Word: abolitionists
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...civil rights poems of the '60s, bloody as a bashed head, have the angry surge of an Abolitionist sermon by his great-great-uncle Henry Ward Beecher...
...would presumably take further research to judge conclusively, and on their interpretation. For example, Fogel and Engerman put some stress on the 1850 census's finding that after 230 years of slavery only 7.7 per cent of slaves were mulatto. Such a finding doesn't appear to justify Abolitionist claims that the pre-war South was one big brothel. But neither does it attempt to measure whatever lesser forms of sexual exploitation of slaves occurred. Or, as Fogel and Engerman themselves put it, "while the cliometricians have been able to construct reasonably reliable indexes of the material level at which...
...actually goes even further than attacking racism in attacking traditional approaches to American history. For the power of a view like Elkins's--even in its discussion of such topics as what "Sambo" really meant--is too great to dismiss as merely racist. It belongs rather with the old Abolitionist tracts, or even with the modern and equally important tracts of people like C. Wright Mills, moving and evocative in their assertion that capitalism grinds down the humanity of labor. It derives from horror--maybe a horrified surprise--that things have gone wrong, and it attacks history as though history...
Henry James, for one, felt guilty all his life for not following up his radically abolitionist principles with action. He allowed his extraordinary recollective powers to be more evocative than explicit. He made the South something magnificent and swashbuckling in his mind, only to discover that it was a mere shadow of its former self when he finally visited there after 50 years. The image of this pathetic South was more dramatic to him than anything else possibly could have been; he rejected Southern chauvinism and identified completely with Southern pain and defeat. In the end, Aaron sees...
...maybe I should compare them to a more potent insect. Once a white politician told Sojourner Truth, the black abolitionist leader: "Woman, I care no more for you than a mosquito." "Maybe so," she said, "but, praise God, I'll keep you scratching...