African American Studies

Lunsford Lane (1803-79) became a folk hero to many enslaved Southerners, as well as a generation of abolitionists, when he challenged the rules of enslavement and, later, pushed the boundaries of free citizenship in North Carolina.  As the author of a unique “slave narrative” and speaking partner with some of the era’s greatest orators, including William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Highland Garnett, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Lane became a celebrity. Gradually, however, the persona he created faltered and his influence waned.

Scholarly transcriptions of African American literature, with basic editing and apparatus.  

This online resource documents conflicting representations of African-Americans, white Southerners, and reformers during and and immediately after the Civil War. In particular, it looks at the stereotypes popularized in the northern press, and the ways that these depictions were countered--or in some cases, reinforced--in the letters written for northern readers by freedmen's teachers and freedmen themselves.

Using print and manuscript collections at the American Antiquarian Society and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, this exhibition explores portrayals of Turner in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Depictions often reveal less about who Turner was and more about the zeitgeist in which a given Turner was created.

Led by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein

Scott Casper will return to Antiquarian Hall to describe the process of researching and writing his latest book, Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon (Macmillan, 2008) It is a process that began in the collections of the Society ten years ago. In this work Casper recovers the remarkable history of former slave Sarah Johnson, who spent more than fifty years at Mount Vernon, before and after emancipation. Through her life and the lives of her family and friends, Casper provides an intimate picture of Mount Vernon's operation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The remarkable story of John Swanson Jacobs—lost for 168 years—was rediscovered in 2016 by historian Jonathan Schroeder. In a conversation with AAS member Manisha Sinha (elected October 2006), Schroeder will discuss his incredible discovery of Jacobs’s first-person slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, first published in Australia in 1855.

Caleb Smith will discuss the memoir of a free black man from Rochester, New York, who spent most of his early life in the juvenile reformatories and state prisons of the antebellum period. Discovered in 2009 and recently published by Random House, Austin Reed's "The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict," gives an inside account of the origins of the American prison system, providing a link between slavery and mass incarceration.

What is family? How does it lend itself to the writing of biography? What particular challenges does the writing of family biography present when the family in question is African American? Finally, how might the task change as we move from the Obama Years into the Trump Years in our national history?

Join us for a roundtable discussion on the history of Black childhood. Moderated by Nazera Wright (University of Kentucky), this program brings together Kabria Baumgartner (Northeastern University) and Crystal Webster (University of British Columbia), who share their own research on the subject. Participants will discuss the threats and challenges facing African American children in the nineteenth century, as well as the ways in which they wrote, organized, and forged their own individual and collective identities.