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A biannual publication offering insights into the use of digital historical collections

Afro-Americana Imprints

Black Women in the Women’s Era, 1890-1920: Course Assignments Using Readings from Afro-Americana Imprints

“With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the debasement, the moral thralldom of her present, the black woman of to-day stands mute and wondering at the Herculean task devolving upon her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever...

Archives of Freedom: Fugitive Science in Antebellum Black Newspapers

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017) traces a forgotten history of black resistance to the ascendency of racial science in the nineteenth century. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, naturalists, medical doctors, comparative anatomists, and a variety of gentleman scientists became increasingly interested...

Gas! Gas! Gas! Anesthesia History in Early American Newspapers, Pamphlets and Broadsides

In the past newspapers, pamphlets and broadsides have been underused sources for research in medical history. Digital access has made these materials much easier to find and use. This piece examines three significant documents and explains their value to the history of anesthesia: an 1800 newspaper article found in Early...

Unlearning from Uncle Tom's Cabin in Black Literary Studies After Ferguson: Perspectives from a Graduate Seminar Utilizing Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535-1922

Most important, Stowe’s text allows whites to talk to other whites about the personal and national issues surrounding the slave [and current] black experience and establishes the character types usually associated with African Americans. Sophia Contave, “Who Gets to Create the Lasting Images?” During the very first session of my...

Antebellum Christian Tracts and the “Africanist Presence”: A Lesson Plan for African American Literature Courses

Introduction: “Christians, attend, while I relate…” [1] Legh Richmond’s The African Widow, a pamphlet circulated by the Christian-based American Tract Society in 1827, unwittingly displays a poignant example of the role Christianity has played in the creation and continuation of stereotypes of African Americans. The stereotypes invoked in the readable...

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