Word by word, emancipation and the act of writing, Christopher Hager
Type
Creator
1
Subject
10
- African Americans + Civil rights
- Slaves + Emancipation -- United States
- African Americans + Social conditions -- To 1964
- Literature and society -- United States
- Authors, American -- 19th century -- Political and social views
- American literature + African American authors + History and criticism
- African Americans in literature
- African American authors + Political and social views
- African Americans + Intellectual life -- 20th century
- American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
Mapped to
1
Label
Word by word, emancipation and the act of writing, Christopher Hager
Language
eng
Bibliography note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Index
index present
Literary form
non fiction
Main title
Word by word
Nature of contents
bibliography
Oclc number
982164891
Responsibility statement
Christopher Hager
Sub title
emancipation and the act of writing
Summary
One of the cruelest abuses of slavery in America was that slaves were forbidden to read and write. Consigned to illiteracy, they left no records of their thoughts and feelings apart from the few exceptional narratives of Frederick Douglass and others who escaped to the North<U+0127> or so we have long believed. But as Christopher Hager reveals, a few enslaved African Americans managed to become literate in spite of all prohibitions, and during the halting years of emancipation thousands more seized the chance to learn. The letters and diaries of these novice writers, unpolished and hesitant yet rich with voice, show ordinary black men and women across the South using pen and paper to make sense of their experiences. Through an unprecedented gathering of these forgotten writings<U+0127> from letters by individuals sold away from their families, to petitions from freedmen in the army to their new leaders, to a New Orleans man's transcription of the Constitution<U+0127> Word by Word rewrites the history of emancipation. The idiosyncrasies of these untutored authors, Hager argues, reveal the enormous difficulty of straddling the border between slave and free. These unusual texts, composed by people with a unique perspective on the written word, force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom. For African Americans at the end of slavery, learning to write could be liberating and empowering, but putting their hard-won skill to use often proved arduous and daunting<U+0127> a portent of the tenuousness of the freedom to come.--, Provided by Publisher
Table of contents
Black Literacy in the White Mind -- The Private Life of the Literate Slave -- Writing a Life in Slavery and Freedom -- The Written We -- Petition and Protest in the Occupied South -- Black Ink, White Pages
Incoming Resources
- Has instance1