Bøger i Regenerations serien

Between 1899 and 1908, five long works of fiction by the Nashville-based black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs appeared in print. One of them, The Hindered Hand, addresses the author's key themes of amalgamation, emigration, armed resistance, and US overseas expansion. This scholarly edition of the novel provides newly discovered biographical information and copious historical context.

J. McHenry Jones's Hearts of Gold is a gripping tale of post-Civil War battles against racism and systemic injustice. Originally published in 1896, this novel reveals an African American community of individuals dedicated to education, journalism, fraternal organisations, and tireless work serving the needs of those abandoned by the political process of the white world.

Virtually unknown outside of her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Jane Edna Harris Hunter was one of the most influential African American social activists of the early-to mid-twentieth century. In her autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer, Hunter presents an enlightening two-part narrative that recollects her formative years in post-Civil War South and her activist years in Cleveland.

In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper "The Christian Recorder, " the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, D.C., and later, as one of the Union army's first black chaplains. In the halls of Congress, Turner witnessed the debates surrounding emancipation and black enlistment. As army chaplain, Turner dodged "grape" and cannon, comforted the sick and wounded, and settled disputes between white southerners and their former slaves. He was dismayed by the destruction left by Sherman's army in the Carolinas, but buoyed by the bravery displayed by black soldiers in battle. After the war ended, he helped establish churches and schools for the freedmen, who previously had been prohibited from attending either. Throughout his columns, Turner evinces his firm belief in the absolute equality of blacks with whites, and insists on civil rights for all black citizens. In vivid, detailed prose, laced with a combination of trenchant commentary and self-deprecating humor, Turner established himself as more than an observer: he became a distinctive and authoritative voice for the black community, and a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. After Reconstruction failed, Turner became disillusioned with the American dream and became a vocal advocate of black emigration to Africa, prefiguring black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Here, however, we see Turner's youthful exuberance and optimism, and his open-eyed wonder at the momentous changes taking place in American society. Well-known in his day, Turner has been relegated to the fringes of African American history, in large part because neither his views nor the forms in which he expressed them were recognized by either the black or white elite. With an introduction by Jean Lee Cole and a foreword by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner "restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

This is a recently recovered novel written by William Anderson and Walter Stowers, two of the editors of the Detroit Plaindealer. Drawing heavily on nineteenth-century print culture, the authors tell the story of John Saunders, a college-educated black man living and working in Detroit.

Written in 1905, this is a compelling tale of the post-Civil War South's degeneration into a region awash with virulent racist practices against African Americans: segregation, lynchings, disenfranchisement, convict-labor exploitation, and endemic violent repression. The events are powerfully depicted from the point of view of a philanthropic but unreliable southern white colonel.

This is an exceptional antebellum biography, chronicling Elleanor Eldridge's life from her birth through the first publication of almost yearly editions of the text between 1838 and 1847. Because of Eldridge's exceptional life as a freeborn woman of colour entrepreneur, it constitutes a counter-narrative to slave narratives of early 19th-century New England.