Antislavery Poetry from San Francisco

The Pacific Appeal was the leading African American newspaper on the West Coast during the early 1860s.  A newly-published set of eight antislavery poems from the journal's inaugural 1862 volume captures the sense of expectancy within the African American community for the imminent end of US slavery.  These poems include the work of James Madison Bell, a San Francisco plasterer, brickmason, and poet. Read more... 

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The goal of the Antislavery Literature Project is to increase public access to a body of literature crucial to understanding African American experience, US and hemispheric histories of slavery, and early human rights philosophies. These multilingual collections contribute to an educational consciousness of the role of many antislavery writers in creating contemporary concepts of freedom.

Antislavery literature represents the origins of multicultural literature in the United States. It is the first body of American literature produced by writers of diverse racial origins. It encompasses slave narratives, lectures, travel accounts, political tracts, prose fiction, poetry, drama, religious and philosophical literature, compendia, journals, manifestoes and children's literature. There is a complex and contradictory range of voices, from journalistic reportage to sentimental poetry, from racial paternalism and stereotyping to advocacy of interracial equality, from religious disputation to militant antislavery calls. In its whole, this literature is inseparable from an understanding of democratic development in US society.

The Antislavery Literature Project engages in public scholarship by providing educational access to the literature and history of the antislavery movement in the United States. Much antislavery literature remains unavailable to all but a small number of scholars. We encourage public use of and participatory contributions to literary and historical scholarship of slavery. We believe that public scholarship, where the academy and community meet to create and use cultural knowledge together, is an expression of engaged citizenship.

To accomplish this work, our project does historical research; digitization and production of electronic editions; and delivers annotated texts via the Internet. We emphasize a continuum between research, digitization, and teaching, and make a corpus of antislavery literature available for free for educational purposes. Further, to avoid redundant effort, our site links to the work of the community of digitization projects that have created publicly-available and not-for-profit electronic editions of antislavery literature.

Most of our work concerns the documents of historical US slavery, but the Project also maintains a collection ofcontemporary slave narratives edited by Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd.  The literature of slavery continues to emerge today and the Project highlights this continuity.

We produce streaming video to interpret selected historical texts, to present research lectures, and to provide teaching models for antislavery literature. Videos includeabolitionist choral music from the Antislavery Ensemble, in cooperation with the Arizona State University School of Music, and lectures from a Harvard University course onAmerican social protest literature.  One new multimedia project involves podcast readings ofFrederick Douglass translations as a way to explore the translation history and international reception of early African American literature.

The Project is based at theEnglish Department ofArizona State University and theEServer atIowa State University'sEnglish Department.  It receives assistance from a diverse group ofaffiliates who support its scholarly and educational objectives.  With this community of  support, the Project has pursued public scholarship over the last half-decade.  In 2008 the National Endowment for the Humanities recognized the Project as "one of the best digital humanities projects" in a peer-reviewed national competition.