DIVArgues that the category of death was a central part of the concept of citizenship in the nineteenth-century U.S., and that the particular form of that construction functioned to naturalize white males as ideal citizens./div

“Elizabeth Ammons has produced a first-rate Norton Critical Edition with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” —Mason I. Lowance, Jr., University of Massachusetts Amherst “I will definitely use this edition again. The critical materials at the end of the book helped my students to have informed, productive class discussions.” —Heidi Oberholtzer Lee, University of Notre Dame This Norton Critical Edition includes: The 1852 first book edition, accompanied by Elizabeth Ammons’s preface, note on the text, and explanatory annotations. Twenty-two illustrations. A rich selection of historical documents on slavery and abolitionism. Seventeen critical reviews spanning more than 160 years. A Chronology, A Brief Time Line of Slavery in America, and an updated Selected Bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Tom-Mania looks at the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the songs, plays, sketches, translations and imitations it inspired. In particular it shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy, the slavery question, and America's emerging cultural identity affected how the novel was read, discussed, dramatized, merchandized and politicised.

Black barbers, reflected a freed slave who barbered in antebellum St. Louis, may have been the only men in their community who enjoyed, at all times, the privilege of free speech. The reason lay in their temporary—but absolute—power over a client. With a flick of the wrist, they could have slit the throats of the white men they shaved. In Knights of the Razor, Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr., explores this extraordinary relationship in the largely untold story of African American barbers, North and South, from the American Revolution to the First World War. In addition to establishing the modern-day barbershop, these barbers used their skilled trade to navigate the many pitfalls that racism created for ambitious black men. Successful barbers assumed leadership roles in their localities, helping to form a black middle class despite pervasive racial segregation. They advocated economic independence from whites and founded insurance companies that became some of the largest black-owned corporations.