Jane H. Pease

The emancipation of Angelina Grimké

Although Angelina and Sarah Grimke have been regarded as equally gifted and involved abolitionists and nineteenth-century womens rights advocates, this first biography of Angelina clearly shows that she, indeed, was the outstanding leader, as her contemporaries recognized. Through the use of unpublished documentary sources and impressive psychological insights, Lumpkin provides new perspectives on Angelina, her husband Theodore Weld, and her sister Sarah.Originally published 1974.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Organized Negro Communities: A North American Experiment

From the Revolution to the Civil War the American Negro lived in bondage, either the bondage of outright servitude or that of prejudice and discrimination. Of the many ways by which he tried to free himself, one of the most interesting but least known was the establishment of organized communities in the United States and Canada. Although these communities had similar aims and purposes, they varied widely in size, were diverse in their methods of operation, and enjoyed markedly different degrees of success. The earliest of these communities, located primarily in the American Midwest, were simple efforts at white philanthropy. They were little more than settlements of manumitted slaves, set free and colonized either directly or indirectly by their owners. In no case were they eminently successful as colonizing ventures, in many they were never more than the projection of an idea.2 In a few cases, however, these early settlements were more ambitious, adding to the general notion of philanthropy specific projects in formal academic and vocational training and consciously directing all their efforts toward making the Negro self-sufficient.8 The most important of the Organized Negro Communities, however, were more complex. Four communities, all of them Canadian, went well beyond their more primitive sister settlements in their concern for providing land, economic independence, basic education, and community self-sufficiency.4 A

Ladies, Women, & Wenches: Choice & Constraint in Antebellum Charleston & Boston

Pursuing the meaning of gender in nineteenth-century urban American society, Ladies, Women, and Wenches compares the lives of women living in two distinctive antebellum cultures, Charleston and Boston, between 1820 and 1850. In contrast to most contemporary histories of women, this study examines the lives of all types of women in both cities: slave and free, rich and poor, married and single, those who worked mostly at home and those who led more public lives. Jane Pease and William Pease argue that legal, political, economic, and cultural contraints did limit the options available to women. Nevertheless, women had opportunities to make meaningful choices about their lives and sometimes to achieve considerable autonomy. By comparing the women of Charleston and Boston, the authors explore how both urbanization and regional differences -- especially with regard to slavery -- governed all womens lives. They assess the impact of marriage and work on womens religious, philanthropic, and reform activity and examine the female uses of education and property in order to illuminate the considerable variation in womens lives. Finally, they consider womens choices of life-style, ranging from compliance with to defiance of increasingly rigid social precepts defining appropriate female behavior. However bound women were by societys prescriptions describing their role or by the class structure of their society, they chose their ways of life from among such options as spinsterhood or marriage, domesticity or paid work, charitable activity or the social whirl, the solace of religion or the escape of drink. Drawing on a variety of sources including diaries, court documents, and contemporary literature, Ladies, Women, and Wenches explores how the women of Charleston and Boston made the choices in their lives between total dependence and full autonomy.

Hinge and Hub: Charleston and Boston in the Age of Jackson@@@The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843.

Given certain similarities in time and space, what factors differentiate cities and what paths to the future are opened and chosen by their inhabitants? William and Jane Pease, two enterprising historians from the University of Maine, have addressed these questions in a rich and impressive book. They have sliced out the same chronological segment from each of two cities, Boston and Charleston, placed each segment under a powerful analytical microscope, and recreated a complex pattern of city building. Though the chronological boundaries are not quite as sharp as the subtitle specifies, the Peases focus on an important fifteen-year period of antebellum history, beginning with hard times and tariff controversy of the late 1820s, proceeding through a cycle of boom and bust in the 1830s, and ending with attempts at recovery in the early 1840s. Erecting a sturdy structure of economic and political history on a solid social historical base, the authors spent a decade and a half compiling and analyzing their materials. Not only did they study voluminous newspaper articles, government reports, and other traditional sources, they also collected extensive biographical data on a total of nearly 7,000 elites from both cities plus countless other quantitative items. Yet they do not overwhelm the reader with numbers; they unassumingly integrate their quantitative analysis into the text and confine tables to a fascinating appendix. The book begins with an identification of the two cities and of their economic aspirations during the late 1820s and early 1830s. Commerce provided the lifeblood to both, and merchants in Boston and Charleston constantly feared they were falling behind commercial competitors, especially those in New York City. In Charleston, however, mercantile success served as a stepping-stone to acquisition of land and a planters life, while in Boston entrepreneurship, including capital investment in corporations and industry, predominated. Bostons boom of the early 1830s was fueled by its industrializing hinterland, solid banking system, relatively quiet labor relations, and