The legacy of the slave family haunts the status of black Americans in modern U.S. society. Stereotypes that first entered the popular imagination in the form of plantation lore have continued to distort the African American social identity. In What Sorrows Labour in My Parents' Breast?, Brenda Stevenson provides a long overdue concise history to help the reader understand this vitally important African American institution as it evolved and survived under the extreme opposition that the institution of slavery imposed. The themes of this work center on the multifaceted reality of loss, recovery, resilience and resistance embedded in the desire of African/African descended people to experience family life despite their enslavement. These themes look back to the critical loss that Africans, both those taken and those who remained, endured, as the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley honors in the line—“What sorrows labour in my parents’ breast?,” and look forward to the generations of slaves born through the Civil War era who struggled to realize their humanity in the recreation of family ties that tied them, through blood and emotion, to a reality beyond their legal bondage to masters and mistresses. Stevenson pays particular attention to the ways in which gender, generation, location, slave labor, the economic status of slaveholders and slave societies’ laws affected the black family in slavery.

American women have created an especially vigorous and innovative poetry, beginning in 1632 when Anne Bradstreet set aside her needle and picked up her "poet's pen." The topics of American women poets have been various, their images their own, and their modes of expression original. Emily Stipes Watts does not imply that the work of American men and that of American women are two different kinds of poetry, although they have been treated as such in the past. It is her aim, rather, to delineate and define the poetic tradition of women as crucial to the understanding of American poetry as a whole. By 1850, American women of all colors, religions, and social classes were writing and publishing poetry. Within the critical category of "female poetry," developed from 1800 to 1850, these women experimented boldly and prepared the way for the achievement of such women as Emily Dickinson in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed at times—for example from 1860 through 1910—it was women who were at the outer edge of prosodic experimentation and innovation in American poetry. Moving chronologically, Professor Watts broadly characterizes the state of American poetry for each period, citing the dominant male poets; she then focuses on women contemporaries, singling out and analyzing their best work. This volume not only brings to light several important women poets but also represents the discovery of a tradition of women writers. This is a unique and invaluable contribution to the history of American literature.

The Right to Write examines how the early American poets Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley gained agency within a traditionally patriarchal field of literary production. Tracing the careers of Bradstreet and Wheatley through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Engberg shows that these women used their positions within society to network themselves into publication. Each woman represents a unique way in which a majority of early American women negotiated their roles as both women and writers while influencing the political and social fabric of the new republic. Examining the context in which these women worked, Engberg provides a window into the social conditions and aesthetic, decisions they negotiated in order to write. This is not simply a historical and literary examination of the field of literary production; this study provides new conceptions of early American women's writing that are valuable to feminist inquiry. Engberg's research is innovative and recaptures a part of early American literary history. Book jacket.

A groundbreaking history of early America that shows how Boston built and sustained an independent city-state in New England before being folded into the United States In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston’s development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain’s Stuart monarchs and how—through its bargain with the slave trade and ratification of the Constitution—it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States. Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar figures alongside well-known ones, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston’s origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain’s empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, “Bostoners” aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston’s regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state’s vision of a common good for all. Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding a revered city, The City-State of Boston offers a startlingly fresh understanding of America’s history.

What does it mean to work inter-culturally? Our multi-cultural society is changing the parameters of counselling. Working Inter-Culturally in Counselling Settings explores how racial issues can be recognised and worked within a practical, clinical setting. The book looks at how the counselling setting can influence practice, and the book includes chapters in a range of settings, including: * counselling training and supervision * social work * the probation service and prisons * setting up counselling services in culturally diverse communities. Aisha Dupont-Joshua, together with contributors of diverse cultural heritage, moves away from exclusive white models of thought, and adopts more of a world view, inclusive of cultural difference. Working Inter-Culturally in Counselling Settings will be invaluable for counsellors, trainers, supervisors and other mental health professionals.

This volume brings together an unprecedented gathering of women and men from the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolutions. Featuring hard-to-find writings from colonists and colonized, citizens and slaves, religious visionaries and scandal-dogged actresses, these wide-ranging selections present a panorama of the diverse, vibrant world facing women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An expansive introduction, along with rich contextual headnotes, makes this an indispensable text for students and scholars of literature, history, and women's and gender studies. With writings from figures like Aphra Behn, Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Toussaint L'Ouverture, to name just a few, Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions recovers the revolutionary moment in which women stepped into a globalizing world and imagined themselves free.

Here is an introduction to the history of English writing from East and West Africa drawing on a range of texts from the slave diaspora to the post-war upsurge in African English language and literature from these regions.

This book brings together leading scholars to examine slavery in American literature from the eighteenth century to the present day.

This one-volume, comprehensive overview of African American history brings together original essays by some of the foremost authorities in the field. Arranged both thematically and chronologically, these papers discuss a wide range of topics - from the Middle Passage to the Civil Rights Movement; from abolition to the Great Migration; from issues in religion, class and family to literature, education and politics.