Browsing by Subject "Frederick Douglass"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Autographs for Freedom and Reaching a New Abolitionist Audience
    (University of Chicago Press, 2017-01-01) McKivigan, John R.; Pattillo, Rebecca A.; History, School of Liberal Arts
    Scholars correctly appreciate Frederick Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave (1853) as an important early work of African American literature and as a significant indicator of its author’s endorsement of violent tactics to end slavery in the United States.1 This essay will literally step back farther from the text of Douglass’s only fictional work, and examine The Heroic Slave as a component of a larger project—the gift book Autographs for Freedom—edited by Douglass and his closest ally in the early 1850s, British abolitionist Julia Griffiths. The thirty-nine pieces of short fiction, poetry, essays, and correspondence in the 263-page anthology were envisioned as tools to construct a wider and politically more potent antislavery alliance than any in which the two abolitionists had previously participated. In the diverse composition of its collection of authors and antislavery themes, Autographs for Freedom was both a cultural and political tool designed by Douglass and Griffiths to help assemble a more powerful antislavery coalition from the volume’s reading audience.
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    “Douglass, Frederick”: Frederick Douglass’s Forgotten Autobiography
    (2019) Kaufman-McKivigan, John R.; Duvall, Jeffery A.; History, School of Liberal Arts
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    "A field lately ploughed" : the expressive landscapes of gender and race in the antebellum slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and William Grimes
    (2013-10-07) Nyhuis, Jeremiah E.; Schultz, Jane E.; Henry Anthony, Ronda C.; Springer, Jennifer Thorington
    The complicated state wherein ex-slaves found themselves, as depicted in the narratives of Bibb, Jacobs, and others, problematizes the dualistic relationship between North and South that the genre’s structural components work to enforce, forging an odyssey that, although sometimes still spiritual in nature, does not offer the type of resolutions that might easily persuade fellow slaves to abandon their masters and seek a similarly ambiguous identity in the so-called “free” land of the North. For blacks and especially fugitive slaves, such restrictive legal provisions provided an “uncertain status” where, writes William Andrews, “the definition of freedom for black people remained open.” In those slave narratives that dare to depict the limits of liberty in the North, this “open” status is particularly reflected in the texts’ discursive terrain itself, which portends a series of candid observations and brutal details that actively work to deconstruct any sort of mythological pattern associated with the slave narrative genre, thereby offering a more expansive view of the experience for most fugitive slaves. The Life of William Grimes, a particularly frank and brutal diary of a man’s trials within and without slavery, is one such slave narrative, depicting a journey that, while more consistent with the general experience of ex-slaves in the antebellum U.S., often works outside the parameters of traditional, straight-forward slave narratives like Douglass’s. “I often was obliged to go off the road,” Grimes admits at one point in his autobiography, and although his remark refers to the cautious path he must tread as a fugitive slave, it might just as well describe the thematic and structural characteristics of his open-ended autobiography. Reputedly the first fugitive slave narrative, the publication of Grimes’s Life in 1825 initiated the beginning of a genre whose path had not yet been forged, which likely contributed to its fluid nature. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Grimes’s self-expressed testimony of injustice under slavery was about five years ahead of its time; it wouldn’t be until the 1830s that the U.S. antislavery movement would begin to consciously seek out ex-slaves to testify to their experience in bondage. Once this literary door was open, however, antislavery sentiment became for many early African American authors “a ready forum” for self-expression. Whereas in twenty years’ time Douglass would take full advantage of this opportunity by drawing inspiration from a number of already established narratives, Grimes as an author found himself singularly “off the road” and essentially alone in new literary territory, uncannily reflecting his sense of alienation and helplessness in the North after escaping from slavery aboard a cargo ship in 1815.
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    Frederick Douglass, Slum Landlord?
    (Institute for American Thought, 2024-02) McKivigan, John R.; Duvall, Jeffery A.; History, School of Liberal Arts
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    Frederick Douglass’s Foray into Fiction: Considering the Context of Recent Work on The Heroic Slave
    (University of Chicago Press, 2017-01-01) McKivigan, John R.; Schultz, Jane E.; History, School of Liberal Arts
    In February 2015, the Frederick Douglass Papers, a documentary editing project at work since 1973 to collect, edit, and disseminate the various works of Frederick Douglass, the most influential African American of the 19th century, published the first-ever scholarly edition of Douglass’s sole work of fiction, his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave. Edited by Robert S. Levine of the University of Maryland, John Stauffer of Harvard University, and John McKivigan, the longtime editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers, based since 1998 at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), and published by the Yale University Press, The Critical and Cultural Edition of The Heroic Slave provides, for the first time, an authoritative text, along with assorted contemporary and scholarly documents to help readers engage the novella in its historical, biographical, and literary contexts. Those documents assist readers to better understand what Douglass chose to emphasize and leave out in his telling of the story of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole. The Heroic Slave has emerged as a major text in Douglass’s canon, a novella that continues to fascinate readers with its compelling vision of reform, black revolution, and the quest for human freedom.
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    Frederick Douglass’s Rhetorical Legacy
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018) Rossing, Jonathan P.; McKivigan, John R.; History, School of Liberal Arts
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    Frederick Douglass’s “New Departure” in the Reconstruction Era Woman Suffrage Movement
    (IUPUI Institute for American Thought, 2022-12-19) McKivigan, John R.; Schwartz, Alex; History, School of Liberal Arts
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    The Legacy of Frederick Douglass’s Words
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2016-04-08) Hunt, Cory A.; Harrah, Peter; Koenn, Emily; Taylor, Lynette A.
    More than a century after his death, Frederick Douglass remains an iconic figure widely referenced by politicians, educators, editorialists, community activists, poets, hip hop artists, comedians, and more, both domestically and abroad as a legitimizing and representative historical figure. This fact raises a number of questions— why have Douglass’s rhetorical contributions remained significant to so many persons in the 21st century? What types of individuals and organizations continue to find the legacy of Douglass’s words relevant and what is the underlying significance therein? How well have Douglass’s 19th century words and ideas been adapted to more modern forms of media and audience expectations that have arisen in the subsequent centuries since his 1895 death?—that this exploration into Douglass’s enduring legacy helps to identify. In order to address these issues, we employed techniques from two disciplines, History and Communication Studies, to identify and analyze the impact of the large body of speeches, editorials, and autobiographical writings left by the runaway Maryland slave who rose to become the most influential African American of the nineteenth century. This research was conducted through careful examination of both print and online sources from the 19th through the 20th centuries as we located and then verified the accuracy of quotations purporting to be from Douglass’s works. Finally we assessed the usage of Douglass’s words by modern commentators through the employment of current scholarly lenses such as rhetorical criticism, cultural studies, and Critical Race Theory in order to judge whether this usage was consistent with the values of Douglass’s long public career as a reformer in areas of social justice and politics. This study further demonstrates the need for continued analysis and dissemination of his thinking considering the modern-day relevancy that is still found in Douglass’s commentary and opinions.
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    "The Most Wonderful Man that America Has Ever Produced": Frederick Douglass and His Contemporary Biographers
    (IUPUI, 2020-10-19) McKivigan, John R.; History, School of Liberal Arts