A House

Unit 7

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

Race and Identity in Antebellum America

Authors and Works

Featured in the Video: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (autobiography/slave narrative), My Bondage and My Freedom (autobiography/slave narrative), “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (speech) Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (autobiography/slave narrative) Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (sentimental novel) Discussed in This Unit: Sorrow Songs (African American musical tradition) Briton Hammon, “Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon” (captivity narrative) Lydia Maria Child, “Mrs. Child’s Reply” (letter) Abraham Lincoln, “A House Divided,” “Gettysburg Address,” “Second Inaugural Address” (speeches) Lorenzo Asisara, “Punishment” (oral narrative, recorded by editor) William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (slave narrative) Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (history), Ramona (novel)

the genre of the slave narrative? How was the genre developed, adapted, and modified by the writers included in this unit? How does the slave narrative compare to the captivity narratives written in the seventeenth century (Mary Rowlandson’s narrative, for example)? I How do ideals of domesticity, femininity, and sentimentality shape nineteenth-century American literature and reform movements? I How do the regional differences between the American North, South, and West (geographic, economic, and demographic) influence antebellum literature? I What is the relationship between oral expressions such as Sorrow Songs and printed literature? How did African American oral traditions influence American music and literature? I What is the relationship between slave narratives and captivity narratives? How did the genre of the slave narrative influence the development of autobiographical writing and the novel in America? I How does abolitionist rhetoric expand and...