks, creating the first mass emancipation of slaves in British colonial history. At the end of the War for Independence, the British evacuations of loyal subjects from 1782 to 1785 were the turning point in the Emancipation Revolution. A majority of free and enslaved blacks would remain where the Royal Navy transports landed them in Jamaica, the Bahamas, Nova Scotia, or Britain. Blacks’ love of freedom is concluded with the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire.