Newspaper Reading and Early American Narratives of Slavery

FAIN: FA-232317-16

Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Colorado State University (Fort Collins, CO 80521-2807)

An online database of early American newspaper references to slavery and a book-length study of the impact of early newspaper accounts on the development of American slave narratives.

The first North American slave narratives, written by Briton Hammon and Olaudah Equiano, were not published until the late eighteenth century, but stories of enslaved African Americans circulated in colonial newspapers long before those accounts were published. Before Equiano will survey slave-for-sale advertisements, advertisements for runaways, accounts of ships sunk during the Middle Passage, and other textual fragments related to slavery in 6,000 issues of ten colonial American newspapers published before 1760, a project of unprecedented scope. This book will identify rhetorical patterns in newspaper reports of African American experience and identity, providing a linguistic baseline against which the modulations and flourishes of Equiano and later slave narratives can be measured. Transcriptions of the materials related to slavery in these newspapers will subsequently be published in a searchable database accessible to the general public.

Media Coverage

Faculty member compiles slavery accounts from colonial America (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Jeff Dodge
Publication: Source
Date: 12/15/2015
URL: http://source.colostate.edu/faculty-member-compiles-slavery-accounts-from-colonial-america/

Associated Products

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative (Book)
Title: Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative
Author: Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Abstract: Investigates how enslaved black Africans conceived of themselves and their stories before the War of American Independence and the genre’s development in the nineteenth century. Zachary McLeod Hutchins argues that colonial newspapers were pivotal in shaping popular understandings of both slavery and the black African experience.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/1312804388
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781469671536
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Earliest African American Literatures: A Critical Reader (Book)
Title: The Earliest African American Literatures: A Critical Reader
Editor: Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Editor: Cassander L. Smith
Abstract: "With the publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019, a growing number of Americans have become aware that Africans arrived in North America before the Pilgrims. Yet the stories of these Africans and their first descendants remain ephemeral and inaccessible for both the general public and educators. This groundbreaking collection of thirty-eight biographical and autobiographical texts chronicles the lives of literary black Africans in British colonial America from 1643 to 1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the presence of black Africans in this early period"
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/1289443896
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Edited Volume
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9781469665627
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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