Full Description
Frances Harper's fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil War, and after Emancipation. Iola Leroy adopts and adapts three genres that commanded significant audiences in the nineteenth century: the sentimental romance, the slave narrative, and plantation fiction. Written by the foremost black woman activist of the nineteenth century, the novel sheds light on the movements for abolition, public education, and voting rights through a compelling narrative.
This edition engages the latest research on Harper's life and work and offers ways to teach these major moments in United States history by centering the experiences of African Americans. The appendices provide primary documents that help readers do what they are seldom encouraged to do: consider the experiences and perspectives of people who are not white. The Introduction traces Harper's biography and the changing critical perspectives on the novel.
Contents
Appendix A: Slavery, Civil War & Emancipation, Reconstruction & Its Demise
1. Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
2. United States Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, The Dred Scott Decision (1857)
3. First Confiscation Act (1861)
4. Second Confiscation Act (1862)
5. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
6. The Freedmen's Bureau Act (1865)
7. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865)
8. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
9. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
10. The Compromise of 1877
11. United States Supreme Court Justice Billings Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
Appendix B: Not White? Then, You Can't Be Equal
1. 1. Abraham Lincoln, Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes (1862)
2. 2. Frances Harper, ""Mrs. Frances E. Watkins Harper on the War and the President's
3. Colonization Scheme"" (1862)
4. 3. Michigan Supreme Court Justice James Campbell, The People v. Dean (1866)
Appendix C: Black Families in Slavery and Freedom
1. From Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass... (1845)
2. Dictated Letter, from enslaved husband to wife when separated by owner
3. Dictated Letter, from enslaved husband to wife when separated by owner
4. Dictated letter, from enslaved wife to husband when separated by owner
5. ""Arrest of Fugitive Slaves,"" Cincinnati Gazette (29 January 1856)
6. Frances Harper, ""The Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio"" (1857)
7. Testimony about enslaved men and women who escaped slavery to join the Union
8. effort and often planned to return to help family members escape (1863)
9. Letter from a black soldier to his children (1864)
10. Letter from a black soldier to the owner of one of his daughters (1864)
11. Notices in hopes of finding lost loved ones after Emancipation
a. From Colored Tennessean (Nashville) (24 March 1866)
b. From Christian Recorder (24 March 1866)
c. From Christian Recorder (28 January 1871)
d. From Southwestern Christian Advocate (17 July 1879)
e. From Christian Recorder (5 October 1882)
f. From Christian Recorder (3 January 1884)
g. From Loyal Georgian (Augusta, Ga.) (13 October 1886)
h. From Christian Recorder (6 January 1893)
Appendix D: Education in Slavery and Freedom
1. A law making the education of enslaved people illegal
2. Account about an enslaved woman who ran a midnight school
3. Account of teaching/learning in secret during slavery
4. An account of finding the spark for learning while enslaved
5. Accounts of the consequences of learning to read and write
6. Account of black soldiers wanting education
7. Account of recently emancipated people's eagerness to learn
8. Testimony on KKK preventing school attendance after Emancipation
Appendix E: Preventing Freedom Even After Emancipation
1. Laws constraining black girls and boys via apprenticeship and African Americans of every age via vagrancy statutes (1865)
2. Testimony about KKK raping black women whose husbands/fathers voted (1871)
3. From Henry W. Grady, ""The Race Problem in the South"" (1889)
4. From Ida B. Wells, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895)
Appendix F: Black Women's Activism
1. Frances Harper, ""We Are All Bound Up Together"" (1866)
2. Frances Harper, ""Aunt Chloe's Politics"" (1872)
3. Frances Harper, ""Colored Women of America"" (1878)
4. Frances Harper, ""The Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Colored Woman"" (1888)
5. Frances Harper, ""Enlightened Motherhood: An Address ... Before the Brooklyn Literary Society"" (15 November 1892)
6. Fannie Barrier Williams, ""The Intellectual Progress of The Colored Women of the United States Since The Emancipation Proclamation"" (1893)
Appendix G: Being Black and a Woman: Aesthetics and Reception
1. William J. Watkins, ""The Reformer"" (1854)
2. Grace Greenwood, Impressions of Harper as a speaker (1866)
3. From Anna Julia Cooper, ""The Status of Woman in America"" (1892)
4. ""Publications Reviewed,"" Christian Recorder (12 January 1893)
5. ""Review 1,"" The Independent (5 January 1893)
6. Richmond Planet (21 January1893)
7. ""Recent Fiction,"" The Nation (23 February 1893)
8. From ""Our Book List,"" The A.M.E. Church Review (April 1893)
9. ""Book Review,"" Friends' Review; a Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal (22 June 1893)
10. Review of Reviews (January 1895)
11. ""Recent Fiction,"" The Independent (29 October 1896)
12. Edward Elmore Brock, ""Brock's Literary Leaves,"" Freeman (Indianapolis) (14 August 1897)
13. [W.E.B. Du Bois], ""Writers,"" Crisis (April 1911)
