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8 books match the query 'Douglass, Frederick'

cover of Anna Murray Douglass: Biography of a Revolutionary

Anna Murray Douglass

Biography of a Revolutionary

Celeste-Marie Bernier

Duke University Press, 2026

Working with family descendants and based on thirty years of research digging through public and private archives, Celeste-Marie Bernier presents the first standalone biography of Anna Murray Douglass, wife and co-revolutionary of Frederick Douglass, honoring her history-making role as a campaigner, liberator, and freedom-fighter.

Anna Murray Douglass was born legally free in Maryland to Mary and Bambarra Murray. From working with her future husband, Frederick Douglass, to secure his self-liberation from enslavement to converting her family homes to command centers for the Underground Railroad, she dedicated her entire life to the fight for all freedoms and to supporting loved ones and strangers alike in their fight for equal, independent lives. Her deeds have long gone unsung until now.

In this first-ever standalone biography of the wife and co-revolutionary of Frederick Douglass, Celeste-Marie Bernier provides a detailed and illustrated history of Anna Murray Douglass’s leadership roles in fighting against the injustices of enslavement, racism, and white supremacy, as well as how she laid the foundation for her family to follow in her and her husband’s footsteps. After over three decades of archival research, Bernier presents a wide-ranging collection of stories, writings, letters, and photographs in a comprehensive and illuminating biography of Anna Murray Douglass’s life and work as an educator, activist, intellectual, orator, political thinker, artist, philosopher, and strategist. Ultimately, Bernier aims to combat the widespread misrepresentation that the liberation movement bearing the Douglass name was the work of one individual when it was, in reality, a family institution. Anna Murray Douglass is the first book in a ten-volume collection detailing the life and work of the entire Douglass family including their children, Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick, Jr., Charles Remond and Annie Douglass, all freedom-fighters in their own right.

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cover of Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Douglass in His Own Time

A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

John Ernest

University of Iowa Press, 2014

One of the most incredible stories in American history is that of Frederick Douglass, the man who escaped from slavery and rose to become one of the most celebrated and eloquent orators, writers, and public figures in the world. He first committed his story to writing in his 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Over the course of his life, he would expand on his story considerably, writing two other autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, as well as innumerable newspaper articles and editorials and orations.

As valuable as these writings are in illuminating the man, the story Douglass told in 1845 has become rather too easy to tell, obscuring as much as it reveals. Less a living presence than an inspiring tale, Frederick Douglass remains relatively unknown even to many of those who celebrate his achievements. Douglass in His Own Time offers an introduction to Douglass the man by those who knew him. The book includes a broad range of writings, some intended for public viewing and some private correspondence, all of which contend with the force of Douglass’s tremendous power over the written and spoken word, his amazing presence before crowds, his ability to improvise, to entertain, to instruct, to inspire—indeed, to change lives through his eloquent appeals to righteous self-awareness and social justice. In approaching Douglass through the biographical sketches, memoirs, letters, editorials, and other articles about him, readers will encounter the complexity of a life lived on a very public stage, the story of an extraordinary black man in an insistently white world.
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cover of Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845

Frederick Douglass

Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845

Gregory P. Lampe

Michigan State University Press, 1998

This work in the MSU Press Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series chronicles Frederick Douglass's preparation for a career in oratory, his emergence as an abolitionist lecturer in 1841, and his development and activities as a public speaker and reformer from 1841 to 1845. Lampe's meticulous scholarship overturns much of the conventional wisdom about this phase of Douglass's life and career uncovering new information about his experiences as a slave and as a fugitive; it provokes a deeper and richer understanding of this renowned orator's emergence as an important voice in the crusade to end slavery. 
     Contrary to conventional wisdom, Douglass was well prepared to become a full-time lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841. His emergence as an eloquent voice from slavery was not as miraculous as scholars have led us to believe. Lampe begins by tracing Douglass's life as slave in Maryland and as fugitive in New Bedford, showing that experiences gained at this time in his life contributed powerfully to his understanding of rhetoric and to his development as an orator. An examination of his daily oratorical activities from the time of his emergence in Nantucket in 1841 until his departure for England in 1845 dispels many conventional beliefs surrounding this period, especially the belief that Douglass was under the wing of William Lloyd Garrison. Lampe's research shows that Douglass was much more outspoken and independent than previously thought and that at times he was in conflict with white abolitionists. 
     Included in this work is a complete itinerary of Douglass's oratorical activities, correcting errors and omissions in previously published works, as well as two newly discovered complete speech texts, never before published.

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cover of Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln

Knowing Him by Heart

African Americans on Abraham Lincoln

Edited by Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Winner of an Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award

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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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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cover of Shaping Words to Fit the Soul: The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism

Shaping Words to Fit the Soul

The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism

Jürgen E. Grandt

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

Taking up where he left off with Kinds of Blue (The Ohio State University Press, 2004), Jürgen E. Grandt seeks to explore in depth some of the implications of the modernist jazz aesthetic resonating in the African American literary tradition. Grandt’s new book, Shaping Words to Fit the Soul:The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism, probes the ways in which modernism’s key themes of fragmentation, alienation, and epistemology complicate the mapping of the American South as an “authenticating” locus of African American narrative. Rather than being a site of authentication, the South constitutes a symbolic territory that actually resists the very narrative strategies deployed to capture it.
 
The figurative ritual grounds traversed in texts by Frederick Douglass, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Tayari Jones reveal Afro-modernism as modernism with a historical conscience. Since literary Afro-modernism recurrently points to music as a symbolic territory of liberatory potential, this study also visits a variety of soundscapes, from the sorrow songs of the slaves to the hip-hop of the Dirty South, and from the blues of W. C. Handy to the southern rock of the Allman Brothers Band.
 
Afro-modernism as modernism with a historical conscience thus suggests a reconfiguration of southern ritual grounds as situated in time and mind rather than time and place, and the ramifications of this process extend far above and beyond the Mason-Dixon Line.
 
 
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cover of The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

The Powers of Dignity

The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

Nick Bromell

Duke University Press, 2021

In The Powers of Dignity Nick Bromell unpacks Frederick Douglass's 1867 claim that he had “elaborated a political philosophy” from his own “slave experience.” Bromell shows that Douglass devised his philosophy because he found that antebellum Americans' liberal-republican understanding of democracy did not provide a sufficient principled basis on which to fight anti-Black racism. To remedy this deficiency, Douglass deployed insights from his distinctively Black experience and developed a Black philosophy of democracy. He began by contesting the founders' racist assumptions about humanity and advancing instead a more robust theory of “the human” as a collection of human “powers.” He asserted further that the conscious exercise of those powers is what confirms human dignity and that human rights and democracy come into being as ways to affirm and protect that dignity. Thus, by emphasizing the powers and the dignity of all citizens, deriving democratic rights from these, and promoting a remarkably activist, power-oriented model of citizenship, Douglass's Black political philosophy aimed to rectify two major failings of US democracy in his time and ours: its complacence and its racism.
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cover of To Raise Up a Nation: John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and the Making of a Free Country

To Raise Up a Nation

John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and the Making of a Free Country

William S. King

Westholme Publishing, 2013

A Choice Academic Book of the Year: The Sweeping Story of the Men and Women Who Fought to End Slavery in America
Drawing on decades of research, and demonstrating remarkable command of a great range of primary sources, William S. King has written an important history of African Americans’ own contributions and points of crossracial cooperation to end slavery in America. Beginning with the civil war along the border of Kansas and Missouri, the author traces the life of John Brown and the personal support for his ideas from elite New England businessmen, intellectuals such as Emerson and Thoreau, and African Americans, including his confidant, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. Throughout, King links events that contributed to the growing antipathy in the North toward slavery and the South’s concerns for its future, including Nat Turner’s insurrection, the Amistad affair, the Fugitive Slave law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision. The author also effectively describes the debate within the African American community as to whether the U.S. Constitution was colorblind or if emigration was the right course for the future of blacks in America.
Following Brown’s execution after the failed raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, King shows how Brown’s vision that only a clash of arms would eradicate slavery was set into motion after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Once the Civil War erupted on the heels of Brown’s raid, the author relates how black leaders, white legislators, and military officers vigorously discussed the use of black manpower for the Union effort as well as plans for the liberation of the “veritable Africa” within the southern United States. Following the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, recruitment of black soldiers increased and by war’s end they made up nearly ten percent of the Union army, and contributed to many important victories.
To Raise Up a Nation: John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and the Making of a Free Country is a sweeping history that explains how the destruction of American slavery was not directed primarily from the counsels of local and national government and military men, but rather through the grassroots efforts of extraordinary men and women. As King notes, the Lincoln administration ultimately armed black Americans, as John Brown had attempted to do, and their role was a vital part in the defeat of slavery.
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