Peculiar Property: Harriet Jacobs on the Nature of Slavery

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Jagmohan
Keyword(s):  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Peculiar Property

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

The Portrait's Subject

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Visual Theory ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Thomas Eakins

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject, Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during this era in paintings, photographs, and illustrations, as well as in literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Portraiture, the book argues, was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology. The Portrait’s Subject reveals the underappreciated connections between portraiture's representations of the material human body and developing modern ideas about the human mind. It encouraged figures like Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Eakins, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James to reimagine how we might see inner life, offering a rich array of metaphors and aesthetic approaches that helped reconfigure the relationship between body and mind, exterior and interior. In the end, Blackwood shows how nineteenth-century psychological discourse developed as much through aesthetic fabulation as through scientific experimentation.

Premature Predicaments

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-58
Author(s):  
Dána-Ain Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Birth Outcomes ◽  
Premature Birth ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Birth Stories ◽  
Racial Science ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

This chapter examines the definitions of prematurity over time and specifically explores how racial science has been used to animate the definitions and etiology, or causes, of premature birth. This chapter focuses on the birth stories of four women, who gave birth prematurely in different centuries, between the nineteenth century and the present, to shed light on the temporality of Black women’s birth outcomes. The birth stories, including one contained in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, an autobiographical narrative by Harriet Jacobs, highlight questions about the definition and etiology of prematurity. The stories also illustrate some of the clinical causes of premature birth and present the situations that women describe as evidence of medical racism.

"That Peculiar Property:" Model Yachting and the Analysis of Balance in Sailing Hulls

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earl Boebert
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Unbalanced Designs ◽  
Peculiar Property ◽  
Property Model ◽  
The Relationship

Balance in sailing hulls has been most extensively studied by the designers of free sailing model yachts. This paper describes the nature of free sailing which led to this preoccupation, and then explains the controversial theories of Admiral Turner. The correlation between Turner’s criteria for balance and known balanced and unbalanced designs is shown and procedures given for designing boats to those criteria. The paper concludes with speculation about the relationship between theory and practice in this area and suggests areas for further research.

Practical Righteousness, 1854–1861

2018 ◽  
pp. 193-229
Author(s):  
Nancy A. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
Armed Resistance

As the WNYASS dissolved, the Posts turned to less visible ways of advancing social justice. They became more involved with the Congregational Friends, now known as Progressive Friends, which promoted practical righteousness. A series of economic and medical crises also fostered more personal forms of action. The Posts assisted the increased flow of fugitives following the Fugitive Slave Act, but questioned Douglass’s and Nell’s support of armed resistance. Nell eventually persuaded Amy of its necessity. The Posts regularly housed abolitionists, spiritualists, and other activists; cared for friends and family who were ill or impoverished; aided abused wives; and joined protests against capital punishment. Amy accompanied Lucy Stone on two lecture tours, but she spent far more time corresponding with her extensive network of friends and family, keeping them apprized of political and personal developments. Harriet Jacobs, who was finishing Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, regularly sought Amy’s advice and support. After John Brown’s 1859 raid, the Posts helped Douglass escape to Canada, reigniting their friendship. By spring 1861, with the nation at war, Amy helped organize a gathering with Douglass and other speakers to help direct “this bloody struggle, that it may end in Emancipation.”

Harriet Jacobs: A Life (review)

Legacy ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-80
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fleischner
Keyword(s):  
Life Review ◽  
Harriet Jacobs

PROPERTIES OF HUMAN PLASMIN

1962 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Ronwin
Keyword(s):  
Ionic Strength ◽  
Similar Data ◽  
Glycerol Molecule ◽  
Substrate Specificities ◽  
Ion Activation ◽  
Peculiar Property ◽  
Related Compounds

Several aspects of the properties and preparation of human plasmin are considered. It appears that glycerol activation of the proenzyme is a peculiar property dependent in part on the structure of the glycerol molecule since closely related compounds are without effect. Observations on the influence of ionic strength, on ion activation and inhibition of the enzyme, on substrate specificities, and on preparative procedures are recorded and comparisons with similar data on related bovine enzymes are made.

Watching from Below: Racialized Surveillance and Vulnerable Sousveillance

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-314
Author(s):  
Kelly Ross
Keyword(s):  
Smart Phone ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
First Century ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Simultaneous Operation ◽  
Explanatory Theory ◽  
Surveillance Studies

By relying on Foucauldian panopticism as a universally explanatory theory, surveillance studies has collapsed two separate issues: the power relations between watcher and watched and the visibility or nonvisibility of the watcher. The presumption that the watcher's visibility or nonvisibility is irrelevant is especially dangerous for observers of color, who are already more vulnerable because of racial hypervisibility. This essay examines the simultaneous operation of surveillance (watching from above) and sousveillance (watching from below), both predicated on racial hypervisibility. To demonstrate the continuity of racial hypervisibility across a broad historical period, I compare the risks taken by sousveillants of color making smart‐phone recordings of police brutality in the twenty‐first century with the dangers faced by visible African American sousveillants in nineteenth‐century slave narratives by Charles Ball, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. (KR)

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