front cover of Knowing Him by Heart
Knowing Him by Heart
African Americans on Abraham Lincoln
Edited by Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Winner of the 2024 Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award


An unprecedented collection of African American writings on Lincoln

Though not blind to Abraham Lincoln's imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president's image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman's anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, Gwendolyn Brooks, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Barack Obama, and dozens of others. The selections move from speeches to letters to book excerpts, mapping the changing contours of the bond--emotional and intellectual--between Lincoln and Black Americans over the span of one hundred and fifty years.

A comprehensive and valuable reader, Knowing Him by Heart examines Lincoln’s still-evolving place in Black American thought.

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front cover of My Bondage and My Freedom
My Bondage and My Freedom
Frederick Douglass
University of Illinois Press, 1988
This is the first annotated edition of a work Eric J. Sundquist has called "a classic text of the American Renaissance." As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has pointed out, My Bondage and My Freedom has been largely ignored by critics, in part because it is longer and less accessible than Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass but also because it has not up to now been "read" by a sensitive critic. "The latter reason is paramount and urgently needed to be addressed, and William Andrews is just the person to introduce Douglass's second autobiography to our generation of readers. He has few peers in nineteenth-century black criticism."
 
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front cover of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
An American Slave, Written by Himself
Frederick Douglass
Harvard University Press, 2009
No book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. In an introductory essay, Robert B. Stepto reexamines the extraordinary life and achievement of a man who escaped from slavery to become a leading abolitionist and one of our most important writers. The John Harvard Library text reproduces the first edition, published in Boston in 1845.
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
An American Slave, Written by Himself
Frederick Douglass
Harvard University Press
THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEW EDITION.
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