Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass: Speeches & Writings (LOA #358) (eBook, ePUB)

Redaktion: Blight, David W.

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The eloquent and defiant writings of the great American freedom fighter, selected by his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Frederick Douglass was one of the greatest orators and essayists in American history. While toiling as an enslaved laborer in the Baltimore shipyards he bought a secondhand copy of The Columbian Orator, a "noble acquisition" that he carried with him on his escape to the North. Douglass began his career as an antislavery lecturer in 1841 and founded his first newspaper, North Star, six years later. For the next five decades he used his voice and wielded his pen in the cause of emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity. Inspired by the Hebrew prophets, Douglass developed a unique oratorical and literary style that combined scriptural cadences with savage irony, moral urgency, and keen insight. In his incandescent jeremiad "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?" Douglass skewered the hypocrisy of the slaveholding republic; and in "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered" he refuted white supremacist ideology. "Resistance to Blood-Houndism" called for forceful opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act; "Capt. John Brown Not Insane" praised the "self-forgetful heroism" of the abolitionist martyr; and "How to End the War," published in 1861, called for the raising of Black troops and the destruction of slavery. In his oration at the Freedmen's Memorial in 1876, Douglass offered a brilliantly perceptive assessment of Lincoln's role in emancipation; "There Was a Right Side in the Late War" attacked the "Lost Cause" mythology of the Confederacy; and "The Lessons of the Hour" denounced lynching and disenfranchisement in the emerging Jim Crow South. As a special feature the volume also includes Douglass's only foray into fiction, the 1853 novella "The Heroic Slave," about a shipboard insurrection.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Library of America
• Seitenzahl: 969
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. September 2022
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781598537239
• Artikelnr.: 62367510

Autorenporträt

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was born Frederick Bailey in eastern Maryland, the son of an enslaved mother and an unknown white man. In 1838 he escaped to the North and took the name Douglass. During the next decade he became an antislavery lecturer, achieved international fame with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the first of his three autobiographies, and began publishing a series of newspapers. By 1861 he had become one of the most famous orators in the United States. Douglass continued his impassioned advocacy for freedom and racial equality until the end of his life. David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University and the author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of American Freedom, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. His other works include Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Professor Blight has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The Washington Post.