Word by word : emancipation and the act of writing
"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"--Page 2 of jacket
Print Book, English, 2013
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013
Criticism, interpretation, etc
311 pages ; 24 cm
9780674059863, 9780674067486, 0674059867, 0674067487
792886753
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