Word by word : emancipation and the act of writing / Christopher Hager.

By:

Hager, Christopher, 1974- [Author]

Material type: Text

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

9780674067486
9780674070820

Subject(s):

Genre/Form:

Electronic Books.

LOC classification:

PS153 .W673 2013

Online resources:

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Available additional physical forms:

Contents:

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.

Subject: Consigned to illiteracy, American slaves left little record of their thoughts and feelings--or so we have believed. But a few learned to use pen and paper to make sense of their experiences, despite prohibitions. These authors' perspectives rewrite the history of emancipation and force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom.Subject: 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--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--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--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--a portent of the tenuousness of the freedom to come.

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Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	URL	Status	Date due	Barcode
Online Book (LOGIN USING YOUR MY CIU LOGIN AND PASSWORD)	G. Allen Fleece Library ONLINE	Non-fiction	PS153.5 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Link to resource	Available		ocn827235538

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Previous	PS153.5 From slave cabins to the White House : homemade citizenship in African American culture /	PS153.5 Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era /edited by Lean'tin L. Bracks, Jessie Carney Smith.	PS153.5 The concise Oxford companion to African American literature /editors, William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, Trudier Harris.	PS153.5 Word by word : emancipation and the act of writing /	PS153.5 Black internationalist feminism : women writers of the Black left, 1945-1995 /	PS153.5 Freud upside down : African American literature and psychoanalytic culture /	PS153.5 New Black feminist criticism, 1985-2000 /Barbara Christian ; edited by Gloria Bowles, M. Giulia Fabi, and Arlene R. Keizer.	Next

Includes bibliographies and index.

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.

Consigned to illiteracy, American slaves left little record of their thoughts and feelings--or so we have believed. But a few learned to use pen and paper to make sense of their experiences, despite prohibitions. These authors' perspectives rewrite the history of emancipation and force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom.

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--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--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--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--a portent of the tenuousness of the freedom to come.

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